"Brideshead Revisited"

[fiefoe]

How did I completely escaped the knowledge that Charles ended up having a serious affair with Sebastian's sister Julia? As Evelyn Waugh said in the preface, there's a lot of war-weariness in the novel.

__ Much of this book therefore is a panegyric preached over an empty coffin. But it would be impossible to bring it up to date without totally destroying it. It is offered to a younger generation of readers as a souvenir of the Second War rather than of the twenties or of the thirties,

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• I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom... I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm her jealousy and self-seeking and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.
• Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St Crispin’s day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon — these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.
• He had disclosed one of those deposits of rubbish which are dear to the private soldier’s sense of order: the head of a broom, the lid of a stove, a bucket rusted through, a sock, a loaf of bread, lay under the dock and nettle among cigarette packets and empty tins.
• ‘What’s this place called?’ <> He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.
• which had been dammed here to form three lakes, one no more than a wet slate among the reeds, but the others more spacious, reflecting the clouds and the mighty beeches at their margin. The woods were all of oak and beech, the oak grey and bare, the beech faintly dusted with green by the breaking buds; they made a simple, carefully designed pattern with the green glades and the wide green spaces — Did the fallow deer graze here still? — and, lest the eye wander aimlessly, a Doric temple stood by the water’s edge, and an ivy-grown arch spanned the lowest of the connecting weirs. All this had been planned and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might be seen in its maturity,
• Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days — such as that day — when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.
• On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine — as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together — and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage’, and the sweet scent of the tobacco, merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.
• (Father:) I wanted to talk about Etruscan notions of immortality; he wanted to talk about extension lectures for the working-class; so we compromised and talked about you.
• You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first…Beware of the Anglo-Catholics — they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents. In fact, steer clear of all the religious groups; they do nothing but harm…’
• It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door. I should like to think — indeed I sometimes do think — that I decorated those rooms with Morris stuffs and Arundel prints and that my shelves we’re filled with seventeenth-century folios and French novels of the second empire in Russia-leather and watered silk. But this was not the truth. On my first afternoon I proudly hung a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers over the fire... most painful to recall, a porcelain figure of Polly Peachum which stood between black tapers on the chimney-piece. My books were meagre and commonplace — Roger Fry’s Vision and Design, the Medici Press edition of A Shropshire Lad, Eminent Victorians, some volumes of Georgian Poetry, Sinister Street, and South Wind
• Collins had exposed the fallacy of modern aesthetics to me: ‘…the whole argument from Significant Form stands or falls by volume. If you allow Cezanne to represent a third dimension on his two-dimensional canvas, then you must allow Landseer his gleam of loyalty in the spaniel’s eye’…but it was not until Sebastian, idly turning the page of Clive Bell’s Art, read: “‘Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?” Yes. I do,’ that my eyes were opened.
• it had to have very stiff bristles, not, Lord Sebastian said, to brush him with, but to threaten him with a spanking when he was sulky. He bought a very nice one with an ivory back and he’s having “Aloysius” engraved on it’ — that’s the bear’s name.’ The man, who, in his time, had had ample chance to tire of undergraduate fantasy, was plainly-captivated.
• But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.
• He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.
• The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours.
• I sometimes wonder whether, had it not been for Sebastian, I might have trodden the same path as Collins round the cultural water-wheel.
• I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood, straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added, a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.
• I could tell him that all the wickedness of that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro, heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the wine, renders it undrinkable, so, that it must lie in the dark year in, year out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table. <> I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other, human being is the root of all wisdom.
• And you, dear Charles, if you will understand me, are not exquisite; but not at all Artists are not exquisite. I am; Sebastian, in a kind of way, is exquisite, but the artist is an eternal type, solid, purposeful, observant — and, beneath it all, p-p-passionate, eh, Charles?
• A face of flawless Florentine quattrocento beauty; almost anyone else with those looks would have been tempted to become artistic; not Lady Julia; she’s as smart as — well, as smart as Stefanie.
• Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights ‘and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.’
• It is remarkable how some people are able to put their opinions in lapidary form; your aunt had that gift.
• He came,’ my father paused to give full weight to the bizarre word — ‘a cropper.’
  Jorkins giggled nervously. My father fixed him with a look of reproach.
  ‘You find his misfortune the subject of mirth? Or perhaps the word I used was unfamiliar; you no doubt would say that he “folded up”.’
  My father was master of the situation. He had made a little fantasy for himself, that Jorkins should I be an American and throughout the evening he played a delicate one-sided parlour-game with him, explaining any peculiarly English terms that occurred in the conversation,
• It was written on, and enveloped in, heavy late-Victorian mourning paper, black-coroneted and black-bordered. I read it eagerly:
  Brideshead Castle, / Wiltshire / I wonder what the date is
  Dearest Charles, <> I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start.
