‘Look at that,’ said the commanding officer. ‘Fine impression that gives to the regiment taking over from us.
‘That’s bad,’ I said.
‘It’s a disgrace. See everything there is burned before you leave camp.’
‘Very good, sir. Sergeant-major, send over to the carrier-platoon and tell Captain Brown that the C.O. wants this ditch cleared up.’
I wondered whether the colonel would take this rebuff; so did he. He stood a moment irresolutely prodding the muck in the ditch, then he turned on his heel and strode away.
‘You shouldn’t do it, sir,’ said the sergeant-major, who had been my guide and prop since I joined the company. ‘You shouldn’t really.’
‘That wasn’t our rubbish.’
‘Maybe not, sir, but you know how it is. If you get on the wrong side of senior officers they take it out of you other ways.’
As we marched past the madhouse, two or three elderly inmates gibbered and mouthed politely behind the railings.
‘Cheeroh, chum, we’ll be seeing you’; ‘We shan’t be long now’; ‘Keep smiling till we meet again’, the men called to them.
I was marching with Hooper at, the head of the leading platoon.
‘I say, any idea where we’re off to?’
‘None.’
‘Do you think it’s the real thing?’
‘No.’
‘Just a flap?’
‘Yes.’
‘Everyone’s been saying we’re for it. I don’t know what to think really. Seems so silly somehow, all this drill and training if we never go into action.’
‘I shouldn’t worry. There’ll be plenty for everyone in time.’
‘Oh, I don’t want much you know. Just enough to say I’ve been in it.’
A train of antiquated coaches was waiting for us at the siding; an R.T.O. was in charge; a fatigue party was loading the last of. the kit-bags from the trucks to the luggage vans. In half an hour we were ready to start and in an hour we started.
My three platoon commanders and myself had a carriage to ourselves. They ate sandwiches and chocolate, smoked and slept. None of them had a book. For the first three or four hours they noted the names of the towns and leaned out of the windows when, as often happened, we stopped between stations. Later they lost interest. At midday and again at dark some tepid cocoa was ladled from a container into our mugs. The train moved slowly south through flat, drab main-line scenery.
The chief incident in the day was the — C.O.’s ‘order group’. We assembled in his carriage, at the summons of an orderly, and found him and the adjutant wearing their steel helmets and equipment. The first thing he said was: ‘This is an Order Group. I expect you to attend properly dressed. The fact that we happen to be in a train is immaterial.’ I thought he was going to send us back but, after glaring at us, he said, ‘Sit down.’
‘The camp was left in a disgraceful condition’. Wherever I went I found evidence that officers are not doing their duty. The state in which a camp is left is the best possible test of the efficiency of regimental officers. It is on such matters that the reputation of a battalion and its commander rests. ‘And’ — did he in fact say this or am I finding words for the resentment in his voice and eye? I think he left it unsaid — ‘I do not intend to have my professional reputation compromised by the slackness of a few temporary officers.’
We sat with our note-books and pencils waiting to take down the details of our next jobs. A more sensitive man would have seen that he had failed to be impressive; perhaps he saw, for he added in a petulant schoolmasterish way: ‘All I ask is loyal cooperation.’
Then he referred to his notes and read:
‘Orders.
‘Information. The battalion is now in transit between location A and location B. This is a major L of C and is liable to bombing and gas attack from the enemy.
‘Intention. I intend to arrive at location B.
‘Method. Train will arrive at destination at approximately 2315 hours …’ and so on.
The sting came at the end under the heading, ‘Administration’. ‘C’ Company, less one platoon, was to unload the train on arrival at the siding where three three-tonners would be available for moving all stores to a battalion dump in the new camp; work to continue until completed; the remaining platoon was to find a guard on the dump and perimeter sentries for the camp area.
‘Any questions?’
‘Can we have an issue of cocoa for the working party?’
‘No. Any more questions?’
When I told the sergeant-major of these orders he said: ‘Poor old “C” Company struck unlucky again’; and I knew this to be a reproach for my having antagonized the commanding officer.
I told the platoon commanders.
‘I say,’ said Hooper, ‘it makes it awfully awkward with the chaps. They’ll be fairly browned off. He always seems to pick on us for the dirty work.’
‘You’ll do guard.’
‘Okey-doke. But I say, how am I to find the perimeter in the dark?’
Shortly after blackout we were disturbed by an orderly making his way lugubriously down the length of the train with a rattle. One of the more sophisticated sergeants called out ‘Deuxieme service.’
‘We are being sprayed with liquid mustard-gas,’ I said. ‘See that the windows are shut.’ I then wrote a neat little situation report to say that there were no casualties and nothing had been contaminated; that men had been detailed to decontaminate the outside of the coach before detraining. This seemed to satisfy the commanding officer, for we heard no more from him. After dark we all slept.
