Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [51]
'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 tomorrow. 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 tomorrow. Tomorrow I start work in earnest on our hostess's book—which, believe me, is a treasure-house of period gems; pure authentic I9I4.'
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 rosegardens; 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, one 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 potpourri; 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.