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 gar?onnière 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.’

‘Just come from one, ‘ said Mulcaster. ‘Too early for the Old Hundredth. I’ll stay on a bit. Things may cheer up.’

‘I spit on you,’ said Anthony. ‘Let me talk to you, Charles.’ We took a bottle and our glasses and found a comer in another room. At our feet five members of the ‘Black Birds’ orchestra squatted on their heels and threw dice.  ‘That one, ‘ said Anthony, ‘the rather pale one, my dear, conked Mrs Arnold Frickheimer the other morning on the nut, my dear, with a bottle of milk.’ Almost immediately, inevitably, we began to talk of Sebastian.  ‘My dear, he’s such a sot. He came to live with me in Marseille last year when you threw him over, and really it was as much as I could stand. Sip, sip, sip like a dowager all day long. And so sly. I was always missing little things, my dear, things I rather liked; once I lost two suits that had arrived from Lesley and Roberts that morning. Of course, I didn’t know it was Sebastian - there were some rather queer fish, my dear, in and out of my little apartment. Who knows better than you my taste for queer fish?  Well, eventually, my dear, we found the pawnshop where Sebastian was p-p-popping them and then he hadn’t got the tickets; there was a market for them, too, at the bistro.

‘I can see that puritanical, disapproving look in your eye, dear Charles, as though you thought I had led the boy on. It’s one of Sebastian’s less lovable qualities that he always gives the impression of being l-1-led on - like a little horse at a circus. But I assure you I did everything. I said to him again and again, “Why drink? If you want to be intoxicated there are so many much more delicious things.” I took him to quite the best man; well, you know him as well as I do, Nada Alopov and Jean Luxmore and everyone we know has been to him for years - he’s always in the Regina Bar - and then we had trouble over that because Sebastian gave him a bad cheque - a s-s-stumer, my dear - and a whole lot of very menacing men came round to the flat thugs, my dear - and Sebastian was making no sense at the time and it was all most unpleasant.’ Boy Mulcaster wandered towards us and sat down, without encouragement, by my side.

‘Drink running short in there,’ he said, helping himself from our bottle and emptying it. ‘Not a soul in the place I ever set eyes on before - all black fellows.’ Anthony ignored him and continued: ‘So then we left Marseille and went to Tangier, and there, my dear, Sebastian took up with his new friend. How can I describe him? He is like the footman in Warning Shadows - a great clod of a German who’d been in the Foreign Legion. He got out by shooting off his great toe. It hadn’t healed yet. Sebastian found him, starving as tout to one of the houses in the Kasbah, and brought him to stay with us. It was too macabre. So back I came, my dear, to good old England - Good old England,’ he repeated, embracing with a flourish of his hand the Negroes gambling at our feet, Mulcaster staring blankly before him, and our hostess who, in pyjamas, now introduced herself to us.

‘Never seen you before,’ she said. ‘Never asked you. Who are all this white trash, anyway? Seems to me I must be in the wrong house.’ ‘A time of national emergency,’ said Mulcaster. ‘Anything may happen.’ ‘Is the party going well?’ she asked anxiously. ‘D’you think Florence Mills would sing? We’ve met before,’ she added to Anthony.

‘Often, my dear, but you never asked me tonight.’

‘Oh dear, perhaps I don’t like you. I thought I liked everyone.’ ‘Do you think,’ asked Mulcaster, when our hostess had left us, ‘that it might be witty to give the fire alarm?’

‘Yes, Boy, run away and ring it.’

‘Might cheer things up, I mean.’

‘Exactly.’

So Mulcaster left us in search of the telephone.

‘I think Sebastian and his lame chum went to French Morocco,’ continued Anthony.  ‘They were in trouble with the Tangier police when I left them. The Marchioness has been a positive pest ever since I came to London, trying to make me get into touch with them. What a time that poor woman’s having! It only shows there’s some justice in life.’ Presently Miss Mills began to sing and everyone, except the crap players, crowded to the next room.

‘That’s my girl,’ said Mulcaster. ‘Over there, with that black fellow. That’s the girl who brought me.’

‘She seems to have forgotten you now.’

‘Yes. I wish I hadn’t come. Let’s go somewhere.’ Two fire engines drove up as we left and a host of helmeted figures joined the throng upstairs.  ‘That chap, Blanche,’ said Mulcaster, ‘not a good fellow. I put him in Mercury once.’ We went to a number of night clubs. In two years Mulcaster seemed to have attained his simple ambition of being known and liked in such places. At the last of them he and I were kindled by a great flame of patriotism.

‘You and I ‘ he said, ‘were too young to fight in the war. Other chaps fought, millions of them dead. Not us. We’ll show them. We’ll show the dead chaps we can fight, too.’ ‘That’s why I’m here,’ I said. ‘Come from overseas, rallying to old country in hour of need.’

