Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [45]
Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year's memories.
The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of June had died with the gillyflowers whose scent at my windows now yielded to the damp leaves, smouldering in a corner of the quad.
It was the first Sunday evening of term.
'I feel precisely one hundred years old,' said Sebastian.
He had come up the night before, a day earlier than I, and this was our first meeting since we parted in the taxi.
'I've had a talking to from Mgr Bell this afternoon. That makes the fourth since I came up—my tutor, the junior dean, Mr Samgrass of All Souls, and now Mgr Bell.'
'Who is Mr Samgrass of All Souls?'
'Just someone of mummy's. They all say that I made a very bad start last year, that I have been noticed, and that if I don't mend my ways I shall get sent down. How does one mend one's ways? I suppose one joins the League of Nations Union, and reads the Isis every week, and drinks coffee in the morning at the Cadena café, and smokes a great pipe and plays hockey and goes out to tea on Boar's Hill and to lectures at Keble, and rides a bicycle with a little tray full of notebooks and drinks cocoa in the evening and discusses sex seriously. Oh, Charles, what has happened since last term? I feel so old.'
'I feel middle-aged. That is infinitely worse. I believe we have had all the fun we can expect here.'
We sat silent in the firelight as darkness fell.
'Anthony Blanche has gone down.'
'Why?'
'He wrote to me. Apparently he's taken a flat in Munich—he has formed an attachment to a policeman there.'
'I shall miss him.'
'I suppose I shall, too, in a way.'
We fell silent again and sat so still in the firelight that a man who came in to see me, stood for a moment in the door and then went away thinking the room empty.
'This is no way to start a new year,' said Sebastian; but this sombre October evening seemed to breathe its chill, moist air over the succeeding-weeks. All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more in the shadows and, like a fetish, hidden first from the missionary and at length forgotten, the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the chest-of-drawers in Sebastian's bedroom.
There was a change in both of us. We had lost the sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down.
Unexpectedly, I missed my cousin Jasper, who had got his first in Greats and was now cumbrously setting about a life of public mischief in London; I needed him to shock; without that massive presence the college seemed to lack solidity; it no longer provoked and gave point to outrage as it had done in the summer. Moreover, I had come back glutted and a little chastened; with the resolve to go slow. Never again would I expose myself to my father's humour; his whimsical persecution had convinced me, as no rebuke could have done, of the folly of living beyond my means. I had had no talking-to this term; my success in History Previous and a beta minus in one of my Collections papers had put me on easy terms with my tutor which I managed to maintain without undue effort.
I kept a tenuous connection with the History School, wrote my two essays a week, and attended an occasional lecture. Besides this I started my second year by joining the Ruskin School of Art; two or three mornings a week we melt, about a dozen of us—half, at least, the daughters of north Oxford among the casts from the antique at the Ashmolean Museum; twice a week we drew from the nude in a small room over a teashop; some pains were taken by the authorities to exclude any hint of lubricity