• The knives and forks set up their regular jingle; the bright landscape rolled past the windows. But I had no mind for these smooth things; instead, fear worked like yeast in my thoughts, and the fermentation brought to the surface, in great gobs of scum, the images of disaster;
• (Julia:) Because her sex was the palpable difference between the familiar and the strange it seemed to fill the space between us, so that I felt her to be especially female, as I had felt of no woman before.
• THE languor of Youth — how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth — all save this — come and go with us through life. These things are a part of life itself; but languor — the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.
• It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls, to wander from room to room, from the Soanesque library to the Chinese drawing, adazzle with gilt pagodas and nodding mandarins, painted paper and Chippendale fretwork, from the Pompeian parlour to the great tapestry-hung hall which stood unchanged
• I had nursed a love of architecture, but, though in opinion I had made that easy leap, characteristic of my generation, from the puritanism of Ruskin to the puritanism of Roger Fry, my sentiments at heart were insular and medieval. <> This was my conversion to the Baroque. Here under that high and insolent dome, under those coffered ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones, was indeed a life-giving spring.
• ‘I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.’ <> ‘Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.’ ‘But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.’ <> ‘But I do. That’s how I believe.’
• ‘They seem just like other people.’ <> ‘My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not particularly in this country, where they’re so few. It’s not just that they’re a clique — as a matter of fact, they’re at least four cliques all blackguarding each other half the time — but they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time.
• (Palace:) A tremendous explosion drew us next door. We found a bathroom which seemed to have been built in a chimney. There was no ceiling; instead the walls ran straight through the floor above to the open sky. The butler was almost invisible in the steam of an antiquated geyser. There was an overpowering smell of gas and a tiny trickle of cold water.
• Lord Marchmain. When I did so I was first struck by his normality, which, as I saw more of him, I found to be studied. It was as though he were conscious of a Byronic aura, which he considered to be in bad taste and was at pains to suppress.
• It has been my tragedy that I abominate the English countryside. I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them. I am all the Socialists would have me be, and a great stumbling-block to my own party.
• ‘I think you are very fond of Sebastian,’ she said. ‘Why, certainly.’ ‘I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long.’
• I have never met Lady Marchmain; I have seen her once only; but if you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved. I know Lady Marchmain very well. She is a good and simple woman who has been loved in the wrong way. <> ‘When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood — innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. A woman has not all these ways of loving... ‘Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. His teddy-bear, his nanny and he is nineteen years old…’
• My father greeted me with, his usual air of mild regret.
• Never again would I expose myself to my father’s humour; his whimsical persecution had convinced me, as no rebuke could have done, of the folly of living beyond my means.
• he had everything except the Faith, and later liked to attend benediction in the chapel of Brideshead and see the ladies of the family with their necks arched in devotion under their black lace mantillas; he loved forgotten scandals in high life and was an expert in putative parentage; he claimed to love the past, but I always felt that he thought all the splendid company, living or dead, with whom he associated slightly absurd; it was Mr Samgrass who was real, the rest were an insubstantial pageant. He was the Victorian tourist, solid and patronizing, for whose amusement these foreign things were paraded.
• ‘You and mummy seem very thick,’ and I realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it.
• Rex stood in the charge-room looking the embodiment indeed, the burlesque — of power and prosperity;
• She knows you were in the clink. I told her. She was divine about it, of course. You know anything Uncle Ned did was always perfect, and he got locked up once for taking a bear into one of Lloyd George’s meetings, so she really feels quite human about the whole thing. She wants you both to lunch with her.’
• ‘But of course,’ she said, ‘it’s very unexpected for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things. It’s not to be expected that an ox and an ass should worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in the lives of the saints. It’s all part of the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side, of religion.’
• By the blue waters and rustling palms of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the slope that had never known the print of a boot, there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist
• That was cruel of him, leaving without a word. I don’t want him to be ashamed — it’s being ashamed that makes it all so wrong of him.’ <> ‘He’s ashamed of being unhappy,’ I said.
• the same tale of men who were, in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice. These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman,
• It was touching to see the faith which everybody put in the value of a day’s hunting. Lady Marchmain, who looked in on me during the morning, mocked herself for it with that delicate irony for which she was famous. <> ‘I’ve always detested hunting,’ she said, ‘because it seems to produce a particularly gross kind of caddishness in the nicest people. I don’t know what it is, but the moment they dress up and get on a horse they become like a lot of Prussians. And so boastful after it.
• (Drinking:) With Brideshead, who came home to luncheon and talked to me on the subject — for the subject was everywhere in the house like a fire deep in the hold of a ship, below the water-line, black and red in the darkness, coming to in acrid wisps of smoke that oozed under hatches and billowed suddenly from the scuttles and air pipes — with Brideshead, I was in a strange world, a dead world to me, in a moon-landscape of barren lava, a high place of toiling lungs.
