Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

“You know, Charles,” he said, “it’s rather a pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.”

I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room.

twitch upon the thread.’

I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated mummy.” “What do you mean by that, Cordelia?” “Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that.

the halls of the ship, which were huge without any splendor, as though they had been designed for a railway coach and preposterously magnified.

all over the blotting-paper carpet were strewn tables designed perhaps by a sanitary engineer, square blocks of stuffing, with square holes for sitting in, and upholstered, it seemed, in blotting paper also; the light of the hall was suffused from scores of hollows, giving an even glow, casting no shadows—the

Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy.

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.

Julia is more than artistic elemnts pieced together

he’s just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn’t there. He couldn’t imagine why it hurt me to find two months after we came back to London from our honeymoon, that he was still keeping up with Brenda Champion.”

Perhaps that is why you and I are here together like this… part of a plan.”

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”

“Living in sin, with sin, always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. ‘Poor Julia,’ they say, ‘she can’t go out. She’s got to take care of her sin. A pity it ever lived,’ they say, ‘but it’s so strong. Children like that always are. Julia’s so good to her little, mad sin.’

perhaps I am only a forerunner, too.”

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.”

finally one day they found Sebastian lying outside the main gate unconscious, he had walked out—usually he took a car—and fallen down and lain there all night. At first they thought he was merely drunk again; then they realized he was very ill, so they put him in the infirmary, where he’d been ever since.

He seemed quite happy by the time I left. He’ll never be able to go into the bush, of course, or join the order, but the Father Superior is going to take charge of him. 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.

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 the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the las...

maimed as he is—no dignity, no power of will.

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?”

“His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.”

What’s it got to do with you or me whether my father sees his parish priest?” I knew these fierce moods of Julia’s, such as had overtaken her at the fountain in moonlight, and dimly surmised their origin; I knew they could not be assuaged by words. Nor could I have spoken, for the answer to her question was still unformed; the sense that the fate of more souls than one was at issue; that the snow was beginning to shift on the high slopes.

Suddenly Lord Marchmain moved his hand to his forehead; I thought he had felt the touch of the chrism and was wiping it away. “O God,” I prayed, “don’t let him do that.” 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.

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.

“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

but then he is telling the story and it is not his story.

Lady Marchmain,10 no I am not on her side; but God is, who suffers fools gladly; and the book is about God. Does that answer it?

“Evelyn Waugh developed a wickedly hilarious yet fundamentally religious assault on a century that, in his opinion, had ripped up the nourishing taproot of tradition and let wither all the dear things of the world.”