‘Like Australians.’

‘Like the poor dead Australians.’

‘What you in?’

‘Nothing yet. War not ready.’

‘Only one thing to join - Bill Meadows’ show Defence Corps. All good chaps. Being fixed in Bratt’s.’

‘I’ll join.’

‘You remember Bratt’s?’

‘No. I’ll join that, too.’

‘That’s right. All good chaps like the dead chaps.’

So I joined Bill Meadows’ show, which was a flying squad, protecting food deliveries in the poorest parts of London. First I was enrolled in the Defence Corps, took an oath of loyalty, and was given a helmet and truncheon; then I was put up for Bratt’s Club and, with a number of other recruits, elected at a committee meeting specially called for the occasion. For a week we sat under orders in Bratt’s and thrice a day we drove out in a lorry at the head of a convoy of milk vans. We were jeered at and sometimes pelted with muck but only once did we go into action.

We were sitting round after luncheon that day when Bill Meadows came back from the telephone in high spirits.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘There’s a perfectly good battle in the Commercial Road.’ We drove at great speed and arrived to find a steel hawser stretched between lamp posts, an overturned truck and a policeman, alone on the pavement, being kicked by half a dozen youths. On either side of this centre of disturbance, and at a little distance from it, two opposing parties had formed. Near us, as we disembarked, a second policeman was sitting on the pavement, dazed, with his head in his hands and blood running through his fingers; two or three sympathizers were standing over him; on the other side of the hawser was a hostile knot of young dockers. We charged in cheerfully, relieved the policeman, and were just falling upon the main body of the enemy when we came into collision with a party of local clergy and town councillors who arrived simultaneously by another route to try persuasion. They were our only victims, for just as they went down there was a cry of ‘Look out. The coppers,’ and a lorry-load of police drew up in our rear.

The crowd broke and disappeared. We picked up the peace-makers (only one of whom was seriously hurt), patrolled some of the side streets looking for trouble and finding none, and at length returned to Bratt’s. Next day the General Strike was called off and the country everywhere, except in the coal fields, returned to normal. It was as though a beast long fabled for its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented danger, and slunk back to its lair. It had not been worth leaving Paris.  Jean, who joined another company, had a pot of ferns dropped on his head by an elderly widow in Camden Town and was in hospital for a week.

It was through my membership of Bill Meadows’ squad that Julia learned I was in England. She telephoned to say her mother was anxious to see me.  ‘You’ll find her terribly ill,’ she said.

I went to Marchmain House on the first morning of peace. Sir Adrian Porson passed me in the hall, leaving, as I arrived; he held a bandanna handkerchief to his face and felt blindly for his hat and stick; he was in tears.

I was shown into the library and in less than a minute Julia joined me. She shook hands with a gentleness and gravity of a ghost.

‘It’s sweet of you to come. Mummy has kept asking for you, but I don’t know if she’ll be able to see you now, after all. She’s just said “good-bye” to Adrian Porson and it’s tired her.’

‘Good-bye?’

‘Yes. She’s dying. She may live a week or two or she may go at any minute. She’s so weak. I’ll go and ask nurse.’

The stillness of death seemed in the house already. No one ever sat in the library at Marchmain House. It was the one ugly room in either of their houses. The bookcases of Victorian oak held volumes of Hansard and obsolete encyclopedias that were never opened; the bare mahogany table seemed set for the meeting of a committee; the place had the air of being both public and unfrequented; outside lay the forecourt, the railings, the quiet cul-de-sac.

Presently Julia returned.

‘No, I’m afraid you can’t see her. She’s asleep. She may lie like that for hours; I can tell you what she wanted. Let’s go somewhere else. I hate this room.’ We went across the hall to the small drawing-room where luncheon parties used to assemble, and sat on either side of the fireplace. Julia seemed to reflect the crimson and gold of the walls and lose some of her warmness.

‘First, I know, mummy wanted to say how sorry she is she was so beastly to you last time you met. She’s spoken of it often. She knows now she was wrong about you. I’m quite sure you understood and put it out of your mind immediately, but it’s the kind of thing mummy can never forgive herself - it’s the kind of thing she so seldom did.’ ‘Do tell her I understood completely.’

‘The other thing, of course, you have guessed - Sebastian. She wants him. I don’t know if that’s possible. Is it?’

‘I hear he’s in a very bad way.’

‘We heard that, too. We cabled to the last address we had, but there was no answer.  There still may be time for him to see her. I thought of you as the only hope, as soon, as I heard you were in England. Will you try and get him? It’s an awful lot to ask, but I think Sebastian would want it, too, if he realized.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘There’s no one else we can ask. Rex is so busy.’

