Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [83]
3
I RETURNED to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike.
It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil war. Every evening the kiosks displayed texts of doom, and, in the cafés, acquaintances greeted one half-derisively with: 'Ha, my friend, you are better off here than at home, are you not?' until I and several friends in circumstances like my own came seriously to believe that our country was in danger and that our duty lay there. We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes.
We crossed together, in a high-spirited, male party, expecting to find unfolding before us at Dover the history so often repeated of late, with so few variations, from all parts of Europe, that I, at any rate, had formed in my mind a clear, composite picture of 'Revolution'—the red flag on the post office, the overturned tram, the drunken N.C.O.s, the gaol open and gangs of released criminals prowling the streets, the train from the capital that did not arrive. One had read it in the papers, seen it in the films, heard it at café tables again and again for six or seven years now, till it had become part of one's experience, at second hand, like the mud of Flanders and the flies of Mesopotamia.
Then we landed and met the old routine of the customs-shed, the punctual boat-train, the porters lining the platform at Victoria and converging on the first-class carriages; the long line of waiting taxis.
'We'll separate,' we said, and see what's happening. We'll meet and compare notes at dinner,' but we knew already in our hearts that nothing was happening; nothing, at any rate, which needed our presence.
'Oh dear, ' said my father, meeting me by chance on the stairs, 'how delightful to see you again so soon.' (I had been abroad fifteen months.) 'You've come at a very awkward time, you know. They're having another of those strikes in two days—such a lot of nonsense—and I don't know when you'll be able to get away.'
I thought of the evening I was forgoing, with the lights coming out along the banks of the Seine, and the company I should have had there—for I was at the time concerned with two emancipated American girls who shared a garçonnière in Auteuil—and wished I had not come.
We dined that night at the Café Royal. There things were a little more warlike, for the Café was full of undergraduates who had come down for 'National Service'. One group, from Cambridge, had that afternoon signed on to run messages for Trans-port House, and their table backed on another group's, who were enrolled as special constables. Now and then one or other party would shout provocatively over the shoulder, but it is hard to come into serious conflict back to back, and the affair ended with their giving each other tall glasses of lager beer.
'You should have been in Budapest when Horthy marched in' said Jean. 'That was politics.'
A party was being given that night in Regent's Park for the 'Black Birds' who had newly arrived in England. One of us had been asked and thither we all went.
To us, who frequented Bricktop's and the Bal Nègre in the Rue Blomet, there was nothing particularly remarkable in the spectacle; I was scarcely inside the door when I heard an unmistakable voice, an echo from what now seemed a distant past.
'No,' it said, 'they are not animals in a zoo, Mulcaster, to be goggled at. They are artists, my dear, very great artists, to be revered.'
Anthony Blanche and Boy Mulcaster were at the table where the wine stood.
'Thank God here's someone I know,' said Mulcaster, as I joined them. 'Girl brought me. Can't see her anywhere.'
'She's given you the slip, my dear, and do you know why? Because you look ridiculously out of place, Mulcaster. It isn't your kind of party at all; you ought not to be here; you ought to go away, you know, to the Old Hundredth or some lugubrious dance in Belgrave Square.'