so they
telephoned our house. It's too horrible. No, London is impossible; if he
can't behave himself here, with us ... We must keep him happy and healthy
here for a bit, hunting, and then send him abroad again with Mr. Samgrass. .
. . You see, I've been through all this before."
The retort was there, unspoken, well-understood by both of us--You
couldn't keep him; he ran away. So will Sebastian. Because they both hate
you.
A horn and the huntsman's cry sounded in the valley below us.
"There they go now, drawing the home woods. I hope he's having a good
day."
Thus with Julia and Lady Marchmain I reached deadlock, not because we
failed to understand one another, but because we understood too well. With
Brideshead, who came home to luncheon and talked to me on the subject--for
the subject was everywhere in the house like a fire deep in the hold of a
ship, below the water-line, black and red in the darkness, coming to light
Hi acrid wisps of smoke that curled up the ladders, crept between decks,
oozed under hatches, hung in wreaths on the flats, billowed suddenly from
the scuttles and air pipes--with Brideshead, I was in a strange world, a
dead world to me, in a moon-landscape of barren lava, on a plateau where the
air struck chill, a high place of unnaturally clear eyes and of toiling
lungs.
He said: "I hope it is dipsomania. That is simply a great misfortune
that we must all help him bear. What I used to fear was that he just got
drunk deliberately when he liked and because he liked."
"That's exactly what he did--what we both did. It's what he does with
me now. I can keep him to that, if only your mother would trust me. If you
wqrry him with keepers and cures he'll be a physical wreck in a few years."
"There's nothing wrong in being a physical wreck, you know. There's no
moral obligation to be Postmaster-General or Master of Foxhounds or to live
to walk ten miles at eighty."
"Wrong" I said. "Moral obligation -- now you're back on religion
again."
"I never left it," said Brideshead.
"D'you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a
Catholic, 1 should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured.
You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark
nonsense."
"It's odd you should say that. I've heard it before from other people.
It's one of the many reasons why I don't think I should make a good priest.
It's something in the way my mind works I suppose. I have to turn a thing
round and round, like a piece of ivory in a Chinese puzzle, until -- click!
--it fits into place -- but by that time it's upside down to everyone else.
But it's the same bit of ivory, you know."
At luncheon Julia had no thoughts except for her guest who was coming
that day. She drove to the station to meet him and brought him home to tea.
"Mummy, do look at Rex's Christmas present."
It was a small tortoise with Julia's initials set in diamonds in the
living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on
the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over
a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its
withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of
those needle-hooks of experience which catch the attention when larger
matters are at stake, and remain in the mind when they are forgotten, so
that years later it is a bit of gilding, or a certain smell, or the tone of
a clock's striking which recalls one to a tragedy.
"Dear me," said Lady Marchmain. "I wonder if it eats the same sort of
things as an ordinary tortoise."
"What will you do when it's dead?" asked Mr. Samgrass. "Can you have
another tortoise fitted into the shell?"
Rex had been told about the problem of Sebastian--he could scarcely
have endured in that atmosphere without -- and had a solution pat. He
propounded it cheerfully and openly at tea, and after a day of whispering it
was a relief to hear the thing discussed. "Send him to Borethus at Zurich.
Borethus is the man. He works miracles every day at that sanatorium of his.
You know how Charlie Kilcartney used to drink."
"No," said Lady Marchmain, with that sweet irony of hers. "No, I'm
afraid I don't know how Charlie Kilcartney drank."
Julia, hearing her lover mocked, frowned at the tortoise, but Rex
Mottram was impervious to such delicate mischief.
"Two wives despaired of him," he said. "When he got engaged to Sylvia,
she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it
worked. He came back in three months a different man. And he hasn't touched
a drop since, even though Sylvia walked out on him."
"Why did she do that?"
"Well, poor Charlie got rather a bore when he stopped drinking. But
that's not really the point of the story."
"No, I suppose not. In fact, I suppose, really, it's meant to be an
encouraging story."
Julia scowled at her jewelled tortoise.
"He takes sex cases, too, you know."
"Oh dear, what very peculiar friends poor Sebastian will make in
Zurich."
"He's booked up for months ahead, but I think he'd find room if I asked
him. I could telephone him from here to-night."
(In his kindest moments Rex displayed a kind of hectoring zeal as if he
were thrusting a vacuum cleaner on an unwilling housewife.).
"We'll think about it."
And we were thinking about it when Cordelia returned from hunting.
"Oh, Julia, what's that? How beastly"
"It's Rex's Christmas present."
"Oh, sorry. I'm always putting my foot in it. But how cruel! It must
have hurt frightfully."
"They can't feel."
"How d'you know? Bet they can."
She kissed her mother, whom she had not seen that day, shook hands with
Rex, and rang for eggs.
"I had one tea at Mrs. Barney's, where I telephoned for the car, but
I'm still hungry. It was a spiffing day. Jean Strickland-Venables fell in
the mud. We ran from Bengers to Upper Eastrey without a check. I reckon
that's five miles, don't you, Bridey?"
"Three."
"Not as he ran. . . ." Between mouthfuls of scrambled egg she told us
about the hunt. . . . "You should have seen Jean when she came out of the
mud."
"Where's Sebastian?"
"He's in disgrace." The words, in that clear, child's voice, had the
ring of a bell tolling, but she went on: "Coming out in that beastly
rat-catcher coat and mean little tie like something from Captain Morvin's
Riding Academy. I just didn't recognize him at the meet, and I hope nobody
else did. Isn't he back? I expect he got lost."
When Wilcox came to clear the tea, Lady Marchmain asked: "No sign of
Lord Sebastian?"
"No, my lady."
"He must have stopped for tea with someone. How very unlike him."
Half an hour later, when Wilcox brought in the cocktail tray, he said:
"Lord Sebastian has just rung up to be fetched from South Twining."
"South Twining? Who lives there?"
"He was speaking from the hotel, my lady."
"South Twining?" said Cordelia. "Goodness, he did get lost!"
When he arrived he was flushed and his eyes were feverishly bright; I
saw that he was two-thirds drunk.
"Dear boy," said Lady Marchmain. "How nice to see you looking so well
again. Your day in the open has done you good. The drinks are on the table;
do help yourself."
There was nothing unusual in her speech but the fact of her saying it.
Six months ago it would not have been said.
"Thanks," said Sebastian. "I will."
A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock
of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another
like it could be borne -- that was how it felt, sitting opposite Sebastian
at dinner that night, seeing his clouded eye and groping movements, hearing
his thickened voice breaking in, ineptly, after long brutish silences. When
at length Lady Marchmain and Julia and the servants left us, Brideshead
said: "You'd best go to bed, Sebastian."
"Have some port first."
"Yes, have some port if you want it. But don't come into the
drawing-room."
"Too bloody drunk," said Sebastian nodding heavily. "Like olden times.
Gentlemen always too drunk join ladies in olden times."
("And yet, you know, it wasn't" said Mr. Samgrass, trying to be chatty
with me about it afterwards, "it wasn't at all like olden times. I wonder
where the difference lies. The lack of good humour? The lack of
companionship? You know I think he must have been drinking by himself
to-day. Where did he get the money?")
"Sebastian's gone up," said Brideshead when we reached the
drawing-room.
"Yes? Shall I read?"
Julia and Rex played bezique; the tortoise, teased by the Pekinese,
withdrew into his shell; Lady Marchmain read The Diary of a Nobody aloud
until, quite early, she said it was time for bed.
"Can't I stay up and play a little longer, Mummy? Just three games?"
"Very well, darling. Come in and see me before you go to bed. I shan't
be asleep."
It was plain to Mr. Samgrass and me that Julia and Rex wanted to be
left alone, so we went, too; it was not plain to Brideshead, who settled
down to read The Times, which he had not yet seen that day. Then, going to
our side of the house, Mr. Samgrass said: "It wasn't at all like olden
times."
Next morning I said to Sebastian: "Tell me honestly, do you want me to
stay on here?"
"No, Charles, I don't believe I do."
"I'm no help?"
"No help."
So I went to make my excuses to his mother.
"There's something I must ask you, Charles. Did you give Sebastian
money yesterday?"
"Yes."
"Knowing how he was likely to spend it?"
"Yes."
"I don't understand it," she said. "I simply don't understand how
anyone can be so callously wicked."
She paused, but I do not think she expected any answer; there was
nothing I could say unless I were to start all over again on that familiar,
endless argument.
"I'm not going to reproach you," she said. "God knows it's not for me
to reproach anyone. Any failure in my children is my failure. But I don't
understand it. I don't understand how you can have been so nice in so many
ways, and then do something so wantonly cruel. I don't understand how we all
liked you somuch. Did you hate us all the time? I don't understand how we
deserved it."
I was unmoved; there was no part of me remotely touched by her
distress. It was as I had often imagined being expelled from school. I
almost expected to hear her say: "I have already written to inform your
unhappy father." But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what
promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of
myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of
it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the
spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay
their way to the nether world.
"I shall never go back," I said to myself.
A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in
Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.
I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh
sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving
forests of the ocean bed.
I had left behind me -- what ? Youth ? Adolescence ? Romance ? The
conjuring stuff of these things, "the Young Magician's Compendium," that
neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard
balls, the penny that folded double and the feather flowers that could be
drawn into a hollow candle.
,
"I have left behind illusion," I said to myself. "Henceforth I live in
a world of three dimensions -- with the aid of my five senses."
I have since learned that there is no such world; but then, as the car
turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all
about me at the end of the avenue.
Thus I returned to Paris, and to the friends I had found there and the
habits I had formed. I thought I should hear no mote of Brideshead, but life
has few separations as sharp as that. It was not three weeks before I
received a letter in Cordelia's Frenchified convent hand: --
Darling Charles [she'said],
I was so very miserable when you went. You might have come and said
good-bye I
I heard all about your disgrace, and I am writing to say that I am in
disgrace, too. I sneaked Wilcox's keys and got whiskey for Sebastian and got
caught. He did seem to want it so. And there was (and is) an awful row.