‘Yes. I heard reports of all he’s been doing organizing the gas works.’ ‘Oh yes,’ Julia said with a touch of her old dryness. ‘He’s made a lot of kudos out of the strike.’

Then we talked for a few minutes about the Bratt’s squad. She told me Brideshead had refused to take any public service because he was not satisfied with the justice of the cause; Cordelia was in London, in bed now, as she had been watching by her mother all night. I told her I had taken up architectural painting and that I enjoyed it. All this talk was nothing; we had said all we had to say in the first two minutes; I stayed for tea and then left her.

Air France ran a service of a kind to Casablanca; there I took the bus to Fez, starting at dawn and arriving in the new town at evening. I telephoned from the hotel to the British Consul and dined with him that evening, in his charming house by the walls of the old town. He was a kind, serious man.

‘I’m delighted someone has come to took after young Flyte at last,’ he said. ‘He’s been something of a thorn in our sides here. This is no place for a remittance man. The French don’t understand him at all. They think everyone who’s not engaged in trade is a spy. It’s not as though he lived like a Milord. Things aren’t easy here. There’s war going on not thirty miles from this house, though you might not think it. We had some young fools on bicycles only last week who’d come to volunteer for Abdul Krim’s army.

‘Then the Moors are a tricky lot; they don’t hold with drink and our young friend, as you may know, spends most of his day drinking. What does he want to come here for?  There’s plenty of room for him at Rabat or Tangier, where they cater for tourists. He’s taken a house in the native town, you know. I tried to stop him, but he got it from a Frenchman in the Department of Arts. I don’t say there’s any harm in him, but he’s an anxiety. There’s an awful fellow sponging on him - a German out of the Foreign Legion.  A thoroughly bad hat by all accounts. There’s bound to be trouble.  ‘Mind you, I like Flyte. I don’t see much of him. He used to come here for baths until he got fixed up at his house. He was always perfectly charming, and my wife took a great fancy to him. What he needs is occupation.’

I explained my errand.

‘You’ll probably find him at home now. Goodness knows there’s nowhere to go in the evenings in the old town. If you like I’ll send the porter to show you the way.’ So I set out after dinner, with the consular porter going ahead lantern in hand.  Morocco was a new and strange country to me. Driving that day, mile after mile, up the smooth, strategic road, past the vineyards and military posts and the new, white settlements and the early crops already standing high in the vast, open fields, and the hoardings advertising the staples of France - Dubonnet, Michelin, Magasin du Louvre - I had thought it all very suburban and up-to-date; now, under the stars, in the walled city, whose streets were gentle, dusty stairways, and whose walls rose windowless on either side, closed overhead, then opened again to the stars; where the dust lay thick among the smooth paving stones and figures passed silently, robed in white, on soft slippers or hard, bare soles; where the air was scented with cloves and incense and wood smoke - now I knew what had drawn- Sebastian here and held him so long.  The consular porter strode arrogantly ahead with his light swinging and his tall cane banging; sometimes an open doorway revealed a silent group seated in golden lamplight round a brazier.

‘Very dirty peoples,’ the porter said scornfully, over his shoulder. ‘No education.  French leave them dirty. Not like British peoples. My peoples,’ he said, ‘always very British peoples.’

For he was from the Sudan Police, and regarded this ancient centre of his culture as a New Zealander might regard Rome.

At length we came to the last of many studded doors, and the porter beat on it with his stick.

‘British Lord’s house,’ he said.

Lamplight and a dark face appeared at the grating. The consular porter spoke peremptorily; bolts were withdrawn and we entered a small courtyard with a well in its centre and a vine trained overhead.

‘I wait here,’ said the porter. ‘You go with this native fellow.’ I entered the house, down a step and into the living-room I found a gramophone, an oil-stove and, between them, a young man. Later, when I looked about me, I noticed other, more agreeable things - the rugs on the floor, the embroidered silk on the walls, the carved and painted beams of the ceiling, the heavy, pierced lamp that hung from a chain and cast soft shadows of its own tracery about the room. But on first entering these three things, the gramophone for its noise - it was playing a French record of jazz band - the stove for its smell, and the young man for his wolfish look, struck my senses. He was lolling in a basket chair, with a bandaged foot stuck forward on a box; he was dressed in a kind of thin, mid-European imitation tweed with a tennis shirt open at the neck; the unwounded foot wore a brown canvas shoe. There was a brass tray by his side on wooden legs, and on it were two beer bottles, a dirty plate, and a saucer full of cigarette ends; he held a glass of beer in his hand and a cigarette lay on his lower lip and stuck there when he spoke. He had long fair hair combed back without a parting and a face that was unnaturally lined for a man of his obviou............