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"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."
Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, like those of a foreign village seen from the slopes outside; new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year's memories.
The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of June had died with the gillyflowers, whose scent at my windows now yielded to the damp leaves, smouldering in a corner of the quad.
It was the first Sunday evening of term.
"I feel precisely one hundred years old," said Sebastian.
He had come up the night before, a day earlier than I, and this was our first meeting since we parted in the taxi.
"I've had a talking-to from Monsignor Bell this afternoon. That makes the fourth since I came up--my tutor, the junior dean, Mr. Samgrass of All Souls, and now Monsignor Bell."
"Who is Mr. Samgrass of All Souls?"
"Just someone of Mummy's. They all say that I made a very bad start last year, that I have been noticed, and that if I don't mend my ways I shall get sent down. How does one mend one's ways? I suppose one joins the League of Nations Union, and reads the Isis every week, and drinks coffee in the morning at the Cadena café, and smokes a great pipe and plays hockey and goes out to tea on Boar's Hill and to lectures at Keble, and rides a bicycle with a little tray full of note-books and drinks cocoa in the evening and discusses sex seriously. Oh, Charles, what has happened since last term? I feel so old."
"I feel middle-aged. That is infinitely worse. I believe we have had all the fun we can expect here."
We sat silent in the firelight as darkness fell.
"Anthony Blanche has gone down."
"Why?"
"He wrote to me. Apparently he's taken a flat in Munich--he has formed an attachment to a policeman there."
"I shall miss him."
"I suppose I shall, too, in a way."
We fell silent again and sat so still in the firelight that a man who came in to see me stood for a moment in the door and then went away thinking the room empty.
"This is no way to start a new year," said Sebastian; but this sombre October evening seemed to breathe its chill, moist air over the succeeding weeks. All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more in the shadows and, like a fetish, hidden first from the missionary and at length forgotten, the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the chest-of-drawers in Sebastian's bedroom.
There was a change in both of us. We had lost the sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down.
Unexpectedly, I missed my cousin Jasper, who had got his first in Greats and was now cumbrously setting about a life of public mischief in London; I needed him to shock; without that massive presence the college seemed to lack solidity; it no longer provoked and gave point to outrage as it had done in the summer. Moreover, I had come back glutted and a little chastened, with the resolve to go slow. Never again would I expose myself to my father's humour; his whimsical persecution had convinced me, as no rebuke could have done, of the folly of living beyond my means. I had had no talking-to this term; my success in History Previous and a beta minus in one of my Collections papers had put me on easy terms with my tutor--which I managed to maintain without undue effort.
I kept a tenuous connection with the History School, wrote my two essays a week and attended an occasional lecture. Besides this I started my second year by joining the Ruskin School of Art; two or three mornings a week we met, about a dozen of us--half, at least, the daughters of North Oxford--among the casts from the antique at the Ashmolean Museum; twice a week we drew from the nude in a small room over a teashop; some pains were taken by the authorities to exclude any hint of lubricity on these evenings, and the young woman who sat to us was brought from London for the day and not allowed to reside in the University city; one flank, that nearer the oil-stove, I remember, was always rosy and the other mottled and puckered as though it had been plucked. There, in the smell of the oil lamp, we sat astride the donkey stools and evoked a barely visible wraith of Trilby. My drawings were worthless; in my own rooms I designed elaborate little pastiches, some of which, preserved by friends of the period, come to light occasionally to embarrass me.
We were instructed by a man of about my age, who treated us with defensive hostility; he wore very dark blue shirts, a lemon-yellow tie and horn-rimmed glasses, and it was largely by reason of this warning that I modified my own style of dress until it approximated to what my cousin Jasper would have thought suitable for country-house visiting. Thus soberly dressed and happily employed I became a fairly respectable member of my college.
With Sebastian it was different. His year of anarchy had filled a deep, interior need of his, the escape from reality, and as he found himself increasingly hemmed in, where he once felt himself free, he became at times listless and morose, even with me.
We kept very much to our own company that term, each so much bound up in the other that we did not look elsewhere for friends. My cousin Jasper had told me that it was normal to spend one's second year shaking off the friends of one's first, and it happened as he said. Most of my friends were those I had made through Sebastian; together we shed them and made no others. There was no renunciation. At first we seemed to see them as often as ever; we went to parties but gave few of our own. I was not concerned to impress the new freshmen who, like their London sisters, were here being launched in society; there were strange faces now at every party and I, who a few months back had been voracious of new acquaintances, now felt surfeited; even our small circle of intimates, so lively in the summer sunshine, seemed dimmed and muted now in the pervading fog, the river-borne twilight that softened and obscured all that year for me. Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom he had always been a stranger, needed him now.