At last, very late, we came to our siding. It was part of our training in security and active service conditions that we should eschew stations and platforms. The drop from the running board to the cinder track made for disorder and breakages in the darkness.
‘Fall in on the road below the embankment. “C” Company seems to be taking their time as usual, Captain Ryder.’
‘Yes, sir. We’re having a little, difficulty. with the bleach.’
‘Bleach?’
‘For decontaminating the outside of the coaches, sir.’
‘Oh very conscientious, I’m sure. Skip it and get a move on.’
By now my half-awake and sulky men were clattering into shape on the road. Soon Hooper’s platoon had marched off into the darkness; I found the lorries organized lines of men to ass the stores from hand to hand down the steep bank, and, presently, as they found themselves doing something with an apparent purpose in it, they got more cheerful. I handled stores with them for the first half hour; then broke off to meet the company second-in-command who came down with the first returning truck.
‘It’s not a bad camp,’ he reported; ‘big private house with two or three lakes. Looks as if we might get some duck if we’re lucky. Village with one pub and a post office. No town within miles. I’ve managed to get a hut between the two of us.’
By four in the morning the work was done. I drove in the last lorry, through tortuous lanes where the overhanging boughs whipped the windscreen; somewhere we left the lane and turned into a drive; somewhere we reached an open space where two drives converged and a ring of storm lanterns marked the heap of stores. Here we unloaded the truck and, at long last, followed the guides to our quarters, under a starless sky, with a fine drizzle of rain beginning now to fall.
I slept until my servant called me, rose wearily, dressed and shaved in silence. It was not till I reached the door that I asked the second-in-command, ‘What’s this place called?’
He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient powe
r, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.
Outside the hut I stood bemused. The rain had ceased but the clouds hung low and heavy overhead. It was a still morning and the smoke from the cookhouse rose straight to the leaden sky. A cart-track, once metalled, then overgrown, now rutted and churned to mud, followed the contour of the hillside and dipped out of sight below, a knoll, and on either side of it lay the haphazard litter of corrugated iron, from which rose the rattle and chatter and whistling and catcalls, all the zoo-noises of the battalion beginning a new day. Beyond and about us, more familiar still, lay an exquisite man-made landscape. It was a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced in a single, winding valley. Our camp lay along one gentle slope; opposite us the ground led, still unravished, to the neighbourly horizon, and between us flowed a stream — it was named the Bride and rose not two miles away at a farm called Bridesprings, where we used sometimes to walk to tea; it became a considerable river lower down before it joined the Avon — which had been dammed here to form three lakes, one no more than a wet slate among the reeds, but the others more spacious, reflecting the clouds and the mighty beeches at their margin. The woods were all of oak and beech, the oak grey and bare, the beech faintly dusted with green by the breaking buds; they made a simple, carefully designed pattern with the green glades and the wide green spaces — Did the fallow deer graze here still? — and, lest the eye wander aimlessly, a Doric temple stood by the water’s edge, and an ivy-grown arch spanned the lowest of the connecting weirs. All this had been planned and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might be seen in its maturity, From where I stood the house was hidden by a green spur, but I knew well how and where it lay, couched among the lime trees like a hind in the bracken.
Hooper, came sidling up and greeted me with his much imitated but inimitable salute. His face was grey from his night’s vigil and he had not yet shaved.
‘“B” Company relieved us. I’ve sent the chaps off to get cleaned up.’
‘Good.’
‘The house is up there, round the corner.’
“Yes.’ I said.
‘Brigade Headquarters are coming there next week. Great barrack of a place. I’ve just had a snoop round. Very ornate, I’d call it. And a queer thing, there’s a sort of R.C. Church attached. I looked in and there was a kind of service going on — just a padre and one old man. I felt very awkward. More in your line than mine.’ Perhaps I seemed not to hear; in a final effort to excite my interest he said: ‘There’s a frightful great fountain, too, in front of the steps, all rocks and sort of carved animals. You never saw such a thing.’
‘Yes, Hooper, I did. I’ve been here before.’
The words seemed to ring back to me enriched from the vaults of my dungeon.
‘Oh well, you know all about it. I’ll go and get cleaned up.’
‘I had been there before; I knew all about it.
BOOK ONE
Et in Acardia Ego
CHAPTER 1
I meet Sebastian Flyte — and Anthony Blanche — I visit Brideshead for the first Time
‘I HAVE been here before,’ I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
That day, too, I had come not knowing my destination. It was Eights Week. Oxford — submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding in — Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days — such as that day — when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour. Here, discordantly, in Eights Week, came a rabble of womankind, some hundreds strong, twittering and fluttering over the cobbles and up the steps, sightseeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup, eating cucumber sandwiches; pushed in punts about the river, herded in droves to the college barges; greeted in the Isis and in the Union by a sudden display of peculiar, facetious, wholly distressing Gilbert-and-Sullivan badinage, and by peculiar choral effects in the College chapels. Echoes of the intruders penetrated every corner, and in my own College was no echo, but an original fount of the grossest disturbance. We were giving a ball. The front quad, where I lived, was floored and tented; palms and azaleas were banked round the porter’s lodge; worst of all, the don who lived above me, a mouse of a man connected with the Natural Sciences, had lent his rooms for a Ladies’ Cloakroom, and a printed notice proclaiming this outrage hung not six inches from my oak.