Mr. Samgrass has gone (good!), and I think he is a bit in disgrace,
too, but I don't know why.
Mr. Mottram is very popular with Julia (bad!) and is taking Sebastian
away (bad! bad!) to a German doctor.
Julia's tortoise disappeared. We think it buried itself, as they do, so
there goes a packet (expression of Mr. Mottram's).
I am very well.
With love from,
cordelia
It must have been about a week after receiving this letter that I
returned to my rooms one afternoon to find Rex waiting for me.
It was about four, for the light began to fail early in the studio at
that time of year. I could see by the expression on the concierge's face,
when she told me I had a visitor waiting that there was something impressive
upstairs; she had a vivid gift of expressing differences of age or
attraction; this was the expression which meant someone of the first
consequence, and Rex indeed seemed to justify it, as I found him in his big
travelling coat, filling the window that looked over the river.
"Well," I said. "Well."
"I came this morning. They told me where you usually lunched but I
couldn't see you there. Have you got him?"
I did not need to ask whom. "So he's given you the slip, too?"
"We got here last night and were going on to Zurich to-day. I left him
at the Lotti after dinner, as he said he was tired, and went round to the
Travellers' for a game."
I noticed how, even with me, he was making excuses, as though
rehearsing his story for re-telling elsewhere. "As he said he was tired" was
good. I could not well imagine Rex letting a half-tipsy boy interfere with
his cards. "So you came back and found him gone ?" "Not at all. I wish I
had. I found him sitting up for me. I had a run of luck at the Travellers'
and cleaned up a packet. Sebastian pinched the lot while I was asleep. All
he left me was two first-class tickets to Zurich stuck in the edge of the
looking-glass. I had. nearly three hundred quid, blast him!"
"And now he may be almost anywhere."
"Anywhere. You're not hiding him by any chance?"
"No. My dealings with that family are over."
"I think mine are just beginning," said Rex. "I say, I've got a lot to
talk about, and I promised a chap at the Travellers' I'd give him his
revenge this afternoon. Won't you dine with me?"
"Yes. Where?"
"I usually go to Ciro's."
"Why not Paillard's?"
"Never heard of it. I'm paying you know."
"I know you are. Let me order dinner."
"Well, all right. What's the place again?" I wrote it down for him. "Is
it the sort of place you see native life?"
"Yes, you might call it that."
"Well, it'll be an experience. Order something good."
"That's my intention."
I was there twenty minutes before Rex. If I had to spend an evening
with him, it should, at any rate, be in my own way. I remember the dinner
well -- soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a
caneton la presse, a lemon souffle. At the last minute, fearing that the
whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviare aux blinis. And for wine
I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with
the duck, a Clos de B re of 1904.
Living was easy in France then; with the exchange as it was, my
allowance went a long way and I did not live frugally. It was very seldom,
however, that I had a dinner like this, and I felt well disposed to Rex,
when at last he arrived and gave up his hat and coat with the air of not
expecting to see them again. He looked round the sombre little place with
suspicion, as though hoping to see apaches or a drinking party of students.
All he saw was four senators with napkins tucked under their beards eating
in absolute silence. I could imagine him telling his commercial friends
later: "... interesting fellow I know; an art student living in Paris. Took
me to a funny little restaurant -- sort of place you'd pass without looking
at -- where there was some of the best food I ever ate. There were half a
dozen senators there, too, which shows you it was the right place. Wasn't at
all cheap either."
"Any sign of Sebastian?" he asked.
"There won't be," I said, "until he needs money."
"It's a bit thick, going off like that. I was rather hoping that if I
made a good job of him, it might do me a bit of good in another direction."
He plainly wished to talk of his own affairs; they could wait, I
thought, for the hour of tolerance and repletion, for the cognac; they could
wait until the attention was blunted and one could listen with half the mind
only; now in the keen moment when the maitre d'hotel was turning the blinis
over in the pan, and, in the background, two humbler men were preparing the
press, we would talk of myself.
"Did you stay long at Brideshead? Was my name mentioned after I left?"
"Was it mentioned? I got sick of the sound of it, old boy. The
Marchioness got what she called a 'bad conscience' about you. She piled it
on pretty thick, I gather, at your last meeting."
" 'Callously wicked', 'wantonly cruel.'"
"Hard words."
" 'It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon
pie and eat you up.'"
"Eh?"
"A saying."
"Ah." The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed separating each
glaucose bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.
"I like a bit of chopped onion with mine," said Rex. "Chap-who-knew
told me it brought out the flavour."
"Try it without first," I said. "And tell me more news of myself."
"Well, of course, Greenacre, or whatever he was called -- the snooty
don -- he came a cropper. That was well received by all.; He was the
blue-eyed boy for a day or two after you left. Shouldn't wonder if he hadn't
put the old girl up to pitching you out. He was always being pushed down our
throats, so in the end Julia couldn't bear it any more and gave him
away."
"Julia did?"
"Well, he'd begun to stick his nose into our affairs you see. Julia
spotted he was a fake, and one afternoon when Sebastian was tight--he was
tight most of the time -- she got the whole story of the Grand Tour out of
him. And that was the end of Mr. Samgrass. After that the Marchioness began
to think she might have been a bit rough with you."
"And what about the row with Cordelia?"
"That eclipsed everything. That kid's a walking marvel -- she'd been
feeding Sebastian whiskey right under our noses for a week. We couldn't
think where he was getting it. That's when the
Marchioness finally crumbled."
The soup was delicious after the rich blinis--hot, thin, bitter,
frothy.
"I'll tell you a thing, Charles, that Ma Marchmain hasn't let on to
anyone. She's a very sick woman. Might peg out any minute. George Anstruther
saw her in the autumn and put it at two years."
"How on earth do you know?"
"It's the kind of thing I hear. With the way her family are going on at
the moment, I wouldn't give her a year. I know just the man for her in
Vienna. He put Sonia Bamfshire on her feet when everyone including
Anstruther had despaired of her. But Ma Marchmain won't do anything about
it. I suppose it's something to do with her crack-brain religion, not to
take care of the body."
The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it. We
ate to the music of the press--the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood
and marrow, the tap of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast. There
was a pause here of a quarter of an hour, while I drank the first glass of
the Clos de Bere and Rex smoked his first cigarette. He leaned back, blew a
cloud of smoke across the table and remarked, "You know, the food here isn't
half bad; someone ought to take this place up and make something of it."
Presently he began again on the Marchmains: --
"I'll tell you another thing, too -- they'll get a jolt financially
soon if they don't look out."
"I thought they were enormously rich."
"Well, they are rich in the way people are who just let their money sit
quiet. Everyone of that sort is poorer than they were in 1914, and the
Flytes don't seem to realize it. I reckon those lawyers who manage their
affairs find it convenient to give them all the cash they want and no
questions asked. Look at the way they live--Brideshead and Marchmain House
both going full blast, pack of foxhounds, no rents raised, nobody sacked,
dozens of old servants doing damn all, being waited on by other servants,
and then besides all that there's the old boy setting up a separate
establishment -- and setting it up on no humble scale either. D'you
know how much they're overdrawn?"
"Of course I don't."
"Jolly near a hundred thousand in London. I don't know what they owe
elsewhere. Well, that'siquite a packet, you know, for people who aren't
using their money. Ninety-eight thousand last November. It's the kind of
thing I hear."
Those were the kind of things he heard, mortal illness and debt, I
thought.
I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy
resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been
strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the
stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and
triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex
knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his.
By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St.
James's Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in
the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of
its prime and, that day, as at Paillard's with Rex Mottram years before, it
whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.
"I don't mean that they'll be paupers; the old boy will always be good
for an odd thirty thousand a year, but there'll be a shake-up coming soon,
and when the upper classes get the wind up, their first idea is usually to
cut down on the girls. I'd like to get the little matter of a marriage
settlement through, before it comes."
We had by no means reached the cognac, but here we were on the subject
of himself. In twenty minutes I should have been ready for all he had to
tell. I closed my mind to him as best I could and gave myself to the food
before me, but sentences came breaking in on my happiness, recalling me to
the harsh, acquisitive world which Rex inhabited. He wanted a woman; he
"wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her cheap; that was what it
amounted to.
"... Ma Marchmain doesn't like me. Well, I'm not asking her to. It's
not her I want to marry. She hasn't the guts to say openly: 'You're not a
gentleman. You're an adventurer from the Colonies.' She says we live in
different atmospheres. That's all right, but Julia happens to fancy my
atmosphere. . . . Then she brings up religion. I've nothing against her
Church; we don't take much account of Catholics in Canada, but that's
different; in Europe you've got some very posh Catholics. All right, Julia
can go to church whenever she wants to. I shan't try and stop her. It
doesn't mean two pins to her, as a matter of fact, but I like a girl to have
religion. What's more, she can bring the children up Catholic. I'll make all
the 'promises' they want. . . . Then there's my past. 'We know so little
about you.' She knows a sight too much. You may know I've been tied up with
someone else for a year or two."
I knew; everyone who had ever met Rex knew of his affair with Brenda
Champion; knew also that it was from this affair that he derived everything
which distinguished him from every other stock-jobber: his golf with the
Prince of Wales, his membership of Bratt's, even his smoking-room
comradeship at the House of Commons; for, when he first appeared there, his
party chiefs did not say of him, "Look, there is the promising young member
for North Gridley who spoke so well on Rent Restrictions." They said:
"There's Brenda Champion's latest"; it had done him a great deal of good
with men; women he could usually charm.
"Well, that's all washed up. Ma Marchmain was too delicate to mention
the subject; all she said was that I had 'notoriety.' Well, what does she
expect as a son-in-law--a sort of half-baked monk like Brideshead? Julia
knows all about the other thing; if she doesn't care, I don't see it's
anyone else's business."