The Charity matinée was over, I felt; the impresario had buttoned his astrakhan coat and taken his fee and the disconsolate ladies of the company were without a leader. Without him they forgot their cues and garbled their lines; they needed him to ring the curtain up at the right moment; they needed him to direct the limelights; they needed his whisper in the wings, and his imperious eye on the leader of the band; without him there were no photographers from the weekly press, no prearranged goodwill and expectation of pleasure. No stronger bond held them together than common service; now the gold lace and velvet were packed away and returned to the costumier and the drab uniform of the day put on in its stead. For a few happy hours of rehearsal, for a few ecstatic minutes of performance, they had played splendid parts, their own great ancestors, the famous paintings they were thought to resemble; now it was over and in the bleak light of day they must go back to their homes; to the husband who came to London too often, to the lover who lost at cards, and to the child who grew too fast.
Anthony Blanche's set broke up and became a bare dozen lethargic, adolescent Englishmen. Sometimes in later life they would say: "Do you remember that extraordinary fellow we used all to know at Oxford--Anthony Blanche? I wonder what became of him." They lumbered back into the herd from which they had been so capriciously chosen and grew less and less individually recognizable. The change was not so apparent to them as to us, and they still congregated on occasions in our rooms; but we gave up seeking them. Instead we formed the taste for lower company and spent our evenings, as often as not, in Hogarthian little inns in St. Ebb's and St. Clement's and the streets between the old market and the canal, where we managed to be gay and were, I believe, well liked by the company. The Gardener's Arms and the Nag's Head, the Druid's Head near the theatre, and the Turf in Hell Passage knew us well; but in the last of these we were liable to meet other undergraduates--pub-crawling hearties from BNC--and Sebastian became possessed by a kind of phobia, like that which sometimes comes over men in uniform against their own service, so that many an evening was spoilt by their intrusion, and he would leave his glass half empty and turn sulkily back to college.
It was thus that Lady Marchmain found us when, early in that Michaelmas term, she came for a week to Oxford. She found Sebastian subdued, with all his host of friends reduced to one, myself. She accepted me as Sebastian's friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck at the roots of our friendship. That is the single reproach I have to set against her abundant kindness to me.
Her business in Oxford was with Mr. Samgrass of All Souls, who now began to play an increasingly large part in our lives. Lady Marchmain was engaged in making a memorial book for circulation among her friends, about her brother, Ned, the eldest of three legendary heroes all killed between Mons and Paschendaele; he had left a quantity of papers--poems, letters, speeches, articles; to edit them even for a restricted circle needed tact and countless decisions in which the judgment of an adoring sister was liable to err. Acknowledging this, she had sought outside advice, and Mr. Samgrass had been found to help her.
He was a young history don, a short, plump man, dapper in dress, with sparse hair brushed flat on an over-large head, neat hands, small feet and the general appearance of being too often bathed. His manner was genial and his speech idiosyncratic. We came to know him well.
It was Mr. Samgrass's particular aptitude to help others with their work, but he was himself the author of several stylish little books. He was a great delver in muniment-rooms and had a sharp nose for the picturesque. Sebastian spoke less than the truth when he described him as "someone of Mummy's"; he was someone of almost everyone's who possessed anything to attract him.
Mr. Samgrass was a genealogist and a legitimist; he loved dispossessed royalty and knew the exact validity of the rival claims of the pretenders to many thrones; he was not a man of religious habit, but he knew more than most Catholics about their Church; he had friends in the Vatican and could talk at length of policy and appointments, saying which contemporary ecclesiastics were in good favour, which in bad, what recent theological hypothesis was suspect, and how this or that Jesuit or Dominican had skated on thin ice or sailed near the wind in his Lenten discourses; he had everything except the Faith, and later liked to attend benediction in the chapel at Brideshead and see the ladies of the family with their necks arched in devotion under their black lace mantillas; he loved forgotten scandals in high life and was an expert on putative parentage; he claimed to love the past, but I always felt that he thought all the splendid company, living or dead, with whom he associated, slightly absurd; it was Mr. Samgrass who was real, the rest were an insubstantial pageant. He was the Victorian tourist, solid and patronizing, for whose amusement these foreign things were paraded. And there was something a little too brisk about his literary manners; I suspected the existence of a concealed typewriter somewhere in his panelled rooms.
