ing 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