Thus, in broad outline, Jasper sketched the more prominent features of my first year; some detail may be added on the same scale.
I had committed myself earlier to spend the Easter vacation with Collins and, though I would have broken my word without compunction and left my former friend friendless, had Sebastian made a sign, no sign was made; accordingly Collins and I spent several economical and instructive weeks together in Ravenna. A bleak wind blew from the Adriatic among those mighty tombs. In an hotel bedroom designed for a warmer season, I wrote long letters to Sebastian and called daily at the post: office for his answers. There were two, each from a different address, neither giving any plain news of himself, for he wrote in a style of remote fantasy - ...'Mummy and two attendant poets have three bad colds in the head, so I have come here. It is the feast of S. Nichodemus of Thyatira, who was martyred by having goatskin nailed to his pate, and is accordingly the patron of bald heads. Tell Collins, who I am sure will be bald before us. There are too many people here, but one, praise heaven! Has an ear trumpet, and that keeps me in good humour. And now I must try to catch a fish. It is too far to send it to you so I will keep the backbone...' - which left me fretful. Collins made notes for a little thesis pointing out the inferiority of the original mosaics to their photographs. Here was planted the seed of what became his life's harvest. When, many years later, there appeared the first massive volume of his still unfinished work on Byzantine Art, I was touched to find among two pages of polite, preliminary acknowledgements of debt, my own name: '...to Charles Ryder, with the aid of whose all-seeing yes I first saw the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and San Vitale...'
I sometimes wonder whether, had it not been for Sebastian, I might have trodden the same path as Collins round the cultural water-wheel. My father in his youth sat for All Souls and, in a year of hot competition, failed; other successes and honours came his way later, but that early failure impressed itself on him, and through him on me, so that I came up with an ill-considered sense that there lay the proper and natural goal of the life of reason. I, too, should doubtless have failed, but, having failed, I might perhaps have slipped into a less august academic life elsewhere. It is conceivable, but not, I believe, likely, for the hot spring of anarchy rose from the depths where was no solid earth, and burst into the sunlight - a rainbow in its cooling vapours - with a power the rocks could not repress.
In the event, that Easter vacation formed a short stretch of level road in the precipitous descent of which Jasper warned me. Descent or ascent? It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood, straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added, a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence. At the end of the term I took my first schools; it was necessary to pass, if I was to remain at Oxford and pass I did, after a week in which I forbade Sebastian my rooms and sat up to a late hour, with iced black, coffee and charcoal biscuits, cramming myself with the neglected texts. I remember no syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient lore which I acquired that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour.
'I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon'; that was enough then. Is more needed now?
Looking back, now, after twenty years, there is little I would have left undone or done otherwise. I could match my cousin Jasper's game-cock maturity with a sturdier fowl. I could tell him that all the wickedness of that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro, heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the wine, renders it undrinkable, so, that it must lie in the dark year in, year out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table.
I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other, human being is the root of all wisdom. But I felt no need for these sophistries as I sat before my cousin, saw him, freed from his inconclusive struggle with Pindar, in his dark grey suit, his white tie, his scholar's gown; heard his grave tones and, all the time, savoured the gillyflowers in full bloom under my windows. I had my secret and sure defence, like a talisman worn in the bosom, felt for in the moment of danger, found and firmly grasped. So I told him what was not in fact the truth, that I usually had a glass of champagne about that time, and asked him to join me.
On the day after Jasper's Grand Remonstrance I received another, in different terms and from an unexpected source.
All the term I had been seeing rather more of Anthony Blanche than my liking for him warranted. I lived now among his friends, but our frequent meetings were more of his choosing than mine, for I held him in considerable awe.
In years, he was barely my senior, but he seemed then to be burdened with the experience of the Wandering Jew. He was indeed a nomad of no nationality.