He was with Lady Marchmain when I first met them, and I thought then that she could not have found a greater contrast to herself than this intellectual-on-the-make, nor a better foil to her own charm. It was not her way to make a conspicuous entry into anyone's life, but towards the end of that week Sebastian said rather sourly: "You and Mummy seem very thick"--and I realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it. By the time that she left I had promised to spend all next vacation, except Christmas itself, at Brideshead.
* * * * *
One Monday morning a week or two later I was in Sebastian's room waiting for him to return from a tutorial, when Julia walked in, followed by a large man whom she introduced as "Mr. Mottram" and addressed as "Rex." They were motoring up from a house where they had spent the week-end, they explained, and had stopped in Oxford for luncheon. Rex Mottram was warm and confident in a checked ulster; Julia cold and rather shy in furs; she made straight for the fire and crouched over it shivering.
"We hoped Sebastian might give us luncheon," she said. "Failing him we can always try Boy Mulcaster, but I somehow thought we should eat better with Sebastian, and we're very hungry. We've been literally starved all the week-end at the Chasms'."
"He and Sebastian are both lunching with me. Come too."
So, without demur, they joined the party in my rooms, one of the last of the old kind that I gave. Rex Mottram exerted himself to make an impression. He was a handsome fellow with dark hair growing low on his forehead and heavy black eyebrows. He spoke with an engaging Canadian accent. One quickly learned all that he wished one to know about him, that he was a lucky man with money, a member of Parliament, a gambler, a good fellow; that he played golf regularly with the Prince of Wales and was on easy terms with "Max" and "F.E." and "Gertie" Lawrence and Augustus John and Carpentier--with anyone, it seemed, who happened to be mentioned. Of the University he said: "No, I was never here. It just means you start life three years behind the other fellow."
His life, so far as he made it known, began in the war, where he had got a good M.C. serving with the Canadians and had ended as A.D.C. to a popular general.
He cannot have been more than thirty at the time we met him, but he seemed very old to us in Oxford. Julia treated him, as she seemed to treat all the world, with mild disdain, but with an air of possession. During luncheon she sent him to the car for her cigarettes, and once or twice when he was talking very big, she apologized for him, saying: "Remember he's a colonial," to which he replied with boisterous laughter.
When he had gone I asked who he was.
"Oh, just someone of Julia's," said Sebastian.
We were slightly surprised a week later to get a telegram from him asking us and Boy Mulcaster to dinner in London on the following night for "a party of Julia's."
"I don't think he knows anyone young," said Sebastian; "all his friends are leathery old sharks in the City and the House of Commons. Shall we go?"
We discussed it, and because our life at Oxford was now so much in the shadows, we decided that we would.
"Why does he want Boy?"
"Julia and I have known him all our lives. I suppose, finding him at lunch with you, he thought he was a chum."
We had no great liking for Mulcaster, but the three of us were in high spirits when, having got leave for the night from our colleges, we drove off on the London road in Hardcastle's car.
We were to spend the night at Marchmain House. We went there to dress and, while we dressed, drank a bottle of champagne. As we came downstairs Julia passed us going up to her room still in her day clothes.
"I'm going to be late," she said; "you boys had better go on to Rex's. It's heavenly of you to come."
"What is this party?"
"A ghastly charity ball I'm involved with. Rex insisted on giving a dinner party for it. See you there."
Rex Mottram lived within walking distance of Marchmain House.
"Julia's going to be late," we said, "she's only just gone up to dress."
"That means an hour. We'd better have some wine."
A woman who was introduced as "Mrs. Champion" said: "I'm sure she'd sooner we started, Rex."
"Well, let's have some wine first anyway."
"Why a Jeroboam, Rex?" she said peevishly. "You always want to have everything too big."
"Won't be too big for us," he said, taking the bottle in his own hands and easing the cork.
There were two girls there, contemporaries of Julia's; they all seemed involved in the management of the ball. Mulcaster knew them of old and they, without much relish I thought, knew him. Mrs. Champion talked to Rex. Sebastian and I found ourselves drinking alone together as we always did.