No one felt more strongly about it than my scout.
‘Gentlemen who haven’t got ladies are asked as far as possible to take their meals out in the next few days,’ he announced despondently. ‘Will you be lunching in?’
‘No, Lunt.’
‘So as to give the servants a chance, they say. What a chance! I’ve got to buy a pin-cushion for the Ladies’ Cloakroom. What do they want with dancing? I don’t see the reason in it. There never was dancing before in Eights Week. Commem. now is another matter being in the vacation, but not in Eights Week, as if teas and the river wasn’t enough. If you ask me, sir, it’s all on account of the war. It couldn’t have happened but for that.’ For this was 1923 and for Lunt, as for thousands of others, things could never be the same as they had been in 1914. ‘Now wine in the evening, he continued, as was his habit half in and half out of the door, ‘or one or two gentlemen to luncheon, there’s reason in. But not dancing. It all came in with the men back from the war. They were too old and they didn’t know and they wouldn’t learn. That’s the truth. And there’s some even goes dancing with the town at the Masonic — but the proctors will get them, you see … Well, here’s Lord Sebastian. I mustn’t stand here talking when there’s pincushions to get.’
Sebastian entered — dove-grey flannel, white crêpe de Chine, a Charvet tie, my tie as it happened, a pattern of postage stamps ‘Charles — what in the world’s happening at your college? Is there a circus? I’ve seen everything except elephants. I must say the whole of Oxford has become most peculiar suddenly. Last night it was pullulating with women. You’re to come away at once, out of danger. I’ve got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Chateau Peyraguey — which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend. It’s heaven with strawberries.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To see a friend.’
‘Who?’
‘Name of Hawkins. Bring some money in case we see anything we want to buy. The motor-car is the property of a man called Hardcastle. Return the bits to him if I kill myself; I’m not very good at driving.
Beyond the gate, beyond the winter garden that was once the lodge, stood an open two-seater Morris-Cowley. Sebastian’s teddy bear sat at the wheel. We put him, between us — ‘Take care he’s not sick’ and drove off. The bells of St Mary’s were chiming nine; we escaped collision with a clergyman, blackstraw-hatted, white-bearded) pedalling quietly down the wrong side of the High Street, crossed Carfax, passed the station, and were soon in open country on the Botley Road; open country was easily reached in those days.
(‘Isn’t it early?’ said Sebastian. ‘The women are still doing whatever women do to themselves before they come downstairs. Sloth has undone them. We’re away. God bless Hardcastle.’
‘Whoever he may be.’
‘He thought he was coming with us. Sloth, undid him too. Well, I did tell him ten. He’s a very gloomy man in my college. He leads a double life. At least I assum
e he does. He couldn’t go on being Hardcastle, day and night, always, could he? — or he’d die of it. He says he knows my father, which is impossible.’
‘Why?’
‘No one knows papa. He’s a social leper. Hadn’t you heard?’
‘It’s a pity neither of us can sing,’ I said.
At Swindon we turned off the main road and, as the sun mounted high, we were among dry-stone walls and ashlar houses. It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine — as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together — and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage’, and the sweet scent of the tobacco, merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.
‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ said Sebastian. ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.’
This was my third term since matriculation, but I date my Oxford life from my first meeting with Sebastian, which had happened, by chance, in the middle of the term before. We were in different colleges and came from different schools; I might well have spent my three or four years in the University and never have met him, but for the chance of his getting drunk one evening in my college and of my having ground-floor rooms in .the front quadrangle.
I had been warned against the dangers of these rooms by my cousin Jasper, who alone, when I first came up, thought me a suitable subject for detailed guidance. My father offered me none. Then, as always, he eschewed serious conversation with me. It was not until I was within a fortnight of going up that he mentioned the subject at all; then he said, shyly and rather slyly: ‘I’ve been talking about you. I met your future Warden at the Athenaeum. I wanted to talk about Etruscan notions of immortality; he wanted to talk about extension lectures for the working-class; so we compromised and talked about you. I asked him what your allowance should be. He said, “Three hundred a year; on no account give him more; that’s all most men have.” I thought that a deplorable answer. I had more than most men when I was up, and my recollection is that nowhere else in the world and at no other time, do a few hundred pounds, one way or the other, make so much difference to one’s importance, and popularity. I toyed with the idea of giving you six hundred,’ said my father, snuffling a little, as he did when he was amused, ‘but I reflected that, should the Warden come to hear of it, it might sound deliberately impolite. So I shall e you five hundred and fifty.’