An attempt had been made in his childhood to make an Englishman of him; he was two years at Eton; then in the middle of the war he had defied the submarines, rejoined his mother in the Argentine, and a clever and audacious schoolboy was added to the valet, the maid, the two chauffeurs, the pekinese, and the second husband. Criss-cross about the world he travelled with them, waxing in wickedness like a Hogarthian page boy. When peace came they returned to Europe, to hotels and furnished villas spas, casinos, and bathing beaches. At this age of fifteen, for a wager; he was disguised as a girl and taken to play at the big table in the Jockey Club at Buenos Aires; he dined with Proust and Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diaghilev; Firbank sent him novels with fervent inscriptions; he had aroused three irreconcilable feuds in Capri; by his own account he had practised black art in Cefal?and had been cured of drug-taking in California and of an Oedipus complex in Vienna.
At times we all seemed like children beside him - at most times, but not always, for there was a bluster and zest in Anthony which the rest of us had shed somewhere in our more leisured adolescence, on the playing field or in the school-room; his vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than in the wish to shock, and in the midst of his polished exhibitions I was often reminded of an urchin I had once seen in Naples, capering derisively with obscene, unambiguous gestures, before a party of English tourists; as he told the tale of his evening at the gaming table, one could see in the roll of his eye just how he had glanced, covertly, over the dwindling pile of chips at his stepfather's party; while we had been rolling one another in the mud at football and gorging ourselves with crumpets, Anthony had helped oil fading beauties on sub-tropical sands and had sipped his ap閞itif in smart little bars, so that the savage we had tamed was still rampant in him. He was cruel, too, in the wanton, insect-maiming manner of the very young, and fearless like a little boy, charging, head down, small fists whirling, at the school prefects.
He asked me to dinner, and I was a little disconcerted to find that we were to dine alone. 'We are going to Thame,' he said. 'There is a delightful hotel there, which luckily doesn't appeal to the Bullingdon. We will, drink Rhine wine and imagine ourselves...where? Not on a j-j-jaunt with J-J-Jorrocks anyway. But first we will have our ap閞itif.'
At the George bar he ordered 'Four Alexandra cocktails, please,' ranged them before him with a loud 'Yum-yum' which drew every eye, outraged, upon him. 'I expect you would prefer sherry, but, my dear Charles, you are not going to have sherry. Isn't this a delicious concoction? You don't like it? Then I will drink it for you. One, two, three, four, down the red lane they go. How the students stare!' And he led me out to the waiting motorcar.
'I hope we shall find no undergraduates there. I am a little out of sympathy with them for the moment. You heard about their treatment of me on Thursday? It was too naughty. Luckily I was wearing my oldest pyjamas and it was an evening of oppressive heat, or I might have been seriously cross.' Anthony had a habit of putting his face near one when he spoke; the sweet and creamy cocktail had tainted his breath. I leaned away from him in the comer of the hired car.
'Picture me, my dear, alone and studious. I had just bought a rather forbidding book called Antic Hay, Which I knew I must read before going to Garsington on Sunday, because everyone was bound to talk about it, and it's so banal saying you have not read the book of the moment, if you haven't. The solution I suppose is not to go to Garsington, but that didn't occur to me until this moment. So, my dear, I had an omelet and a peach and a bottle of Vichy water and put on my pyjamas and settled down to read. I must say my thoughts wandered, but I kept turning the pages and watching the light fade, which in Peckwater, my dear, is quite an experience - as darkness falls the stone seems positively to decay under one's eyes. I was reminded of some of those leprous fa鏰de's in the vieux port at Marseille, until suddenly I was disturbed by such a bawling and cater-wauling as you never heard, and there, down in the little piazza, I saw a mob of about twenty terrible young men, and do know what they were chanting? "We want Blanche. We want Blanche," in a kind of litany. Such a public declaration! Well, I saw it was all up with Mr Huxley for the evening, and, I must say I had reached a point of tedium when any interruption was welcome. I was stirred by the bellows, but, do you know, the louder they shouted, the shyer they seemed? They kept saying "Where's Boy?" "He's Boy Mulcaster's friend," "Boy must bring him down." Of course you've met Boy? He's always popping in and out of dear Sebastian's rooms. He's everything we dagos expect of an English lord. A great parti I can assure you. All the young ladies in London are after him. He's very hoity-toity with them I'm told. My dear, he's scared stiff. A great oaf - that's Mulcaster - and what's more, my dear, a cad. He came to le Touquet at Easter and, in some extraordinary way, I seemed to have asked him to stay. He lost some infinitesimal sum at cards, and as a result expected me to pay for all his treats - well, Mulcaster was in this party; I could see his ungainly form shuffling about below and hear him saying: "It's no good. He's out. Let's go back and have a drink?" So then I put my head out of the window and called to him; "Good evening, Mulcaster, old sponge and toady, are you lurking among the hobbledehoys? Have you come to repay me the three hundred francs I lent you for the poor drab you picked up in the Casino? It was a niggardly sum for her trouble, and what a trouble, Mulcaster. Come up and pay me, poor hooligan!"