At length Julia arrived, unhurried, exquisite, unrepentant. "You shouldn't have let him wait," she said. "It's his Canadian courtesy."
Rex Mottram was a liberal host, and by the end of dinner the three of us who had come from Oxford were rather drunk. While we were standing in the hall waiting for the girls to come down and Rex and Mrs. Champion had drawn away from us, talking acrimoniously, in low voices, Mulcaster said, "I say, let's slip away from this ghastly dance and go to Ma Mayfield's."
"Who is Ma Mayfield?"
"You know Ma Mayfield. Everyone knows Ma Mayfield of the Old Hundredth. I've got a regular there--a sweet little thing called Effie. There'd be the devil to pay if Effie heard I'd been to London and hadn't been in to see her. Come and meet Effie at Ma Mayfield's."
"All right," said Sebastian, "let's meet Effie at Ma Mayfield's."
"We'll take another bottle of pop off the good Mottram and then leave the bloody dance and go to the Old Hundredth. How about that?"
It was not a difficult matter to leave the ball; the girls whom Rex Mottram had collected had many friends there and, after we had danced together once or twice, our table began to fill up; Rex Mottram ordered more and more wine; presently the three of us were together on the pavement.
"D'you know where this place is?"
"Of course I do. A hundred Sink Street."
"Where's that?"
"Just off Leicester Square. Better take the car."
"Why?"
"Always better to have one's own car on an occasion like this."
We did not question this reasoning, and there lay our mistake. The car was in the forecourt of Marchmain House within a hundred yards of the hotel where we had been dancing. Mulcaster drove and, after some wandering, brought us safely to Sink Street. A commissionaire at one side of a dark doorway and a middle-aged man in evening dress on the other side of it, standing with his face to the wall cooling his forehead on the bricks, indicated our destination.
"Keep out, you'll be poisoned," said the middle-aged man.
"Members?" said the commissionaire.
"The name is Mulcaster," said Mulcaster. "Viscount Mulcaster."
"Well, try inside," said the commissionaire.
"You'll be robbed and given a dose," said the middle-aged man.
Inside the dark doorway was a bright hatch.
"Members?" asked a stout woman, in evening dress.
"I like that," said Mulcaster. "You ought to know me by now."
"Yes, dearie," said the woman without interest. "Ten bob each."
"Oh, look here, I've never paid before."
"Daresay not, dearie. We're full up to-night so it's ten bob. Anyone who comes after you will have to pay a quid. You're lucky."
"Let me speak to Mrs. Mayfield."
"I'm Mrs. Mayfield. Ten bob each."
"Why, Ma, I didn't recognize you in your finery. You know me, don't you? Boy Mulcaster."
"Yes, duckie. Ten bob each."
We paid, and the man who had been standing between us and the inner door now made way for us. Inside it was hot and crowded, for the Old Hundredth was then at the height of its success. We found a table and ordered a bottle; the waiter took payment before he opened it.
"Where's Effie to-night?" asked Mulcaster.
"Effie 'oo?"
"Effie, one of the girls who's always here. The pretty dark one."
"There's lots of girls works here. Some of them's dark and some of them's fair. You might call some of them pretty. I haven't the time to know them by name."
"I'll go and look for her," said Mulcaster.
While he was away two girls stopped near our table and looked at us curiously. "Come on," said one to the other, "we're wasting our time. They're only fairies."
Presently Mulcaster returned in triumph with Effie to whom, without its being ordered, the waiter immediately brought a plate of eggs and bacon.
"First bite I've had all the evening," she said. "Only thing that's any good here is the breakfast; makes you fair peckish hanging about."
"That's another six bob," said the waiter.
When her hunger was appeased, Effie dabbed her mouth and looked at us.
"I've seen you here before, often, haven't I?" she said to me.
"I'm afraid not."
"But I've seen you?" to Mulcaster.
"Well, I should rather hope so. You haven't forgotten our little evening in September?"
"No, darling, of course not. You were the boy in the Guards who cut your toe, weren't you?"
"Now, Effie, don't be a tease."
"No, that was another night, wasn't it? I know--you were with Bunty the time the police were in and we all hid in the place they keep the dustbins."
"Effie loves pulling my leg, don't you, Effie? She's annoyed with me for staying away so long, aren't you?"
"Whatever you say, I know I have seen you before somewhere."
"Stop teasing."
"I wasn't meaning to tease. Honest. Want to dance?"
"Not at the minute."
