Brideshead Revisited(107)
‘Better today. Better today. I can see now, in the corner of the fireplace, where the mandarin is holding his gold bell and the crooked tree is in flower below his feet, where yesterday I was confused and took the little tower for another man. Soon I shall see the bridge and the three storks and know where the path leads over the hill.
‘Better tomorrow. We live long in our family and marry late. Seventy-three is no great age. Aunt Julia, my father’s aunt, lived to be eighty-eight, born and died here, never married, saw the fire on beacon hill for the battle of Trafalgar, always called it “the New House”; that was the name they had for it in the nursery and in the fields when unlettered men had long memories. You can see where the old house stood near the village church; they call the field “Castle Hill”, Horlick’s field where the ground’s uneven and half of it is waste, nettle, and brier in hollows too deep for ploughing. They dug to the foundations to carry the stone for the new house; the house that was a century old when Aunt Julia was born. Those were our roots in the waste hollows of Castle Hill, in the brier and nettle; among the tombs in the old church and the chantry where no clerk sings.
‘Aunt Julia knew the tombs, cross-legged knight and doubleted earl, marquis like a Roman senator, limestone, alabaster, and Italian marble; tapped the escutcheons with her ebony cane, made the casque ring over old Sir Roger. We were knights then, barons since Agincourt, the larger honours came with the Georges. They came the last and they’ll go the first; the barony goes on. When all of you are dead Julia’s son will be called by the name his fathers bore before the fat days; the days of wool shearing and the wide corn lands, the days of growth and building, when the marshes were drained and the waste land brought under the plough, when one built the house, his son added the dome, his son spread the wings and dammed the river. Aunt Julia watched them build the fountain; it was old before it came here, weathered two hundred years by the suns of Naples, brought by man-o’-war in the days of Nelson. Soon the fountain will be dry till the rain fills it, setting the fallen leaves afloat in the basin; and over the lakes the reeds will spread and close. Better today.
‘Better today. I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long. I was fifty when they dismounted us and sent us into the line; old men stay at the base, the orders said, but Walter Venables, my commanding officer, my nearest neighbour, said: “You’re as fit as the youngest of them, Alex.” So I was; so I am now, if I could only breathe.
‘No air; no wind stirring under the velvet canopy. When the summer comes,’ said Lord Marchmain, oblivious of the deep corn and swelling fruit and the surfeited bees who slowly sought their hives in the heavy afternoon sunlight outside his windows, ‘when the summer comes I shall leave my bed and sit in the open air and breathe more easily.
‘Who would have thought that all these little gold men, gentlemen in their own country, could live so long without breathing? Like to toads in the coal, down a deep mine, untroubled. God take it, why have they dug a hole for me? Must a man stifle to death in his own cellars? Plender, Gaston, open the windows.’
‘The windows are all wide open, my lord.’
A cylinder of oxygen was placed beside his bed, with a long tube, a face-piece, and a little stop-cock he could work himself. Often he said: ‘It’s empty — look nurse, there’s nothing comes out.’
‘No, Lord Marchmain, it’s quite full; the bubble here in the glass bulb shows that; it’s at full pressure; listen, don’t you hear it hiss? Try and breathe slowly, Lord Marchmain; quite gently, then you get the benefit.’
‘Free as air; that’s what they say — “free as air”. Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.’
Once he said: ‘Cordelia, what became of the chapel?’
‘They locked it up, papa, when mummy died.’
‘It was hers, I gave it to her. We’ve always been builders in our family. I built it for her; in the shade of the pavilion; rebuilt with the old stones behind the old walls; it was the last of the new house to come, the first to go. There used to be a chaplain until the war. Do you remember him?’
‘I was too young.’
‘Then I went away — left her in the chapel praying. It was hers. It was the place for her. I never came back to disturb her prayers. They said we were fighting for freedom; I had my own victory. Was it a crime?’
‘I think it was, papa.’
‘Crying to heaven for vengeance? Is that why they’ve locked me in this cave, do you think, with a black tube of air and the little yellow men along the walls, who live without breathing? Do you think that, child? But the wind will come soon, tomorrow perhaps, and we’ll breathe again. The ill wind that will blow me good. Better tomorrow.’
Thus, till mid-July, Lord Marchmain lay dying, wearing himself down in the struggle to-live. Then, since there was no reason to expect an immediate change, Cordelia went to London to see her women’s organization about the coming ‘emergency’. That day Lord Marchmain became suddenly worse. He lay silent and quite still, breathing laboriously; only his open eyes, which sometimes moved about the room, gave any sign of consciousness.
‘Is this the end?’ Julia asked.
‘It is impossible to say,’ the doctor answered; ‘when he does die it will probably be like this. He may recover from the present attack. The only thing is not to disturb him. The least shock will be fatal.’