'That, my dear, seemed to put a little life into them, and up the stairs they came, clattering. About six of them came into my room, the rest stood mouthing outside. My dear, they looked too extraordinary. They had been having one of their ridiculous club dinners, and they were all wearing coloured tail-coats - a sort of livery. "My dears," I said to them, "you look like a lot of most disorderly- footmen." Then one of them, rather a juicy little piece, accused me of unnatural vices. "My dear," I said, "I may be inverted but I am not insatiable. Come back when you are alone." Then they began to blaspheme in a very shocking manner, and suddenly I, too, began to be annoyed. "Really," I thought, "when I think of all the hullabaloo there was when I was seventeen, and the Duc de Vincennes (old Armand, of course, not Philippe) challenged me to a duel for an affair of the heart, and very much more than the heart, I assure you, with the duchess (Stefanie, of course, not old Poppy) - now, to submit to impertinence from these pimply, tipsy virgins..." Well, I gave up the light, bantering tone and let myself be just a little offensive.
'Then they began saying, "Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury." Now as you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, "Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be art ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified libido and see me bathe, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain."
'Do you know, they all looked a little foolish at that? I walked down with them and no one came within a yard of me. Then I got into the fountain and, you know, it was really most refreshing, so I sported there a little and struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home, and I heard Boy Mulcaster saying, "Anyway, we did put him in Mercury." You know, Charles, that is just what they'll be saying in thirty years time. When they're all married to scraggy little women like hens and have cretinous porcine sons like themselves getting drunk at the same club dinner in the same coloured coats, they'll still say, when my name is mentioned, "We put him in Mercury one night," and their barnyard daughters will snigger and think their father was quite a dog in his day, and what a pity he's grown so dull.' Oh, la fatigue du Nord!'
It was not, I knew, the first time Anthony had been ducked, but the incident seemed much on his mind, for he reverted to it again at dinner.
'Now you can't imagine an unpleasantness like that happening to Sebastian, can you?'
'No.' I said; I could not.
'No, Sebastian has charm'; he held up his glass of hock to the candle-light and repeated, 'such charm. Do you know, I went round to call on Sebastian next day? I thought the tale of my evening's adventures might amuse him. And what do you think I found - besides, of course, his amusing toy bear? Mulcaster and two of his cronies of the night before. They looked very foolish and Sebastian, as composed as Mrs P-p-ponsonby-de-Tomkyns in P-p-punch, said, "You know Lord Mulcaster, of course," and the oafs said, "Oh, we just came to see how Aloysius was," for they find the toy bear just as amusing as we do - or, shall I hint, just a teeny bit more? So off they went. And I said "S-s-sebastian, do you realize that those s-sycophantic s-slugs insulted me last night, and but for the warmth of the weather might have given me a s-s-severe cold," and he said "Poor things. I expect they were drunk." He has a kind -word for everyone, you see; he has such charm.