After the duck came a salad of watercress and chicory in a faint mist
of chives. I tried to think only of the salad. I succeeded for a time in
thinking only of the souffle. Then came the cognac and the proper hour for
these confidences.
"... Julia's just rising twenty. I don't want to wait till she's of
age. Anyway, I don't want to marry without doing the thing properly . . .
nothing hole-in-corner. ... I have to see she isn't jockeyed out of her
proper settlement. I've got to the time now when 'notoriety,' as Ma
Marchmain calls it, has done its bit. I need setting up solidly. You know --
St. Margaret's, Westminster, or Whatever Catholics have, royalty and the
Prime Minister photographed going in ... and, afterwards 'the beautiful Lady
Julia Mottram, leading young political hostess' . . . nothing
hole-in-corner. So as the Marchioness won't play ball I'm off to see the old
man and square him. I gather he's likely to agree to anything he knows will
upset her. He's at Monte Carlo at the moment. I'd planned to go on there
after dropping Sebastian off at Zurich. That's why it's such a bloody bore
having lost him."
The cognac was not to Rex's taste. It was clear and pale and it came to
us in a bottle free from grime and Napoleonic cyphers. It was only a year or
two older than Rex and lately bottled. They gave it to us in very thin
tulip-shaped glasses of modest size.
"Brandy's one of the things I do know a bit about," said Rex. "This is
a bad colour. What's more, I can't taste it in this thimble."
They brought him a balloon the size of his head. He made them warm it
over the spirit lamp.
Then he rolled the splendid spirit round, buried his face in the fumes,
and pronounced it the sort of stuff he put soda in at home.
So, shamefacedly, they wheeled out of its hiding place the vast and
mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex's sort.
"That's the stuff," he said, tilting the treacly concoction till it
left dark rings round the sides of his glass. "They've always got some
tucked away, but they won't bring it out unless you
make a fuss. Have some."
"I'm quite happy with this."
"Well, it's a crime to drink it, if you don't really appreciate it." He
lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in
another world than his. We both were happy.
He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great
distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night.
At the beginning of May the engagement was announced. I saw the notice
in the Continental Daily Mail and assumed that Rex had "squared the old
man." But things did not go as expected. The next news I had of them was in
the middle of June, when I read that they had been married very quietly at
the Savoy Chapel. No royalty was present; nor was the Prime Minister; nor
were any of Julia's family. It sounded like a "hole-in-the-corner" affair,
but it was not for several years that I heard the full story.
Chapter Seven
it is time to speak of Julia, who till now has played an intermittent
and somewhat enigmatic part in Sebastian's drama. It was thus she appeared
to me at the time, and I to her. We pursued separate aims which brought us
near to one another, but we remained strangers. She told me later that she
had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a
particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another,
take it down, glance at the title page and, saying "I must read that, too,
when I've the time," replace it and continue the search. On my side the
interest was keener, for there was always the physical likeness between
brother and sister, which, caught repeatedly in different poses, under
different lights, each time pierced me anew; and, as Sebastian in his sharp
decline seemed daily to fade and crumble, so much the more did Julia stand
out clear and firm.
She was thin in those days, flat-chested, leggy; she seemed all limbs
and neck, bodiless, spidery; thus far she conformed to the fashion, but the
hair-cut and the hats of the period, and the blank stare and gape of the
period, and the clownish dabs of rouge high on the cheekbones, could not
reduce her to type.
When I first met her, when she met me in the station yard and drove me
home through the twilight that high summer of 1923, she was just eighteen
and fresh from her first London season.
Some said it was the most brilliant season since the war, that things
were getting into their stride again. Julia, by right, was at the centre of
it. There were then remaining perhaps half a dozen London houses which could
be called "historic"; March-main House in St. James's was one of them, and
the ball given for Julia, in spite of the ignoble costume of the time, was
by all accounts a splendid spectacle. Sebastian went down for it and
half-heartedly suggested my coming with him; I refused and came to regret my
refusal, for it was the last ball of its kind given there; the last of a
splendid series.
How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days;
the world was open to be explored at leisure. I was so full of Oxford that
summer; London could wait, I
thought.
The other great houses belonged to kinsmen or to childhood friends of
Julia's, and besides them there were countless substantial houses in the
squares of Mayfair and Belgravia, alight and thronged, one or other of them,
night after night, their music floating out among the plane-trees, couples
outside sauntering on the quiet pavements or breathing the summer air from
the balconies. Foreigners returning on post from their own waste lands wrote
home that here they seemed to catch a glimpse of the world they had believed
lost for ever among the mud and wire, and through those halcyon weeks Julia
darted and shone, part of the sunshine between the trees, part of the
candlelight in the mirror's spectrum, so that elderly men and women, sitting
aside with their memories, saw her as herself the blue-bird.
"'Bridey' Marchmain's eldest girl," they said. "Pity he can't see her
to-night."
That night and the night after and the night after, wherever she went,
always in her own little circle of intimates, she brought to all whose eyes
were open to it a moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the
river's bank when the kingfisher suddenly flames across dappled water.
This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through
the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power
of her own beauty, hesitating on the steps of life; one who had suddenly
found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning over in
her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her fingertips, and
whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth
her Titanic servant, die fawning monster who would bring her whatever she
asked, but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.
She h?A no interest in me that evening; the jinn rumbled below us
uncalled; she lived apart in a little world, within a little world, the
innermost of a system of concentric spheres, like the ivory balls
laboriously carved in ancient China; a little problem troubling her mind --
little, as she saw it, in abstract terms and symbols. She was wondering,
dispassionately and leagues distant from reality, whom she should marry.
Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured
chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches,
which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf
past, present and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then,
lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of
pin and line; she knew nothing of war.
"If only one lived abroad," she thought, "where these things are
arranged between parents and lawyers."
To be married, soon and splendidly, was the unquestioned aim of all her
friends. If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as
the beginning of individual existence; the skirmish where one gained one's
spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.
She outshone by far all the girls of her age, but she knew that, in
that little world within a world which she inhabited, there were certain
grave disabilities from which she suffered. On the sofas against the wall
where the old people counted up the points, there were things against her.
There was the scandal of her father; they had all loved him in the past, the
women along the wall, and they most of them loved her mother, yet there was
that slight, inherited stain upon her brightness that seemed deepened by
something in her own way of life -- waywardness and wil-fulness, a less
disciplined habit than most of her contemporaries' -- that unfitted her for
the highest honours; but for that, who knows? . . .
One subject eclipsed all others in importance for the ladies along the
wall; whom would the young princes marry? They Could not hope for purer
lineage or a more gracious presence than Julia's; but there was this faint
shadow on her that unfitted her for the highest honours; there was also her
religion.
Nothing could have been further from Julia's ambitions than a royal
marriage. She knew, or thought she knew, what she wanted and it was not
that. But wherever she turned, it seemed, her religion stood as a barrier
between her and her natural goal.
As it seemed to her, the thing was a dead loss. If she apos-tasized
now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the
Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could
marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before
her. There could be no eldest son for her, and younger sons were indelicate
things, necessary, but not to be much spoken of. Younger sons had none of
the privileges of obscurity; it was their plain duty to remain hidden until
some disaster perchance promoted them to their brothers' places, and, since
this was their function, it was desirable that they should keep themselves
wholly suitable for succession. Perhaps in a family of three or four boys, a
Catholic might get the youngest without opposition. There were of course the
Catholics themselves, but these came seldom into the little world Julia had
made for herself; those who did were her mother's kinsmen, who, to her,
seemed grim and eccentric. Of the dozen or so wealthy and noble Catholic
families, none at that time had an heir of the right age. Foreigners --
there were many among her mother's family -- were tricky about money, odd in
their ways, and a sure mark of failure in the English girl who wed them.
What was there left?
This was Julia's problem after her weeks of triumph in London. She knew
it was not insurmountable. There must, she thought, be a number of people
outside her own world who were well qualified to be drawn into it; the shame
was that she must seek them. Not for her the cruel, delicate luxury of
choice, the indolent, cat-and-mouse pastimes of the hearth-rug. No Penelope
she; she must hunt in the forest.
She had made a preposterous little picture of the kind of man ' who
would do: he was an English diplomat of great but not very virile beauty,
now abroad, with a house smaller than Brideshead, nearer to London; he was
old, thirty-two or three, and had been recently and tragically widowed;
Julia thought she would prefer a man a little subdued by earlier grief. He
had a great career before him but had grown listless in his loneliness; she
was not sure he was not in danger of falling into the hands of an
unscrupulous foreign adventuress; he needed a new infusion of young life to
carry him to the Embassy at Paris. While professing a mild agnosticism
himself, he had a liking for the shows of religion and was perfectly
agreeable to having his children brought up Catholic; he believed, however,
in the prudent restriction of his family to two boys and a girl, comfortably
spaced over twelve years, and did not demand, as a Catholic husband might,
yearly pregnancies. He had twelve thousand a year above his pay, and no near
relations. Someone like that would do, Julia thought, and she was in search
of him when she met me at the railway station. I was not her man. She told
me as much, without a word, when she took the cigarette from my lips.
All this I learned about Julia, bit by bit, from the stories she told,
from guesswork, knowing her, from what her friends said, from the odd
expressions she now and then let slip, from occasional dreamy monologues of
reminiscences; I learned it as one does learn the former -- as it seems at
the time, the preparatory -- life of a woman one loves, so that one thinks
of oneself as part of it, directing it by devious ways, towards oneself.
Julia left Sebastian and me at Brideshead and went to stay with an
aunt, Lady Rosscommon, in her villa at Cap Ferrat. All the way she pondered
her problem. She had given a name to her widower-diplomat; she called him
"Eustace," and from that moment he became a figure of fun to her, a little
interior, incommunicable joke, so that when at last such a man did cross her
path -- though he was not a diplomat but a wistful major in the Life Guards
-- and fall in love with her and offer her just those gifts she had chosen,
she sent him away moodier and more wistful than ever, for by that time she
had met Rex Mottram.
