Suddenly I felt tired and miserable. I wanted the face of his Russian correspondent. I wanted pictures of Sebastian himself. I wanted many things…. Then, as I let my eyes roam around the room, I caught sight of a couple of framed photographs in the dim shadows above the bookshelves.
I got up and examined them. One was an enlarged snapshot of a Chinese stripped to the waist, in the act of being vigorously beheaded, the other was a banal photographic study of a curly child playing with a pup. The taste of their juxtaposition seemed to me questionable, but probably Sebastian had his own reasons for keeping and hanging them so.
I glanced too, at the books; they were numerous, untidy, and miscellaneous. But one shelf was a little neater than the rest and here I noted the following sequence which for a moment seemed to form a vague musical phrase, oddly familiar: Hamlet, La morte d'Arthur, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, South Wind, The Lady with the Dog, Madame Bovary, The Invisible Man, Le Temps Retrouvй, Anglo-Persian Dictionary, The Author of Trixie, Alice in Wonderland, Ulysses, About Buying a Horse, King Lear….
The melody gave a small gasp and faded. I returned to the desk and began sorting out the letters I had laid aside. They were mostly business letters, and I felt entitled to peruse them. Some bore no relation to Sebastian's profession, others did. The disorder was considerable and many allusions remained unintelligible to me. In a few cases he had kept copies of his own letters so that for instance I got in full a long zestful dialogue between him and his publisher in regard to a certain book. Then, there was a fussy soul in Rumania of all places, clamouring for an option…. I learnt too of the sales in England and the Dominions…. Nothing very brilliant – but in one case at least perfectly satisfactory. A few letters from friendly authors. One gentle writer, the author of a single famous book, rebuked Sebastian (April 4, 1928) for being 'Conradish' and suggested his leaving out the 'con' and cultivating the 'radish' in future works – a singularly silly idea, I thought.
Lastly, at the very bottom of the bundle, I came to my mother's and my own letters, together with several from one of his undergraduate friends; and as I struggled a little with their pages (old letters resent being unfolded) I suddenly realized what my next hunting-ground ought to be.
5
Sebastian Knight's college years were not particularly happy. To be sure he enjoyed many of the things he found at Cambridge – he was in fact quite overcome at first to see and smell and feel the country for which he had always longed. A real hansom cab took him from the station to Trinity College: the vehicle, it seemed, had been waiting there especially for him, desperately holding out against extinction till that moment, and then gladly dying out to join side whiskers and the Large Copper. The slush of streets gleaming wet in the misty darkness with its promised counterpoint – a cup of strong tea and a generous fire – formed a harmony which somehow he knew by heart. The pure chimes of tower-clocks, now hanging over the town, now overlapping and echoing afar, in some odd, deeply familiar way blended with the piping cries of the newspaper vendors. And as he entered the stately gloom of Great Court with gowned shadows passing in the mist and the porter's bowler hat bobbing in front of him, Sebastian felt that he somehow recognized every sensation, the wholesome reek of damp turf, the ancient sonority of stone slabs under heel, the blurred outlines of dark walls overhead – everything. That special feeling of elation probably endured for quite a long time, but there was something else intermingled with it, and later on predominant. Sebastian in spite of himself realized with perhaps a kind of helpless amazement (for he had expected more from England than she could do for him) that no matter how wisely and sweetly his new surroundings played up to his old dreams, he himself, or rather still the most precious part of himself, would remain as hopelessly alone as it had always been. The keynote of Sebastian's life was solitude and the kindlier fate tried to make him feel at home by counterfeiting admirably the things he thought he wanted, the more he was aware of his inability to fit into the picture – into any kind of picture. When at last he thoroughly understood this and grimly started to cultivate self-consciousness as if it had been some rare talent or passion, only then did Sebastian derive satisfaction from its rich and monstrous growth, ceasing to worry about his awkward uncongeniality – but that was much later.
Apparently, at first he was frantically afraid of not doing the right thing or, worse still, of doing it clumsily. Someone told him that the hard cornered part of the academical cap ought to be broken, or even removed altogether, leaving only the limp black cloth. No sooner had he done so, than he found out that he had lapsed into the worst 'undergrad' vulgarity and that perfect taste consisted in ignoring the cap and gown one wore, thus granting them the faultless appearance of insignificant things which otherwise would have dared to matter. Again, whatever the weather, hats and umbrellas were tabooed, and Sebastian piously got wet and caught colds until a certain day when he came to know one D. W. Gorget, a delightful, flippant, lazy, easy-going fellow, famed for his rowdiness, elegance, and wit: and Gorget coolly went about in a town-hat plus umbrella. Fifteen years later, when I visited Cambridge and was told by Sebastian's best college friend (now a prominent scholar) of all these things, I remarked that everybody seemed to be carrying – 'Exactly,' said he, 'Gorget's umbrella has bred.'
'And tell me,' I asked, 'what about games? Was Sebastian good at games?'
My informant smiled.
'I am afraid,' he answered, 'that except a little mild tennis on a rather soggy green court with a daisy or two on the worst patches, neither Sebastian nor I went in very much for that sort of thing. His racket, I remember, was a remarkably expensive one, and his flannels very becoming – and generally he looked very tidy and nice and all that; but his service was a feminine pat and he rushed about a lot without hitting anything, and as I was not much better than he, our game mainly consisted in retrieving damp green balls or throwing them back to players on the adjacent courts – all this under a steady drizzle. Yes, he was definitely poor at games.'
'Did that upset him?'
'It did in a way. In fact, his first term was quite poisoned by the thought of his inferiority in those matters. The first time he met Gorget – that was in my rooms – poor Sebastian talked so much about tennis that at last Gorget asked whether the game was played with a stick. This rather soothed Sebastian as he supposed that Gorget, whom he liked from the start, was bad at games, too.'
'And was he?'
'Oh, well, he was a Rugby Blue, but perhaps he did not much care for lawn tennis. Anyway, Sebastian soon got over the game complex. And generally speaking – '
We sat there in that dimly lit oak-panelled room, our armchairs so low that it was quite easy to reach the tea things which stood humbly on the' carpet, and Sebastian's spirit seemed to hover about us with the flicker of the fire reflected in the brass knobs of the hearth. My interlocutor had known him so intimately that I think he was right in suggesting that Sebastian's sense of inferiority was based on his trying to out-England England, and never succeeding, and going on trying, until finally he realized that it was not these outward things that betrayed him, not the mannerisms of fashionable slang, but the very fact of his striving to be and act like other people when he was blissfully condemned to the solitary confinement of his own self.
Still, he had done his best to be a standard undergraduate. Clad in a brown dressing-gown and old pumps, carrying soap-box and sponge-bag, he had strolled out on winter mornings on his way to the Baths round the comer. He had had breakfast in Hall, with the porridge as grey and dull as the sky above Great Court and the orange marmalade of exactly the same hue as the creeper on its walls. He had mounted his 'pushbike', as my informant called it, and with his gown across his shoulder had pedalled to this or that lecture hall. He had lunched at the Pitt (which, I understood, was a kind of club, probably with horsey pictures on the walls and very old waiters asking their eternal riddle: thick or clear?). He had played fives (whatever that may be) or some other tame game, and then had had tea with two or three friends; the talk had hobbled along between crumpet and pipe, carefully avoiding anything that had not been said by others. There may have been another lecture or two before dinner, and then again Hall, a very fine place which I was duly shown. It was being swept at the moment, and the fat white calves of Henry the Eighth looked as if they might get tickled.