"Thank the Lord. My shoes pinch something terrible to-night."
Soon she and Mulcaster were deep in conversation. Sebastian leaned back and said to me: "I'm going to ask that pair to join us."
The two unattached women who had considered us earlier were again circling towards us. Sebastian smiled and rose to greet them; soon they, too, were eating heartily. One had the face of a skull, the other of a sickly child. The Death's Head seemed destined for me. "How about a little party," she said, "just the six of us over at my place?"
"Certainly," said Sebastian.
"We thought you were fairies when you came in."
"That was our extreme youth."
Death's Head giggled. "You're a good sport," she said.
"You're very sweet really," said the Sickly Child. "I must just tell Mrs. Mayfield we're going out."
It was still early, not long after midnight, when we regained the street. The commissionaire tried to persuade us to take a taxi. "I'll look after your car, sir. I wouldn't drive yourself, sir, really I wouldn't."
But Sebastian took the wheel and the two women sat one on the other beside him, to show him the way. Effie and Mulcaster and I sat in the back. I think we cheered a little as we drove off.
We did not drive far. We turned into Shaftesbury Avenue and were making for Piccadilly when we narrowly escaped a head-on collision with a taxi-cab.
"For Christ's sake," said Effie, "look where you're going. D'you want to murder us all?"
"Careless fellow that," said Sebastian.
"It isn't safe the way you're driving," said Death's Head. "Besides, we ought to be on the other side of the road."
"So we should," said Sebastian, swinging abruptly across.
"Here, stop. I'd sooner walk."
"Stop? Certainly."
He put on the brakes and we came abruptly to a halt broadside across the road. Two policemen quickened their stride and approached us.
"Let me out of this," said Effie, and made her escape with a leap and a scamper.
The rest of us were caught.
"I am sorry if I am impeding the traffic, officer," said Sebastian with care, "but the lady insisted on my stopping for her to get out. She would take no denial. As you will have observed, she was pressed for time. A matter of nerves you know."
"Let me talk to him," said Death's Head. "Be a sport, handsome; no one's seen anything but you. The boys don't mean any harm. I'll get them into a taxi and see them home quiet."
The policemen looked us over, deliberately, forming their own judgment. Even then everything might have been well had not Mulcaster joined in. "Look here, my good man," he said. "There's no need for you to notice anything. We've just come from Ma Mayfield's. I reckon she pays you a nice retainer to keep your eyes shut. Well, you can keep 'em shut on us too and you won't be the losers by it."
That resolved any doubts which the policemen may have felt. In a short time we were in the cells.
I remember little of the journey there or the process of admission. Mulcaster, I think, protested vigorously and, when we were made to empty our pockets, accused his gaolers of theft. Then we were locked in, and my first clear memory is of tiled walls with a lamp set high up under thick glass, a bunk, and a door which had no handle on my side. Somewhere to the left of me Sebastian and Mulcaster were raising Cain. Sebastian had been steady on his legs and fairly composed on the way to the station; now, shut in, he seemed in a frenzy and was pounding the door, and shouting: "Damn you, I'm not drunk. Open this door. I insist on seeing the doctor. I tell you I'm not drunk," while Mulcaster, beyond, cried: "My God, you'll pay for this! You're making a great mistake, I can tell you. Telephone the Home Secretary. Send for my solicitors. I will have habeas corpus."
Groans of protest rose from the other cells where various tramps and pickpockets were trying to get some sleep: "Aw, pipe down!" "Give a man some peace, can't yer?"... "Is this a blinking lock-up or a looney-house?" And the sergeant, going his rounds, admonished them through the grille: "You'll be here all night if you don't sober up."
I sat on the bunk in low spirits and dozed a little. Presently the racket subsided and Sebastian called: "I say, Charles, are you there?"
"Here I am."
"This is the hell of a business."
"Can't we get bail or something?"
Mulcaster seemed to have fallen asleep.
"I tell you the man--Rex Mottram. He'd be in his element here."
We had some difficulty in getting into touch with him; it was half an hour before the policeman in charge answered my bell. At last he consented, rather sceptically, to send a telephone message to the hotel where the ball was being held. There was another long delay and then our prison doors were open.
Seeping through the squalid air of the police station, the sour smell of dirt and disinfectant, came the sweet, rich smoke of a Havana cigar--of two Havana cigars, for the sergeant in charge was smoking also.