Rex's age was greatly in his favour, for among Julia's friends there
was a kind of gerontophilic snobbery; young men were held to be gauche and
pimply; it was thought very much more chic to be seen lunching alone at the
Ritz -- a thing, in any case, allowed to few girls of that day, to the tiny
circle of Julia's intimates; a thing looked at askance by the elders who
kept the score, chatting pleasantly against the walls of the ballrooms -- at
the table on the left as you came in, with a starched and wrinkled old roue
whom your mother had been warned of as a girl, than in the centre of the
room with a party of exuberant young bloods. Rex, indeed, was neither
starched nor wrinkled; his seniors thought him a pushful young cad, but
Julia recognized the unmistakable chic -- the flavour of "Max" and "F.E."
and the Prince of Wales, of the big table in the Sporting Club, the second
magnum and the fourth cigar, of the chauffeur kept waiting hour after hour
without compunction -- which her friends would envy. His social position was
unique; it had an air of mystery, even of crime, about it; people said Rex
went about armed. Julia and her friends had a fascinated abhorrence of what
they called "Pont Street"; they collected phrases that damned their user,
and among themselves -- and often, disconcertingly, in public -- talked a
language made up of them. It was "Pont Street" to wear a signet ring and to
give chocolates at the theatre; it was "Pont Street" at a dance to say, "Can
I forage for you?" Whatever Rex might be, he was definitely not "Pont
Street." He had stepped straight from the underworld into the world of
Brenda Champion, who was herself the innermost of a number of concentric
ivory spheres. Perhaps Julia recognized in Brenda Champion an intimation of
what she and her friends might be in twelve years' time; there was an
antagonism between the girl and the woman that was hard to explain
otherwise. Certainly the fact of his being Brenda Champion's property
sharpened Julia's appetite for him.
Rex and Brenda Champion were staying at the next villa on Cap Ferrat,
taken that year by a newspaper magnate and frequented by politicians. .They
would not normally have come within Lady Rosscommon's ambit, but, living so
close, the parties mingled and at once Rex began warily to pay his court.
All that summer he had been feeling restless. Mrs. Champion had proved
a dead end; it had all been intensely exciting at first, but now those
bonds, so much more rigid than the bonds of marriage, had begun to chafe.
Mrs. Champion lived as, he found, the English seemed apt to do, in a little
world within a little world; Rex demanded a wider horizon. He wanted to
consolidate his gains; to strike the black ensign, go ashore, hang the
cutlass up over the chimney and think about the crops. It was time he
married; he, too, was in search of a "Eustace," but, living as he did, he
met few girls. He knew of Julia; she was by all accounts top debutante, a
suitable prize.
With Mrs. Champion's cold eyes watching behind her sun glasses, there
was little Rex could do at Cap Ferrat except establish a friendliness which
could be widened later. He was never entirely alone with Julia, but he saw
to it that she was included in most things they did; he taught her
chemin-de-fer, he arranged that it was always in his car that they drove to
Monte Carlo or Nice; he did enough to make Lady Rosscommon write to Lady
Marchmain, and Mrs. Champion move him, sooner than they had planned, to
Antibes.
Julia went to Salzburg to join her mother.
"Aunt Fanny tells me you made great friends with Mr. Mottram. I'm sure
he can't be very nice."
"I don't think he is," said Julia. "I don't know that I like nice
people."
There is proverbially a mystery among most men of new wealth, how they
made their first ten thousand; it is the qualities they showed then, before
they became bullies, when every man was someone to be placated, when only
hope sustained them and they could count on nothing from the world but what
could be charmed from it, that make them, if they survive their triumph,
successful with women. Rex, in the comparative freedom of London, became
abject to Julia; he planned his life about hers, going where he would meet
her, ingratiating himself with those who could report well of him to her; he
sat on a number of charitable committees in order to be near Lady Marchmain;
he offered his services to Brideshead in getting him a seat in Parliament
(but was there rebuffed); he expressed a keen interest in the Catholic
Church until he found that this was no way to Julia's heart. He was always
ready to drive her in his Hispano wherever she wanted to go; he took her and
parties of her friends to ring-side seats at prize-fights and introduced
them afterwards to the pugilists; and all the time he never once made love
to her. From being agreeable, he became indispensable to her; from having
been proud of him in public she became a little ashamed, but by that time,
between Christmas and Easter, he had become indispensable. And then, without
in the least expecting it, she suddenly found herself in love.
It came to her, this disturbing and unsought revelation, one evening in
May, when Rex had told her he would be busy at the House, and, driving by
chance down Charles Street, she saw him leaving what she knew to be Brenda
Champion's house. She was so hurt and angry that she could barely keep up
appearances through dinner; as soon as she could, she went home and cried
bitterly for ten minutes; then she felt hungry, wished she had eaten more at
dinner, ordered some bread-and-milk, and went to bed saying: "When Mr.
Mottram telephones in the morning, whatever time it is, say I am not to be
disturbed."
Next day she breakfasted in bed as usual, read the papers, telephoned
to her friends. Finally she asked: "Did Mr. Mottram ring up by any chance?"
"Oh yes, my lady, four times. Shall I put him through when he rings
again?"
"Yes. No. Say I've gone out."
When she came downstairs there was a message for her on the hall table.
Mr. Mottram expects Lady Julia at the Ritz at 1:30. "I shall lunch at home
to-day," she said.
That afternoon she went shopping with her mother; they had tea with an
aunt and returned at six.
"Mr. Mottram is waiting, my lady. I've shown him into the library."
"Oh, Mummy. I can't be bothered with him. Do tell him to go home."
"That's not at all kind, Julia. I've often said he's not my favourite
among your friends, but I have grown quite used to him, almost to like him.
You really mustn't take people up and drop them like this -- particularly
people like Mr. Mottram."
"Oh, Mummy, must I see him? There'll be a scene if I do."
"Nonsense, Julia, you twist that poor man round your finger."
So Julia went into the library and came out an hour later engaged to be
married.
"Oh, Mummy, I warned you this would happen if I went in there."
"You did nothing of the kind. You merely said there would be a scene. I
never conceived of a scene of this kind."
"Anyway, you do like him, Mummy. You said so."
"He has been very kind in a number of ways. I regard him as entirely
unsuitable as your husband. So will everyone."
"Damn everybody."
"We know nothing about him. He may have black blood -- in fact he is
suspiciously dark. Darling, the whole thing's impossible. I can't see how
you can have been so foolish."
"Well, what right have I got otherwise to be angry with him if he goes
with that horrible old woman? You make a great thing about rescuing fallen
women. Well, I'm rescuing a fallen man for a change. I'm saving Rex from
mortal sin."
"Don't be irreverent, Julia."
"Well, isn't it mortal sin to sleep with Brenda Champion?"
"Or indecent."
"He's promised never to see her again. I couldn't ask him to do that
unless I admitted I was in love with him, could I?"
"Mrs. Champion's morals, thank God, are not my business. Your happiness
is. If you must know, I think Mr. Mottram a kind and useful friend, but I
wouldn't trust him an inch, and I'm sure he'll have very unpleasant
children. They always, revert. I've no doubt you'll regret the whole thing
in a few days. Meanwhile nothing is to be done. No one must be told anything
or allowed to suspect. You must stop lunching with him. You may see him
here, of course, but nowhere in public. You had better send him to me and I
will have a little talk to him about it."
Thus began a year's secret engagement for Julia; a time of great
stress, for Rex made love to her that afternoon for the first time; not as
had happened to her once or twice before with sentimental and uncertain
boys, but with a passion that disclosed the corner of something like it in
her. Their passion frightened her, and she came back from the confessional
one flay determined to put an end to it.
"Otherwise I must stop seeing you," she said.
Rex was humble at once, just as he had been in the winter, day after
day, when he used to wait for her in the cold in his big car.
"If only we could be married immediately," she said.
For six weeks they remained at arm's length, kissing when they met and
parted, sitting meantime at a distance, talking of what they would do and
where they would live and of Rex's chances of an under-secretaryship. Julia
was content, deep in love, living in the future. Then, just before the end
of the session, . she learned that Rex had been staying the week-end with a
stockbroker at Sunningdale, when he said he was at his constituency, and
that Mrs. Champion had been there, too.
On the evening she heard of this, when Rex came as usual to Marchmain
House, they re-enacted the scene of two months before.
"What do you expect?" he said. "What right have you to ask so much,
when you give so little?"
She took her problem to Farm Street and propounded it in general terms,
not in the confessional, but in a dark little parlour kept for such
interviews.
"Surely, Father, it can't be wrong to commit a small sin myself in
order to keep him from a much worse one?"
But the gentle old Jesuit was unyielding as rock. She barely listened
to him; he was refusing her what she wanted, that was all she needed to
know.
When he had finished he said, "Now you had better come to the church
and make your confession."
"No, thank you," she said, as though refusing the offer of something in
a shop, "I don't think I want to to-day," and walked angrily home.
From that moment she shut her mind against her religion.
And Lady Marchmain saw this and added it to her new grief for Sebastian
and her old grief for her husband and to the deadly sickness in her body,
and took all these sorrows with her daily to church; it seemed her heart was
transfixed with the swords of her dolours, a living heart to match the
plaster and paint; what comfort she took home with her, God knows.
