Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

She was not yet thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spidery look; the head that I used to think quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was now part of herself and not at all Florentine; not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself, so that it would be idle to itemize and dissect her beauty, which was her own essence, and could only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have for her.

That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.

This clergyman later described himself—redundantly it seemed—as an Episcopalian Bishop.

Ha! But could have been an Episcopalian layman

And all night between dreaming and waking I thought of Julia; in my brief dreams she took a hundred fantastic and terrible and obscene forms, but in my waking thoughts she returned with her sad, starry head just as I had seen her at dinner.

“I was glad when I found Celia was unfaithful,” I said. “I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.”

When after long silences we spoke, our thoughts, we found, had kept pace together side by side.

Julia came among the others, and it was happiness enough, now merely to be near her.

You see Charles lives for one thing—Beauty. I think he got bored with finding it ready-made in England; he had to go and create it for himself. He wanted new worlds to conquer.

Brideshead as the symbol of timeless beauty, firmly established, peaceful. He got tired of this establishment

Where are the pictures? Let me explain them to you.”

I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight.

“Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It’s supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.”

“But we’ve got our happiness in spite of them; here and now, we’ve taken possession of it. They can’t hurt us, can they?”

the brandy-butter

“Sometimes,” said Julia, “I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”

“Bridey, what a bloody offensive thing to say to Julia!” “There was nothing she should object to. I was merely stating a fact well known to her.”

F vs T

when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already dead; putting him away, forgetting him, finding you, the past two years with you, all the future with you, all the future with or without you, war coming, world ending—sin.

mummy dying with my sin eating at her, more cruelly than her own deadly illness.

“Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the dark church where only the old charwoman raises the dust and one candle burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging for ever; never the cool sepulcher and the grave clothes spread on the stone slab, never the oil and spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat.

Christ the only forgiveness and way forward

Tears spring from speech;

“An hour ago,” I thought, “in the black refuge in the box hedge, she wept her heart out for the death of her God; now she is discussing whether Beryl’s children shall take the old smoking-room or the school-room for their own.” I was all at sea.

“Of course it’s a thing psychologists could explain; a preconditioning from childhood; feelings of guilt from the nonsense you were taught in the nursery. You do know at heart that it’s all bosh, don’t you?”

It was odd, I thought, how the same ingredients, differently dispensed, could produce Brideshead, Sebastian, Julia, and her.

perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”

‘he was a queer fish but he was very earnest.’

They had the idea of making him a sort of under-porter; there are usually a few odd hangers-on in a religious house, you know; people who can’t quite fit in either to the world or the monastic rule.

“Poor Sebastian!” I said. “It’s too pitiful. How will it end?” “I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I’ve seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He’ll live on, half in, half out of, the community, a familiar figure pottering round with his broom and his bunch of keys. He’ll be a great favorite with the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking; he’ll disappear for two or three days every month or so, and they’ll all nod and smile and say in their various accents, “Old Sebastian’s on the spree again,” and then he’ll come back disheveled and shamefaced and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel. He’ll probably have little hiding places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and then on the sly. They’ll bring him forward to act as guide, whenever they have an English-speaking visitor, and he will be completely charming so that before they go, they’ll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that he has high connections at home. If he lives long enough, generations of missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old character who was somehow part of the Hope of their student days, and remember him in their masses. He’ll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he’ll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he’s expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at...

No one is ever holy without suffering.

‘Thwarted passion,’ I thought.”

I realized that she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, “Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?”

Had it come to him at that moment, an awakened memory of childhood, a dream in the nursery—“When I’m grown up I’ll sleep in the Queen’s bed in the Chinese drawing-room”—the apotheosis of adult grandeur?

“In Italy,” he said, “no one believes there will be a war. They think it will all be ‘arranged.’

“Yes,” said Cara, “he has come home to die.”

It opened a prospect; the prospect one gained at the turn of the avenue, as I had first seen it with Sebastian, of the secluded valley, the lakes falling away one below the other, the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty; a soldier’s dream in a foreign bivouac; such a prospect perhaps as a high pinnacle of the temple afforded after the hungry days in the desert and the jackal-haunted nights. Need I reproach myself if sometimes I was taken by the vision?

They’ll come now, when his mind’s wandering and he hasn’t the strength to resist, and claim him as a death-bed penitent. I’ve had a certain respect for their Church up till now. If they do a thing like that I shall know that everything stupid people say about them is quite true—that it’s all superstition and trickery.”

the snow was beginning to shift on the high slopes.

No one in that dark office spoke the word “war”; it was taboo; we should be called for if there was “an emergency”—not in case of strife, an act of human will; nothing so clear and simple as wrath or retribution; an emergency; something coming out of the waters, a monster with sightless face and thrashing tail thrown up from the depths.

“He’s got a wonderful will to live, hasn’t he?” “Would you put it like that? I should say a great fear of death.”

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.

“Christ came to call, not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

I recognized the words “ego te absolvo in nomine Patris…” and saw the priest make the sign of the cross. Then I knelt, too, and prayed: “O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin,” and the man on the bed opened his eyes and gave a sigh, the sort of sigh I had imagined people made at the moment of death, but his eyes moved so that we knew there was still life in him. I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I knew, for a sign. It seemed so small a thing that was asked, the bare acknowledgment of a present, a nod in the crowd. I prayed more simply; “God forgive him his sins” and “Please God, make him accept your forgiveness.”

But there was no need for fear; the hand moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross. Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.

The devil resists to the last moment and then the Grace of God is too much for him.

But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself out from his mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without him. One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable—like things in the schoolroom, so bad they were unpunishable, that only mummy could deal with—the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I’m not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God’s.

it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, he won’t quite despair of me in the end.

“No,” I said, “not what it was built for. Perhaps that’s one of the pleasures of building, like having a son, wondering how he’ll grow up. I don’t know; I never built anything, and I forfeited the right to watch my son grow up.

the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

“and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back. “Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame—a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.” I quickened my pace and reached the hut which served us for our ante-room. “You’re looking unusually cheerful today,” said the second-in-command.