Rex stood in the charge room looking the embodiment--indeed, the burlesque--of power and prosperity; he wore a fur-lined overcoat with broad astrakhan lapels and a silk hat. The police were deferential and eager to help.
"We had to do our duty," they said. "Took the young gentlemen into custody for their own protection."
Mulcaster looked crapulous and began a confused complaint that he had been denied legal representation and civil rights. Rex said: "Better leave all the talking to me."
I was clear-headed now and watched and listened with fascination while Rex settled our business. He examined the charge sheets, spoke affably to the men who had made the arrest; with the slightest perceptible nuance he opened the way for bribery and quickly covered it when he saw that things had now lasted too long and the knowledge had been too widely shared; he undertook to deliver us at the magistrate's court at ten next morning, and then led us away. His car was outside.
"It's no use discussing things to-night. Where are you sleeping?"
"Marchers," said Sebastian.
"You'd better come to me. I can fix you up for to-night. Leave everything to me."
It was plain that he rejoiced in his efficiency.
Next morning the display was even more impressive. I awoke with the startled and puzzled sense of being in a strange room, and in the first seconds of consciousness the memory of the evening before returned, first as though of a nightmare, then of reality. Rex's valet was unpacking a suitcase. On seeing me move he went to the wash-hand stand and poured something from a bottle. "I think I have everything from Marchmain House," he said. "Mr. Mottram sent round to Heppel's for this."
I took the draught and felt better.
A man was there from Trumper's to shave us.
Rex joined us at breakfast. "It's important to make a good appearance at the court," he said. "Luckily none of you look much the worse for wear."
After breakfast the barrister arrived and Rex delivered a summary of the case.
"Sebastian's in a jam," he said. "He's liable to anything up to six months' imprisonment for being drunk in charge of a car. You'll come up before Grigg unfortunately. He takes rather a grim view of cases of this sort. All that will happen this morning is that we shall ask to have Sebastian held over for a week to prepare the defence. You two will plead guilty, say you're sorry, and pay your five-bob fine. I'll see what can be done about squaring the evening papers. The Star may be difficult.
"Remember, the important thing is to keep out all mention of the Old Hundredth. Luckily the tarts were sober and aren't being charged, but their names have been taken as witnesses. If we try and break down the police evidence, they'll be called. We've got to avoid that at all costs, so we shall have to swallow the police story whole and appeal to the magistrate's good nature not to wreck a young man's career for a single boyish indiscretion. It'll work all right. We shall need a don to give evidence of good character. Julia tells me you have a tame one called Samgrass. He'll do. Meanwhile your story is simply that you came up from Oxford for a perfectly respectable dance, weren't used to wine, had too much, and lost the way driving home.
"After that we shall have to see about fixing things with your authorities at Oxford."
"I told them to call my solicitors," said Mulcaster, "and they refused. They've put themselves hopelessly in the wrong, and I don't see why they should get away with it."
"For heaven's sake don't start any kind of argument. Just plead guilty and pay up. Understand?"
Mulcaster grumbled but submitted.
Everything happened at court as Rex had predicted. At half past ten we stood in Bow Street, Mulcaster and I free men, Sebastian bound over to appear in a week's time. Mulcaster had kept silent about his grievance; he and I were admonished and fined five shillings each and fifteen shillings costs. Mulcaster was becoming rather irksome to us, and it was with relief that we heard his plea of other business in London. The barrister bustled off and Sebastian and I were left alone and disconsolate.
"I suppose Mummy's got to hear about it," he said. "Damn, damn, damn! It's cold. I won't go home. I've nowhere to go. Let's just slip back to Oxford and wait for them to bother us."
The raffish habitués of the police court came and went up and down the steps; still we stood on the windy corner, undecided.
"Why not get hold of Julia?"
"I might go abroad."
"My dear Sebastian, you'll only be given a talking-to and fined a few pounds."
"Yes, but it's all the bother--Mummy and Bridey and all the family and the dons. I'd sooner go to prison. If I just slip away abroad they can't get me back, can they? That's what people do when the police are after them. I know Mummy will make it seem she has to bear the whole brunt of the business."
"Let's telephone Julia and get her to meet us somewhere and talk it over."
We met at Gunter's in Berkeley Square. Julia, like most women then, wore a green hat pulled down to her eyes with a diamond arrow in it; she had a small dog under her arm, three-quarters buried in the fur of her coat. She greeted us with an unusual show of interest.