So the year wore on and the secret of the engagement spread from
Julia's confidantes to their confidantes, and so, like ripples on the water,
in ever-widening circles, till there were hints of it in the press, and Lady
Rosscommon as Lady-in-Waiting was closely questioned about it, and something
had to be done. Then, after Julia had refused to make her Christmas
communion and Lady Marchmain had found herself betrayed first by me, then by
Mr. Samgrass, then by Cordelia, in the first grey days of 1925, she decided
to act. She forbade all talk of an engagement; she forbade Julia and Rex
ever to meet; she made plans for shutting Marchmain House for six months and
taking Julia on a tour of visits to their foreign kinsmen. It was
characteristic of an old, atavistic callousness that went with her delicacy
that, even at this crisis, she did not think it unreasonable to put
Sebastian in Rex's charge on the journey to Dr. Borethus, and Rex,
having failed her in that matter, went on to Monte Carlo, where he completed
her rout. Lord Marchmain did not concern himself with the finer points of
Rex's character; those, he believed, were his daughter's business. Rex
seemed a rough, healthy, prosperous fellow whose name was already familiar
to him from reading the political reports; he gambled in an open-handed but
sensible manner; he seemed to keep reasonably good company; he had a future;
Lady Marchmain disliked him. Lord Marchmain was, on the whole, relieved that
Julia should have chosen so well, and gave his consent to an immediate
marriage.
Rex gave himself to the preparations with gusto. He bought her a ring,
not, as she expected, from a tray at Cartier's, but in a back room in Hatton
Garden from a man who brought stones out of a safe in little bags and
displayed them for her on a writing-desk; then another man in another back
room made designs for the setting with a stub of pencil on a sheet of
note-paper, and the result excited the admiration of all her friends.
"How d'you know about these things, Rex?" she asked. She was daily
surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the
time, added to his attraction.
His present house in Westminster was large enough for them both, and
had lately been furnished and decorated by the most expensive firm. Julia
said she did not want a home in the country yet; they could always take
places furnished when they wanted to go away.
There was trouble about the marriage settlement, with which Julia
refused to interest herself. The lawyers were in despair. Rex absolutely
refused to settle any capital. "What do I want with trustee stock?" he
asked.
"I don't know, darling."
"I make money work for me," he said. "I expect fifteen, twenty per
cent, and I get it. It's pure waste tying up capital at three and a half."
"I'm sure it is, darling."
"These fellows talk as though I were trying to rob you. It's they who
are doing the robbing. They want to rob you of two thirds of the income I
can make you." "Does it matter, Rex? We've got heaps, haven't we?" Rex hoped
to have the whole of Julia's dowry in his hands, to make it work for him.
The lawyers insisted on tying it up, but they could not get, as they asked,
a like sum from him. Finally, grudgingly, he agreed to insure his life,
after explaining at length to the lawyers that this was mertly a device for
putting part of his legitimate profits into other people's pockets; but he
had some connection with an insurance office which made the arrangement
slightly less painful to him, by which he took for himself the agent's
commission which the lawyers were themselves expecting.
Last and least tame the question of Rex's religion. He had once
attended a royal wedding in Madrid, and he wanted something of die kind for
himself.
"That's one thing your Church can do," he said: "put on a good show.
You never saw anything to equal the cardinals. How many do you have in
England?"
"Only one, darling."
"Only one? Can we hire some others from abroad?" It was then explained
to him that a mixed marriage was a very unostentatious affair.
"How d'you mean 'mixed'? I'm not a nigger or anything."
"No, darling --between a Catholic and a Protestant."
"Oh, that? Well, if that's all, it's soon unmixed. I'll become a
Catholic. What does one have to do?"
Lady Marchmain was dismayed and perplexed by this new development; it
was no good her telling herself that in charity she must assume his good
faith; it brought back memories of
another courtship and another conversion.
"Rex," she said. "I sometimes wonder if you realize how big a thing you
are taking on in the Faith. It would be very wicked to take a step like this
without believing sincerely."
He was masterly in his treatment of her.
"I don't pretend to be a very devout man," he said, "nor much of a
theologian, but I know it's a bad plan to have two religions in one house. A
man needs a religion. If your Church is good enough for Julia, it's good
enough for me."
"Very well," she said, "I will see about having you instructed."
"Look, Lady Marchmain, I haven't the time. Instruction will be wasted
on me. Just you give me the form and I'll sign on the dotted line."
"It usually takes some months - often a lifetime."
"Well, I'm a quick learner. Try me."
So Rex was sent to Farm Street to Father Mowbray, a priest renowned for
his triumphs with obdurate catechumens. After the third interview he came to
tea with Lady Marchmain.
"Well, how do you find my future son-in-law?"
"He's the most difficult convert I have ever met."
"Oh dear, I thought he was going to make it so easy."
"That's exactly it. I can't get anywhere near him. He doesn't seem to
have the least intellectual curiosity or natural piety.
"The first day I wanted to find out what sort of religious life he had
had till now, so I asked him what he meant by prayer. He said: 'I don't mean
anything. You tell me'. I tried to, in a few words, and he said: 'Right. So
much for prayer. What's the next thing?' I gave him the catechism to take
away. Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He
said: 'Just as many as you say, Father.'
"Then again I asked him: 'Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud
and said "It's going to rain," would that be bound to happen?' 'Oh, yes,
Father.' 'But supposing it didn't?' He thought a moment and said, 'I suppose
it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.'
"Lady Marchmain, he doesn't correspond to any degree of paganism known
to the missionaries."
"Julia," said Lady Marchmain, when the priest had gone, "are you sure
that Rex isn't doing this thing purely with the idea of pleasing us?"
"I don't think it enters his head," said Julia.
"He's really sincere in his conversion?"
"He's absolutely determined to become a Catholic, Mummy," and to
herself she said: In her long history the Church must have had some pretty
queer converts. I don't suppose all Clevis's army were exactly
Catholic-minded. One more won't hurt.
Next week the Jesuit came to tea again. It was the Easter holidays and
Cordelia was there, too.
"Lady Marchmain," he said. "You should have chosen one of the younger
fathers for this task. I shall be dead long before Rex is a Catholic."
"Oh dear, I thought it was going so well."
"It was, in a sense. He was exceptionally docile, said he accepted
everything I told him, remembered bits of it, asked no questions. I wasn't
happy about him. He seemed to have no sense of reality, but I knew he was
coming under a steady Catholic influence, so I was willing to receive him.
One has to take a chance sometimes -- with semi-imbeciles, for instance. You
never know quite how much they have understood. As long as you know there's
someone to keep an eye on them, you do take the chance."
"How I wish Rex could hear this!" said Cordelia. "But yesterday I got a
regular eye-opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how
ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident
what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have
such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly
breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.
Take yesterday. He seemed to be doing very well. He'd learned large bits of
the catechism by heart, and the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary. Then I
asked him as usual if there was anything troubling him, and he looked 'at me
in a crafty way and said, 'Look, Father, I don't think you're being straight
with me. I want to join your Church and I'm going to join your Church, but
you're holding too much back.' I asked what he meant, and he said: 'I've had
a long talk with a Catholic -- a very pious, well-educated one, and I've
learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet
pointing East because that's the direction of heaven, and if you die in the
night you can walk there. Now I'll sleep with my feet pointing any way that
suits Julia, but d'you expect a grown man to believe about walking to
heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a cardinal? And
what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound
note with someone's name on it, they get sent to hell. I don't say there
mayn't be a good reason for all this,' he said, 'but you ought to tell me
about it and not let me find out for myself.'"
"What can the poor man have meant?" said Lady Marchmain.
"You see he's a long way from the Church yet," said Father Mowbray.
"But who can he have been talking to? Did he dream it all? Cordelia,
what's the matter?"
"What a chump! Oh, Mummy, what a glorious chump!"
"Cordelia, it was you."
"Oh, Mummy, who could have dreamed he'd swallow it? I told him such a
lot besides. About the sacred monkeys in the Vatican -- all kinds of
things."
"Well, you've very considerably increased my work," said Father
Mowbray.
"Poor Rex," said Lady Marchmain. "You know, I think it makes him rather
lovable. You must treat him like an idiot child, Father Mowbray."
So the instruction was continued, and Father Mowbray at length
consented to receive Rex a week before his wedding.
"You'd think they'd be all over themselves to have me in," Rex
complained. "I can be a lot of help to them one way and another; instead
they're like the chaps who issue cards for a casino. What's more," he added,
"Cordelia's got me so muddled I don't know what's in the catechism and what
she's invented."
Thus things stood three weeks before the wedding; the cards had gone
out, presents were coming in fast, the bridesmaids were delighted with their
dresses. Then came what Julia called "Bridey's bombshell."
With characteristic ruthlessness he tossed his load of explosive
without warning into what, till then, had been a happy family party. The
library at Marchmain House was being devoted to wedding presents; Lady
Marchmain, Julia, Cordelia and Rex were busy unpacking and listing them.
Brideshead came in and watched them for a moment.
"Chinky vases from Aunt Betty," said Cordelia. "Old stuff. I remember
them on the stairs at Buckborne."
"What's all this?" asked Brideshead.
"Mr., Mrs., and Miss Pendle-Garthwaite, one early-morning tea set.
Goode's, thirty shillings, jolly mean."
"You'd better pack all that stuff up again."
"Bridey, what do you mean?"
"Only that the wedding's off."
"Bridey."
"I thought I'd better make some enquiries about my prospective
brother-in-law, as no one else seemed interested," said Brideshead. "I got
the final answer to-night. He was married in Montreal hi 1915 to a Miss
Sarah Evangeline Cutler, who is still living there."
"Rex, is this true?"
Rex stood with a jade dragon in his hand looking at it critically; then
he set it carefully on its ebony stand and smiled openly and innocently at
them all.
"Sure it's true," he said. "What about it? What are you all looking so
hit-up about? She isn't a thing to me. She never meant any good. I was only
a kid, anyhow. The sort of mistake anyone might make. I got my divorce back
in 1919. I didn't even know where she was living till Bridey here told me.
What's all the rumpus?"
"You might have told me," said Julia.
"You never asked. Honest, I've not given her a thought in years."
His sincerity was so plain that they had to sit down and talk about it
calmly.
"Don't you realize, you poor sweet oaf," said Julia, "that you can't
get married as a Catholic when you've another wife alive?"
"But I haven't. Didn't I just tell you we were divorced six years ago?"
"But you can't be divorced as a Catholic."
"I wasn't a Catholic and I was divorced. I've got the papers
somewhere."
