The Edwardians (30 page)

Sebastian frantically sought the door handle before he remembered that it was not there. He turned, tore away the little flap, and banged on the tiny window at the back with such violence that he broke it. Through the shivered glass he could see the four white silk calves of the two footmen. Air rushed into the coach. He shouted to the white silk calves, remembering, as he did so, the way that one had shouted to the cabby through the trap door in the roof of a hansom. “Open the door,” he said; “open the door!” In dismay, thinking his master must be ill, Wilfrid clambered down and hurried round to struggle with the unwieldy fastenings. The traffic in front had moved on, and a policeman, concerned with his duty but still anxious to conciliate a young peer who drove in so magnificent a coach, came up to see what had occasioned the delay. “Get in,” said Sebastian, craning forward and gesticulating; “get in; we can't hold up the traffic forever. Never mind the step,” he said impatiently to the footman, who was groping after it; “I daresay Mr. Anquetil can do without it.” Mr. Anquetil could. A jump took him into the coach; Wilfrid slammed the door, and Sebastian proceeded on his way with Anquetil beside him.

“Well,” said Anquetil surveying his companion, “you're very smart to be sure, and what a pretty bauble,” he added, picking up Sebastian's coronet and turning it round and round in his strong hands. “Strawberry leaves. Ermine. Balls.” He put it down again on the seat opposite. “How very delightful to see you after these long years.”

The complete conventionality of the phrase relaxed Sebastian's tension as nothing else could have relaxed it. He laughed as he had not laughed since he last played with Henry and Sarah. “Oh, Leonard, Leonard!” he said then, putting his hand over his eyes and shaking his head helplessly because he had no words. He was flooded by an inexplicable happiness. “Oh, Leonard,” he said, “why did you desert me?”

“Lama sabachthani?” said Anquetil.

“Lamasabachthani.” The coach rolled on. “What have you been doing? The
Daily Mail
said that you were missing. Then there was a little paragraph in the
Times
to say that you were found. What have you been doing, all this time?”

“And you?” said Anquetil; “what have you been doing?”

“Nothing,” said Sebastian, picking up his coronet; “nothing!” He ran his fingers over the outline of the strawberry leaves. “It's an awful thing, Leonard, to have been born a duke; a paralysing thing. It doesn't give one a fair chance. Better, far better, to have been born the son of a fisherman. I had just resigned myself to my fate.”

“Just? How long ago?”

“Two hours ago.”

“During the Coronation? In Westminster Abbey?”

“During the Coronation. In Westminster Abbey. Leonard! pull me out of it. But for you, I'm lost.”

“My poor Sebastian. Crushed under the weight of that beautiful cloak?” He touched it. “Lost in a forest of tradition?”

“You understand it. You can't know anything about it, yet you understand it. You understand both sides.”

“Our all too infrequent conversations,” said Anquetil suddenly, “always seem to take place under unusual circumstances.”

“Last time, we sat on the roofs of Chevron.”

“Sebastian,” said Anquetil, “take care. You are letting yourself be misled by a symbol.”

“Am I?” said Sebastian, startled. “But isn't symbolism always backed up by reality?”

“Yes,” said Anquetil; “that's the danger of symbolism.” The coach rolled on. “I ought to tell you,” said Anquetil, “that I am going to marry your sister.”

“Marry Viola?”

“Yes. I arrived in England yesterday; I asked her to marry me last night.”

“But you don't know her.”

“We have written to each other once a week for six years.”

“Oh,” said Sebastian enlightened; “that explains a great deal.”

“But we are not going to marry,” said Anquetil rapidly, “for three years. I am leaving England again next week. If you like, you can come with me. I repeat the invitation I made six years ago.”

“I always imagined,” said Sebastian, “that once you had finished discovering the sources of the Amazon you would go into politics.”

“No politics for me yet. I'm not ripe.”

“If you're not ripe, then what about me?”

“You? Ripe ! You've scarcely flowered into blossom, let alone set your fruit. You've never come into contact with life at all. Come with me, and learn that life is a stone for the teeth to bite on. Then after three years you may perhaps come back with some sense of proportion. Or there may be a war, by then, which will kill you off. I've no doubt that you would behave with great gallantry; and I'll even admit that Tradition, by which you set such store, will serve you then in the stead of experience. In the meantime, will you come?”

“Chevron!” said Sebastian in the throes of a last struggle.

“You'll be a better master to Chevron.”

“All right;” said Sebastian. “I'll come.”

The coach came to a standstill in Grosvenor Square.

The End

Vita Sackville-West
was an English author and poet who is best known for her novels The Edwardians and All Passions Spent, and is notable as the only author to twice win the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature (in 1926 for
The Land
and in 1933 for Collected Poems.) A member of the British peerage, Sackville-West and her husband had an open marriage, and her passionate relationship with author Virginia Woolf served as the inspiration for Woolf's
Orlando
. Sackville-West died in 1962.

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