"Well, you are a pair of pickles; I must say you look remarkably well on it. The only time I got tight I was paralysed all the next day. I do think you might have taken me with you. The ball was positively lethal, and I've always longed to go to the Old Hundredth. No one will ever take me. Is it heaven?"
"So you know all about that, too?"
"Rex telephoned me this morning and told me everything. What were your girl friends like?"
"Don't be prurient," said Sebastian.
"Mine was like a skull."
"Mine was like a consumptive."
"Goodness." It had clearly raised us in Julia's estimation that we had been out with women; to her they were the point of interest.
"Does Mummy know?"
"Not about your skulls and consumptives. She knows you were in the clink. I told her. She was divine about it, of course. You know anything Uncle Ned did was always perfect, and he got locked up once for taking a bear into one of Lloyd George's meetings, so she really feels quite human about the whole thing. She wants you both to lunch with her."
"Oh God!"
"The only trouble is the papers and the family. Have you got an awful family, Charles?"
"Only a father. He'll never hear about it."
"Ours are awful. Poor Mummy is in for a ghastly time with them. They'll be writing letters and paying visits of sympathy, and all the time at the back of their minds one half will be saying, 'That's what comes of bringing the boy up a Catholic,' and the other half will say, 'That's what comes of sending him to Eton instead of Stonyhurst.' Poor Mummy can't get it right."
We lunched with Lady Marchmain. She accepted the whole thing with humorous resignation. Her only reproach was: "I can't think why you went off and stayed with Mr. Mottram. You might have come and told me about it first....
"How am I going to explain it to all the family?" she asked. "They will be so shocked to find that they're more upset about it than I am. Do you know my sister-in-law, Fanny Rosscommon? She has always thought I brought the children up badly. Now I am beginning to think she must be right."
When we left I said: "She couldn't have been more charming. What were you so worried about?"
"I can't explain," said Sebastian miserably.
A week later when Sebastian came up for trial he was fined ten pounds. The newspapers reported it with painful prominence, one of them under the ironic headline: "Marquis's Son Unused to Wine." The magistrate said that it was only through the prompt action of the police that he was not up on a grave charge... "It is purely by good fortune that you do not bear the responsibility of a serious accident...." Mr. Samgrass gave evidence that Sebastian bore an irreproachable character and that a brilliant future at the University was in jeopardy. The papers took hold of this too--"Model Student's Career at Stake." But for Mr. Samgrass's evidence, said the magistrate, he would have been disposed to give an exemplary sentence; the law was the same for an Oxford undergraduate as for any young hooligan, indeed the better the home the more shameful the offence....
It was not only at Bow Street that Mr. Samgrass was of value. At Oxford he showed all the zeal and acumen which were Rex Mottram's in London. He interviewed the college authorities, the proctors, the Vice-Chancellor; he induced Monsignor Bell to call on the Dean of Christ Church; he arranged for Lady Marchmain to talk to the Chancellor himself; and, as a result of all this, the three of us were gated for the rest of the term, Hardcastle, for no very clear reason, was again deprived of the use of his car, and the affair blew over. The most lasting penalty we suffered was our intimacy with Rex Mottram and Mr. Samgrass, but since Rex's life was in London in a world of politics and high finance and Mr. Samgrass's nearer to our own at Oxford, it was from him we suffered the more.
For the rest of that term he haunted us. Now that we were gated we could not spend our evenings together, and from nine o'clock onwards were alone and at Mr. Samgrass's mercy. Hardly an evening seemed to pass but he called on one or the other of us. He spoke of "our little escapade" as though he, too, had been in the cells, and had that bond with us.... Once I climbed out of college and Mr. Samgrass found me in Sebastian's rooms after the gate was shut and that, too, he made into a bond. It did not surprise me, therefore, when I arrived at Brideshead, to find Mr. Samgrass, as though in wait for me, sitting alone before the fire in the room they called the "Tapestry Hall."
"You find me in solitary possession," he said, and indeed he seemed to possess the hall and the sombre scenes of venery that hung round it, to possess the caryatids on either side of the fireplace, to possess me, as he rose to take my hand and greet me like a host: "This morning," he continued, "we had a lawn meet of the Marchmain Hounds--a deliciously archaic spectacle--and all our young friends are fox hunting, even Sebastian who, you will not be surprised to hear, looked remarkably elegant in his pink coat. Brideshead was impressive rather than elegant; he is Joint-master with a local figure of fun named Sir Walter Strickland-Venables. I wish the two of them could be included in these rather humdrum tapestries--they would give a note of fantasy.