"But didn't Father Mowbray explain to you about marriage?"
"He said I wasn't to be divorced from you. Well, I don't want to be. I
can't remember all he told me -- sacred monkeys, plenary indulgences, four
last things -- if I remembered all he told" me I shouldn't have time for
anything else. Anyhow, what about your Italian cousin, Francesca? She
married twice."
"She had an annulment."
"All right then, I'll get an annulment. What does it cost? Who do I get
it from? Has Father Mowbray got one? I only want to do what's right. Nobody
told me."
It was a long time before Rex could be convinced of the existence of a
serious impediment to his marriage. The discussion took them to dinner, lay
dormant in the presence of the servants, started again as soon as they were
alone, and lasted long after midnight. Up, down and round the argument
circled and swooped like a gull, now out to sea, out of sight, cloud-bound,
among irrelevances and repetitions, now right on the patch where the offal
floated.'
"What d'you want me to do? Who should I see?" Rex kept asking. "Don't
tell me there isn't someone who can fix this."
"There's nothing to do, Rex," said Brideshead. "It simply means your
marriage can't take place. I'm sorry from everyone's point of view that it's
come so suddenly. You ought to have told us yourself."
"Look," said Rex. "Maybe what you say is right; maybe strictly by law I
shouldn't get married in your cathedral. But the cathedral is booked; no one
there is asking any questions; the Cardinal knows nothing about it; Father
Mowbray knows nothing about it. Nobody except us knows a thing. So why make
a lot of trouble? Just stay mum and let the thing go through, as if nothing
had happened. Who loses anything by that? Maybe I risk going to hell. Well,
I'll risk it. What's it got to do with anyone else?"
"Why not?" said Julia. "I don't believe these priests know everything.
I don't believe in hell for things like that. I don't know that I believe in
it for anything. Anyway, that's our lookout. We're not asking you to risk
your souls. Just keep away."
"Julia, I hate you," said Cordelia, and left the room.
"We're all tired," said Lady Marchmain. "If there is anything to say,
I'd suggest our discussing it in the morning."
"But there's nothing to discuss," said Brideshead, "except what is the
least offensive way we can close the whole incident. Mother and I will
decide that. We must put a notice in The Times and the Morning Post; the
presents will have to go back. I don't know what is usual about the
bridesmaids' dresses."
"Just a moment," said Rex. "Just a moment. Maybe you can stop us
marrying in your cathedral. All right, to hell, we'll be married in a
Protestant church."
"I can stop that, too," said Lady Marchmain.
"But I don't think you will, Mummy," said Julia. "You see, I've been
Rex's mistress for some time now, and I shall go on being, married or not."
"Rex, is this true?"
"No, damn it, it's not," said Rex. "I wish it were."
"I see we shall have to discuss it all again in the morning," said Lady
Marchmain faintly. "I can't go on any more now."
And she needed her son's help up the stairs.
"What on earth made you tell your mother that?" I asked, when, years
later, Julia described the scene to me.
"That's exactly what Rex wanted to know. I suppose because I thought it
was true. Not literally -- though you must remember I was only twenty, and
no one really knows the 'facts of life' by being told them -- but, of
course, I didn't mean it was true literally. I didn't know how else to
express it. I meant I was much too deep with Rex just to be able to say 'the
marriage arranged will not now take place,' and leave it at that. I wanted
to be made an honest woman. I've been wanting it ever since -- come to think
of it."
"And then?"
"And then the talks went on and on. Poor Mummy. And priests came into
it and aunts came into it. There were all kinds of suggestions -- that Rex
should go to Canada, that Father Mowbray should go to Rome and see if there
were any possible grounds for an annulment; that I should go abroad for a
year. In the middle of it Rex just telegraphed to Papa: 'Julia and I prefer
wedding ceremony take place by Protestant rites. Have you any objection?' He
answered, 'Delighted,' and that settled the matter as far as Mummy stopping
us legally went. There was a lot of personal appeal after that. I was sent
to talk to priests and nuns and aunts. Rex just went on quietly -- or fairly
quietly -- with the plans.
"Oh, Charles, what a squalid wedding! The Savoy Chapel was the place
where divorced couples got married in those days--a poky little place not at
all what Rex had intended. I wanted just to slip into a registry office one
morning and get the thing over with a couple of charwomen as witnesses, but
nothing else would do but Rex had to have bridesmaids and orange blossoms
and the wedding march. It was gruesome.
"Poor Mummy behaved like a martyr and insisted on my having her lace in
spite of everything. Well, she more or less had to--the dress had been
planned round it. My own friends came, of course, and the curious
accomplices Rex called his friends; the rest bf the party were very oddly
assorted. None of Mummy's family came, of course; one or two of Papa's. All
the stuffy people stayed away--you know, the Anchorages and Chasms and
Vanbrughs -- and I thought, Thank God for that, they always look down their
noses at me, anyhow; but Rex was furious, Because it was just them he wanted
apparently.
"I hoped at one moment there'd be no party at all. Mummy said we
couldn't use Marchers, and Rex wanted to telegraph Papa and invade the place
with an army of caterers headed by the family solicitor. In the end it was
decided to have a party the evening before at home to see the presents --
apparently that was all right according to Father Mowbray. Well, no one can
ever resist going to see her own present, so that was quite a success, but
the reception Rex gave next day at the Savoy for the wedding guests was very
squalid.
"There was great awkwardness about the tenants. In the end Bridey went
down and gave them a dinner and bonfire there, which wasn't at all what they
expected in return for their silver
soup-tureen.
"Poor Cordelia took it hardest. She had looked forward so much to being
my bridesmaid -- it was a thing we used to talk about long before I came
out--and of course she was a very pious child, too. At first she wouldn't
speak to me. Then on the morning of the wedding --I'd moved to Aunt Fanny
Ross-common's the evening before; it was thought more suitable--she came
bursting in before I was up, straight from Farm Street, in floods of tears,
begged me not to marry, then hugged me, gave me a dear little brooch she'd
bought, and said she prayed I'd always be happy. Always happy, Charles!
"It was an awfully unpopular wedding, you know. Everyone took Mummy's
side, as everyone always did -- not that she got any benefit from it. All
through her life Mummy had all the sympathy of everyone except those she
loved. They all said I'd behaved abominably to her. In fact, poor Rex found
he'd married an outcast, which was exactly the opposite of all he'd wanted.
"So you see things never looked like going right. There was a hoodoo on
us from the start. But I was still nuts about Rex.
"Funny to think of, isn't it?
"You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it
took me a year of marriage to see. He simply wasn't all there. He wasn't a
complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally
developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I
thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely
modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny ,bit
of a man pretending he was the whole.
"Well, it's all over now."
It was ten years later that she said this to me in a storm in the
Atlantic.
Chapter Eight
I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike.
It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the
discomfiture of their former friends, 'and transposing into their own
precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold
revolution and civil war. Every evening the kiosks displayed texts of doom,
and in the cafes acquaintances greeted one half-derisively with: "Ha, my
friend, you are better off here than at home, are you not?" until I, and
several friends in circumstances like my own, came seriously to believe that
our country was in danger and that our duty lay there. We were joined by a
Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de
Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere
against the lower classes.
We crossed together, in a high-spirited, male party, expecting to find
unfolding before us at Dover the history so often repeated of late, with so
few variations, from all parts of Europe, that I, at any rate, had formed in
my mind a clear, composite picture of Revolution -- the red flag on the post
office, the overturned tram, the drunken N.C.O-'s, the gaol open and gangs
of released criminals prowling the streets, the train from the capital that
did not arrive. One had read it in the papers, seen it in the films, heard
it at cafe tables again and again for six or seven years now, till it had
become part of one's experience, at second hand, like the mud of Flanders
and the flies of Mesopotamia.
Then we landed and met the old routine of the customs sheds, the
punctual boat-train, the porters lining the platform at Victoria and
converging on the first-class carriages; the long line of waiting taxis.
"We'll separate," we said, "and see what's happening. We'll meet and
compare notes at dinner," but we knew already in our hearts that nothing was
happening; nothing, at any rate, which needed our presence.
"Oh dear," said my father, meeting me by chance on the stairs, "how
delightful to see you again so soon." (I had been abroad fifteen months.)
"You've come at a very awkward time, you know. They're having another of
those strikes in two days -- such a lot of nonsense--and I don't know when
you'll be able to get away."
I thought of the evening I was forgoing, with the lights coming out
along the banks of the Seine, and the company I should have had there -- for
I was at the time concerned with two emancipated American girls who shared a
garconniere in Auteuil -- and wished I had not come.
We dined that night at the Cafe" Royal. There things were a little more
warlike, for the cafe" was full of undergraduates who had come down for
"National Service." One group, from Cambridge, had that afternoon signed on
to run messages for Transport House, and their table backed on another
group's, who were enrolled as special constables. Now and then one or other
party would shout provocatively over the shoulder, but it is hard to come
into serious conflict back to back, and the affair ended-with their giving
each other tall glasses of lager beer.
"You should have been in Budapest when Horthy marched in," said Jean.
"That was politics."
A party was being given that night in Regent's Park for the "Black
Birds," who had newly arrived in England. One of us had been asked and
thither we all went.
To us, who frequented Bricktop's and the Bal Negre in the Rue Blomet,
there was nothing particularly remarkable in the spectacle; I was scarcely
inside the door when I heard an unmistakable voice, an echo from what now
seemed a distant past.
"No" it said, "they are not animals in a zoo, Mulcaster, to be goggled
at. They are artists, my dear, very great artists, to be revered."
Anthony Blanche and Boy Mulcaster were at the table where the wine
stood.
"Thank God here's someone I know," said Mulcaster, as I joined them.
"Girl brought me. Can't see her anywhere."
"She's given you the slip, my dear, and do you know why? Because you
look ridiculously out of place, Mulcaster. It isn't your kind of party at
all; you ought not to be here; you ought to go away, you know, to the Old
Hundredth or some lugubrious dance in Belgrave Square."
"Just come from one," said Mulcaster. "Too early for the Old Hundredth.
I'll stay on a bit. Things may cheer up."
"I spit on you," said Anthony. "Let me talk to you, Charles."
We took a bottle and our glasses and found a corner in another room. At
our feet, five members of the "Black Birds" orchestra squatted on their
heels and threw dice.
"That one," said Anthony, "the rather pale one, my dear, konked Mrs.
Arnold Frickheimer the other morning on the nut, my dear, with a bottle of
milk."
Almost immediately, inevitably, we began to talk of Sebastian.
"My dear, he's such a sot. He came to live with me in Marseilles last
year when you threw him over, and really it was as much as I could stand.
Sip, sip, sip like a dowager all day long. And so sly. I was always missing
little things, my dear, things I rather liked; once I lost two suits that
had arrived from Lesley and Roberts that morning. Of course, I didn't know
it was Sebastian--there were some rather queer fish, my dear, in and out of
my little apartment. Who knows better than you my taste for queer fish?
Well, eventually, my dear, we found the pawnshop where Sebastian was
p-p-popping them and then he hadn't got the tickets; there was a market for
them, too, at the Bistro.
"I can see that puritanical, disapproving look in your eye, dear
Charles, as though you thought I had led the boy on. It's one of Sebastian's
less lovable qualities that he always gives the impression of being l-l-led
on -- like a little horse at a circus. But I assure you I did everything. I
said to him again and again, 'Why drink? If you want to be intoxicated there
are so many much
more delicious things.' I took him to quite the best man; well, you
know him as well as I do, Nada Alopov; and Jean Luxmore and everyone we know
has been to him for years -- he's always
in the Regina Bar -- and then we had trouble over that because
Sebastian gave him a bad cheque--a s-s-stumer, my dear-- and a whole lot of
very menacing men came round to the flat --thugs, my dear -- and Sebastian
was making no sense at the time and it was all most unpleasant."
Boy Mulcaster wandered towards us and sat down, without encouragement,
by my side.
"Drink running short in there," he said, helping himself from our
bottle and emptying it. "Not a soul in the place I ever set eyes on before
-- all black fellows."
Anthony ignored him and continued: "So then we left Marseilles and went
to Tangier, and there, my dear, Sebastian took up with his new friend. How
can I describe him? He is like the footman in 'Warning Shadows' -- a great
clod of a German who'd been in the Foreign Legion. He got put by shooting
off his great toe. It hadn't healed yet. Sebastian found him, starving as
tout to one of the houses in the Kasbah, and brought him to stay with us. It
was too macabre. So back I came, my dear, to good old England -- good old
England" he repeated, indicating in an ample gesture the Negroes gambling at
our feet, Mulcaster, staring blankly before him, and our hostess who, in
pyjamas, now introduced herself to us.
"Never seen you before," she said. "Never asked you. Who are all this
white trash, anyway? Seems to me I must be in the wrong house."
"A time of national emergency," said Mulcaster. "Anything may happen."
"Is the party going well?" she asked anxiously. "D'you think Florence
Mills would sing? We've met before," she added to Anthony.
"Often, my dear, but you never asked me to-night."
"Oh dear, perhaps I don't like you. I thought I liked everyone."
"Do you think," asked Mulcaster, when our hostess had left us, "that it
might be witty to give the fire alarm?"
"Yes, Boy, run away and ring it."
"Might cheer things up, I mean."
"Exactly."
So Mulcaster left us in search of the telephone.
"I think Sebastian and his lame chum went to French Morocco," continued
Anthony. "They were in trouble with the Tangier police when I left them. The
Marchioness has been a positive pest ever since I came to London, trying to
make me get into touch with them. What a time that poor woman's having! It
only shows there's some justice in life."
Presently Miss Mills began to sing and everyone, except the crap
players, crowded to the next room.
"That's my girl," said Mulcaster. "Over there with that black fellow.
That's the girl who brought me."
"She seems to have forgotten you now."
"Yes. I wish I hadn't come. Let's go on somewhere."
Two fire engines drove up as we left and a host of helmeted figures
joined the throng upstairs.
"That chap, Blanche," said Mulcaster, "not a good fellow. I put him in
Mercury once."
We went to a number of night clubs. In two years Mulcaster seemed to
have attained his simple ambition of being known and liked in such places.
At the last of them he and I were kindled by a great flame of patriotism.
"You and I," he said, "were too young to fight in the war. Other chaps
fought, millions of them dead. Not us. We'll show them. We'll show the dead
chaps we can fight, too."
"That's why I'm here," I said. "Come from overseas, rallying to old
country in hour of need."
"Like Australians."
"Like the poor dead Australians."
"What you in?"
"Nothing yet. War not ready."
"Only one thing to join -- Bill Meadows's show--Defence Corps. All good
chaps. Being fixed in Bratt's."
"Ill join."
"You member Bratt's?"
"No. I'll join that, too."
"That's right. All good chaps like the dead chaps."
So I joined Bill Meadows's show, which was a flying squad, protecting
food deliveries in the poorer parts of London. First I was enrolled in the
Defence Corps, took an oath of loyalty, and was given a helmet and
truncheon; then I was put up for Bratt's Club and, with a number of other
recruits, elected at a committee meeting specially called for the occasion.
For a week we sat under orders in Bratt's, and thrice a day we drove out in
a lorry at the head of a convoy of milk vans. We were jeered at and
sometimes pelted with muck, but only once did we go into action.
We were sitting round after luncheon that day when Bill Meadows came
back from the telephone in high spirits.
"Come on," he said. "There's a perfectly good battle in the Commercial
Road."
We drove at great speed and arrived to find a steel hawser stretched
between lamp-posts, an overturned truck and a policeman, alone on the
pavement, being kicked by half a dozen youths. On either side of this centre
of disturbance, and at a little distance from it, two opposing parties had
formed. Near us, as we disembarked, a second policeman was sitting on the
pavement, dazed, with his head in his hands and blood running through his
fingers; two or three sympathizers were standing over him; on the other side
of the hawser was a hostile knot of. young dockers. We charged in
cheerfully, relieved the policeman, and were just falling upon the main body
of the enemy when we came into collision with a party of local clergy and
town councillors who arrived simultaneously by another route, to try
persuasion. They were our only victims, for just as they went down there was
a cry of "Look out. The coppers," and a lorry load of police drew up in our
rear.
The crowd broke and disappeared. We picked up the peacemakers (only one
of whom was seriously hurt), patrolled some of the side streets looking for
trouble and finding none, and at length returned to Bratt's. Next day the
General Strike was called off and the country everywhere, except in the
coal-fields, returned to normal. It was as though a beast long fabled for
its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented danger, and slunk back to its
lair. It had not been worth leaving Paris.
Jean, who joined another company, had a pot of ferns dropped on his
head by an elderly widow in Camden Town and was in hospital for a week.
It was through my membership of Bill Meadows's squad that Julia learned
I was in England. She telephoned to say her mother was anxious to see me.
"You'll find her terribly ill," she said.
I went to Marchmain House on the first morning of peace. Sir Adrian
Porson passed me in the hall, leaving, as I arrived; he held a bandanna
handkerchief to his face and felt blindly for his hat and stick; he was in
tears.
I was shown into the library and in less than a minute Julia joined me.
She shook hands with a gentleness and gravity that were unfamiliar; in the
gloom of that room she seemed a ghost.
"It's sweet of you to come. Mummy has kept asking for you, but I don't
know if she'll be able to see you now, after all. She's just said 'good-bye'
to Adrian Porson and it's tired her."
"Good-bye?"
"Yes. She's dying. She may live a week or two or she may go at any
minute. She's so weak. I'll go and ask nurse."
The stillness of death seemed in the house already. No one ever sat in
the library at Marchmain House. It was the one ungracious room in either of
their houses. The bookcases of Victorian oak held volumes of Hansard and
obsolete encyclopedias that were never opened; the bare mahogany table
seemed set for the meeting of a committee; the place had the air of being
both public and unfrequented; outside lay the forecourt, the railings, the
quiet cul-de-sac.
Presently Julia returned.
"No, I'm afraid you can't see her. She's asleep. She may lie like that
for hours; I can tell you what she wanted. Let's go somewhere else. I hate
this room."
We went across the hall to the small drawing-room where luncheon
parties used to assemble, and sat on either side of the fireplace. Julia
seemed to reflect the crimson and gold of the walls and lose some of her
wanness.
"First, I know, Mummy wanted to say how sorry she is she was so beastly
to you last time you met. She's spoken of it often. She knows now she was
wrong about you. I'm quite sure you understood and put it out of your mind
immediately, but it's the kind of thing Mummy can never forgive herself --
it's the kind of thing she so seldom did."
"Do tell her I understood completely."
"The other thing, of course, you have guessed -- Sebastian. She wants
him. I don't know if that's possible. Is it?"
"I hear he's in a very bad way."
"We heard that, too. We cabled to the last address we had, but there
was no answer. There still may be time for him to see her. I thought of you
as the only hope, as soon as I heard you were in England. Will you try and
get him? It's an awful lot to ask, but I think Sebastian would want it, too,
if he realized."
"I'll try."
"There's no one else we can ask. Rex is so busy."
"Yes. I heard reports of all he'd been doing organizing the gas works."
"Oh yes," Julia said with a touch of her old dryness. "He's made a lot
of kudos out of the strike."
Then we talked for a few minutes about the Bratt's squad. She told me
Brideshead had refused to take any public service because he was not
satisfied with the justice of the cause; Cordelia was in London, in bed now,
as she had been watching by her mother all night. I told her I had taken up
architectural painting and that I enjoyed it. All this talk was nothing; we
had said all we had to say in the first two minutes; I stayed for ten and
then left her.
Air France ran a service of a kind to Casablanca; there I took the bus
to Fez, starting at dawn and arriving in the new town at evening. I
telephoned from the hotel to the British Consul and dined with him that
evening, in his charming house by the walls of the old town. He was a kind,
serious man.