"Our hostess remained at home; also a convalescent Dominican who has read too much Maritain and too little Hegel; Sir Adrian Porson, of course, and two rather forbidding Magyar cousins--I have tried them in German and in French, but in neither tongue are they diverting. All these have now driven off to visit a neighbour. I have been spending a cosy afternoon before the fire with the incomparable Charlus. Your arrival emboldens me to ring for some tea. How can I prepare you for the party? Alas, it breaks up to-morrow. Lady Julia departs to celebrate the New Year elsewhere, and takes the beau-monde with her. I shall miss the pretty creatures about the house--particularly one Celia; she is the sister of our old companion in adversity, Boy Mulcaster, and wonderfully unlike him. She has a bird-like style of conversation, pecking away at the subject in a way I find most engaging, and a school-monitor style of dress which I can only call 'saucy.' I shall miss her, for I do not go to-morrow. To-morrow I start work in earnest on our hostess's book--which, believe me, is a treasure house of period gems; pure authentic 1914."
Tea was brought and, soon after it, Sebastian returned; he had lost the hunt early, he said, and hacked home; the others were not long after him, having been fetched by car at the end of the day; Brideshead was absent; he had business at the kennels and Cordelia had gone with him. The rest filled the hall and were soon eating scrambled eggs and crumpets; and Mr. Samgrass, who had lunched at home and dozed all the afternoon before the fire, ate eggs and crumpets with them. Presently Lady Marchmain's party returned; and when, before we went upstairs to dress for dinner, she said, "Who's coming to chapel for the rosary?" and Sebastian and Julia said they must have their baths at once, Mr. Samgrass went with her and the friar.
"I wish Mr. Samgrass would go," said Sebastian, in his bath; "I'm sick of being grateful to him."
In the course of the next fortnight distaste for Mr. Samgrass came to be a little unspoken secret throughout the house; in his presence Sir Adrian Porson's fine old eyes seemed to search a distant horizon and his lips set in classic pessimism. Only the Hungarian cousins who, mistaking the status of tutor, took him for an unusually privileged upper servant, were unaffected by his presence.
* * * * *
Mr. Samgrass, Sir Adrian Porson, the Hungarians, the friar, Brideshead, Sebastian, Cordelia, were all who remained of the Christmas party.
Religion predominated in the house; not only in its practices--the daily mass and rosary, morning and evening in the chapel--but in all its intercourse. "We must make a Catholic of Charles," Lady Marchmain said, and we had many little talks together during my visits when she delicately steered the subject into a holy quarter. After the first of these Sebastian said: "Has Mummy been having one of her 'little talks' with you? She's always doing it. I wish to hell she wouldn't."
One was never summoned for a little talk, or consciously led to it; it merely happened, when she wished to speak intimately, that one found oneself alone with her, if it was summer in a secluded walk by the lakes or in a corner of the walled rose gardens; if it was winter in her sitting-room on the first floor.
This room was all her own; she had taken it for herself and changed it so that, entering, one seemed to be in another house. She had lowered the ceiling, and the elaborate cornice which, in one form or another, graced every room, was lost to view; the walls, once panelled in brocade, were stripped and washed blue and spotted with innumerable little water-colours of fond association; the air was sweet with the fresh scent of flowers and musty pot-pourri; her library in soft leather covers, well-read works of poetry and piety, filled a small rosewood bookcase; the chimney-piece was covered with small personal treasures--an ivory Madonna, a plaster St. Joseph, posthumous miniatures of her three soldier brothers. When Sebastian and I lived alone at Brideshead during that brilliant August we had kept out of his mother's room.
Scraps of conversation come back to me with the memory of her room. I remember her saying: "When I was a girl we were comparatively poor, but still much richer than most of the world, and when I married I became very rich. It used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favourites of God and His saints, but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included. Wealth in pagan Rome was necessarily something cruel; it's not any more."
I said something about a camel and the eye of a needle and she rose happily to the point.
"But of course" she said, "it's very unexpected for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things. It's not to be expected that an ox and an ass should worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in the lives of the saints. It's all part of the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side, of religion."
But I was as untouched by her faith as I was by her charm; or, rather, I was