"I'm delighted someone has come to look after young Flyte at last," he
said. "He's been something of a thorn in our sides here. This is no place
for a remittance man. The French don't understand him at all. They think
everyone who's not engaged in trade is a spy. It's not as though he lived
like a milord. Things aren't easy here. There's war going on not thirty
miles from this house, though you might not think it. We had some young
fools on bicycles only last week who'd come to volunteer for Abdul Krim's
army.
"Then the Moors are a tricky lot; they don't hold with drink and our
young friend, as you may know, spends most of his day drinking. What does he
want to come here for? There's plenty of room for him at Rabat or Tangier,
where they cater for tourists. He's taken a house in the native town, you
know. I tried to stop him, but he got it from a Frenchman in the Department
of Arts. I don't say there's any harm in him but he's an anxiety. There's an
awful fellow sponging on him -- a German out of the Foreign Legion. A
thoroughly bad lot by all accounts. There's bound to be trouble.
"Mind you, I like Flyte. I don't see much of him. He used to come here
for baths until he got fixed up at his house. He was always perfectly
charming, and my wife took a great fancy to him. What he needs is
occupation."
I explained my errand.
"You'll probably find him at home now. Goodness knows there's nowhere
to go in the evenings in the old town. If you like I'll send the porter to
show you the way."
So I set out after dinner, with the consular porter going ahead,
lantern in hand. Morocco was a new and strange country to me. Driving that
day, mile after mile, up the smooth, strategic road, past the vineyards and
military posts and the new, white settlements and the early crops already
standing high in the vast, open fields, and the hoardings advertising the
staples of France -- Dubonnet, Michelin, Magasin du Louvre --I had thought
it all very suburban and up-to-date; now, under the stars, in the walled
city, whose streets were gentle, dusty stairways, and whose walls rose
windowless on either side, closed overhead, then opened again to the stars;
where the dust lay thick among the smooth paving stones and figures passed
silently, robed in white, on soft slippers or hard, bare soles; where the
air was scented with cloves and incense and wood smoke -- now I knew what
had drawn Sebastian here and held him so long.
The consular porter strode arrogantly ahead with his light swinging and
his tall cane banging; sometimes an open doorway revealed a silent group
seated in golden lamplight round a brazier.
"Very dirty peoples," the porter said scornfully, over his shoulder.
"No education. French leave them dirty. Not like' British peoples. My
peoples," he said, "always very British peoples."
For he was from the Sudan Police, and regarded this ancient centre of
his culture as a New Zealander might regard Rome.
At length we came to the last of many studded doors, and the porter
beat on it with his stick.
"British Lord's house," he said.
Lamplight and a dark face appeared at the grating. The consular porter
spoke peremptorily; bolts were withdrawn and we entered a small courtyard
with a well in its centre and a vine trained overhead.
"I wait here," said the porter. "You go with this native fellow."
I entered the house, down a step, and into the living-room. I found a
gramophone, an oil-stove and, between them, a young man. Later, when I
looked about me, I noticed other, more agreeable things -- the rugs on the
floor, the embroidered silk on the walls, the carved and painted beams of
the ceiling, the heavy, pierced lamp that hung from a chain and cast the
soft shadows of its own tracery about the room. But on first entering, these
three things -- the gramophone for its noise -- it was playing a French
record of a jazz band; the stove for its smell; and the young man for his
wolfish look -- struck my senses. He was lolling in a basket chair, with a
bandaged foot stuck forward on a box; he was dressed in a kind of thin,
mid-European imitation tweed with a tennis shirt open at the neck; the
unwounded foot wore a brown canvas shoe. There was a brass tray by his side
on wooden legs, and on it were two beer bottles, a dirty plate, and a saucer
full of cigarette ends; he held a glass of beer in his hand and a cigarette
lay on his lower lip and stuck there when he spoke. He had long fair hair
combed back without a parting and a face that was unnaturally lined for a
man of his obvious youth; one of his front teeth was missing, so that his
sibilants came sometimes with a lisp, sometimes with a disconcerting
whistle, which he covered with a giggle; the teeth he had were stained with
tobacco and set far apart.
This was plainly the "thoroughly bad lot" of the consul's description,
the film footman of Anthony's.
"I'm looking for Sebastian Flyte. This is his house, is it not?" I
spoke loudly to make myself heard above the dance music, but he answered
softly in English fluent enough to suggest that it was now habitual to him.
"Yeth. But he isn't here. There's no one but me."
"I've come from England to see him on important business; Can you tell
me where I can find him?"
The record came to its end. The German turned it over, wound up the
machine, and started it playing again before answering.
"Sebastian's sick. The brothers took him away to the infirmary. Maybe
they'll let you thee him, maybe not. I got to go there myself one day thoon
to have my foot dressed. I'll ask them then. When he's better they'll let
you thee him, maybe."
There was another chair and I sat down on it. Seeing that I meant to
stay, the German offered me some beer.
"You're not Thebastian's brother?" he said. "Cousin maybe? Maybe you
married hith thister?"
"I'm only a friend. We were at the University together."
"I had a friend at the University. We studied History. My friend was
cleverer than me; a little weak fellow -- I used to pick him up and shake
him when I was angry -- but tho clever. Then one day we said: 'What the
hell? There is no work in Germany. Germany is down the drain,' so we said
good-bye to our professors, and they said: 'Yes, Germany is down the drain.
There is nothing for a student to do here now,' and we went away anckj
walked and walked and at last we came here. Then we said, 'There is no army
in Germany now, but we must be tholdiers,' so we joined the Legion. My
friend died of dysentery last year, campaigning in the Atlas. When he was
dead, I said, 'What the hell?' so I shot my foot. It is now full of pus,
though I have done it one year."
"Yes," I said. "That's very interesting. But my immediate concern is
with Sebastian. Perhaps you would tell me about him."
"He is a very good fellow, Sebastian. He is all right for me. Tangier
was a stinking place. He brought me here--nice house, nice food, nice
servant -- everything is all right for me here, I reckon. I like it all
right."
"His mother is very ill," I said. "I have come to tell him."
"She rich?"
"Yes."
"Why don't she give him more money? Then we could live at Casablanca,
maybe, in a nice flat.
You know her well? You could make her give him more money?"
"What's the matter with him?"
"I don't know. I reckon maybe he drink too much. The brothers will look
after him. It's all right for him there. The brothers are good fellows. Very
cheap there."
He clapped his hands and ordered more beer.
"You thee? A nice thervant to look after me. It is all right."
When I had got the name of the hospital I left.
"Tell Thebastian I am still here and all right. I reckon he's worrying
about me, maybe."
The hospital, where I went next morning, was a collection of bungalows
between the old and the new towns. It was kept by Franciscans. I made my way
through a crowd of diseased Moors to the doctor's room. He was a layman,
clean-shaven, dressed in white, starched overalls. We spoke in French, and
he told me Sebastian was in no danger, but quite unfit to travel. He had had
the grippe, with one lung slightly affected; he was very weak; he lacked
resistance; what could one expect? He was an alcoholic. The doctor spoke
dispassionately, almost brutally, with the relish men of scidnce sometimes
have for limiting themselves to inessentials, for pruning back their work to
th<? point of sterility; but the bearded, barefooted brother in whose
charge he put me, the man of no scientific pretensions who did the dirty
jobs of the ward, had a different story.
"He's so patient. Not like a young man at all. He lies there and never
complains -- and there is much to complain of. We have no facilities. The
Government give us what they can spare from the soldiers. And he is so kind.
There is a poor German boy with a foot that will not heal and secondary
syphilis, who comes here for treatment. Lord Flyte found him starving in
Tangier
and took him in and gave him a home. A real Samaritan."
Poor simple monk, I thought, poor booby. God forgive me!
Sebastian was in the wing kept for Europeans, where the beds were
divided by low partitions into cubicles with some air of privacy. He was
lying with his hands on the quilt staring at the 1
wall, where the only ornament was a religious oleograph.
"Your friend," said the brother.
He looked round slowly.
"Oh, I thought he meant Kurt. What are you doing here, Charles?"
He was more than ever emaciated; drink, which made others fat and red,
seemed to wither Sebastian. The brother left us, and I sat by his bed and
talked about his illness.
"I was out of my mind for a day or two," he said. "I kept thinking I
was back in Oxford. You went to my house? Did you like it? Is Kurt still
there? I won't ask you if you liked Kurt; no one does. It's funny -- I
couldn't get on without him, you know."
Then I told him about his mother. He said nothing for some time, but
lay gazing at the oleograph of the Seven Dolours. Then: --
"Poor Mummy. She really was a femme fatale, wasn't she. She killed at a
touch."
I telegraphed to Julia that Sebastian was unable to travel, and stayed
a week at Fez, visiting the hospital daily until he was well' enough to
move. His first sign of returning strength, on the second day of my visit,
was to ask for brandy. By next day he had got some, somehow, and kept it
under the bedclothes.
The doctor said: "Your friend is drinking again. It is forbidden here.
What can I do? This is not a reformatory school. I cannot police the wards.
I am here to cure people, not to protect them from vicious habits, or teach
them self-control. Cognac will not hurt him now. It will make him weaker for
the next time he is ill, and then one day some little trouble will carry him
off, pouff. This is not a home for inebriates. He must go at the end of the
week."
The lay brother said: "Your friend is so much happier to-day, it is
like one transfigured."
Poor simple monk, I thought, poor booby; but he added, "You know why?
He has a bottle of cognac in bed with him. It is the second I have found. No
sooner do I take one away than he gets another. He is so naughty. It is the
Arab boys who fetch it for him. But it is good to see him happy again when
he has been so sad."
On my last afternoon I said, "Sebastian, now your mother's dead" -- for
the news had reached us that morning -- "do you think of going back to
England?"
"It would be lovely, in some ways," he said, "but do you think