• (In his kindest moments Rex displayed a kind of hectoring zeal as if he were thrusting a vacuum cleaner on an unwilling housewife.)
• A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden. <> I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed.
• I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a, reminder that the world was an older, and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope.
• sentences came breaking in on my happiness, recalling me to the harsh, acquisitive world which Rex inhabited. He wanted a woman; he wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her at his own price; that was what it amounted to.
• On my side the interest was keener, for there was always the physical likeness between brother and sister, which, caught repeatedly in different poses, under different lights, each time pierced me anew; and, as Sebastian in his sharp decline seemed daily to fade and crumble, so much the more did Julia stand out clear and firm.
• the ball given for Julia, in spite of the ignoble costume of the time, was by all accounts a splendid spectacle. Sebastian went down for it and half-heartedly suggested my coming with him; I refused and came to regret my refusal, for it was the last ball of its kind given there; the last of a splendid series. <> How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days; the world was open to be explored at leisure. I was so full of Oxford that summer; London could wait, I thought.
• She had no interest in me that evening; the jinn rumbled below us uncalled; she lived apart in a little world, within a little world, the innermost of a system of concentric spheres, like the ivory balls laboriously carved in China; a little problem troubling her mind — little, as she saw it, in abstract terms and symbols. She was wondering dispassionately and leagues distant from reality, whom she should marry. Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf past, present, and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and women; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war.
• But wherever she turned, it seemed, her religion stood as a barrier between her and her natural goal. <> As it seemed to her, the thing was a dead loss. If she apostatized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her. There could be no eldest son for her, and younger sons were indelicate things, necessary, but not to be much spoken of. Younger sons had none of the privileges of obscurity; it was their plain duty to remain hidden until some disaster perchance promoted them to their brother's places, and, since this was their function, it was desirable that they should keep themselves wholly suitable for succession. Perhaps in a family of three or four boys, a Catholic might get the youngest without opposition.
• he was old, thirty-two or -three, and had been recently and tragically widowed; Julia thought she would prefer a man a little subdued by earlier grief.
• There is proverbially a mystery among most men of new wealth, how they made their first ten thousand; it is the qualities they showed then, before they became bullies, when every man was someone to be placated, when only hope sustained them and they could count on nothing from the world but what could be charmed from it, that make them, if they survive their triumph, successful with women.
• 'He has been very kind in a number of ways. I regard him as entirely unsuitable as your husband. So will everyone.'
  'Damn everybody.'
  'We know nothing about him. He may have black blood—in fact he is suspiciously dark. Darling, the whole thing's impossible. I can't see how you can have been so foolish.'
• 'That's one thing your Church can do,' he said, 'put on a good show. You never saw anything to equal the cardinals. How many do you have in England?'
  'Only one, darling.'
  'Only one? Can we hire some others from abroad?'
  It was then explained to him that a mixed marriage was a very unostentatious affair.
  'How d'you mean 'mixed';' I'm not a nigger or anything.'
  'No, darling, between a Catholic and a Protestant.'
• The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed.
• 'Oh, mummy, who could have dreamed he'd swallow it? I told him such a lot besides. About the sacred monkeys in the Vatican—all kinds of things.'
  'Well, you've very considerably increased my work,' said Father Mowbray.
  'Poor Rex,' said Lady Marchmain. 'You know, I think it makes him rather lovable. You must treat him like an idiot child, Father Mowbray.'
• 'It was an awfully unpopular wedding, you know. Everyone took mummy's side, as everyone always did—not that she got any benefit from it. All through her life mummy had all the sympathy of everyone except those she loved.
• (Rex:) He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modem and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.
• (News of the General Strike in 1926:) 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.
• what could one expect? He was an alcoholic. The doctor spoke dispassionately, almost brutally, with the relish men of science sometimes have for limiting themselves to inessentials, for pruning back their work to the point of sterility; but the bearded, barefooted brother in whose charge he put me, the man of no scientific pretensions who did the dirty jobs of the ward, had a different story.
• I held back from painting, like a diver on the water's edge; once in I found myself buoyed and exhilarated. I was normally a slow and deliberate painter; that afternoon and all next day, and the day after, I worked fast. I could do nothing wrong. At the end of each passage I paused, tense, afraid to start the next, fearing, like a gambler, that luck must turn and the pile be lost. Bit by bit, minute by minute, the thing came into being. There were no difficulties; the intricate multiplicity of light and colour became a whole; the right colour was where I wanted it, on the palette; each brush stroke, as soon as it was complete, seemed to have been there always.
• 'I got on best with her of any of us, but I don't believe I ever really loved her. Not as she wanted or deserved. It's odd I didn't, because I'm full of natural affections.'
  'I never really knew your Mother,' I said.
  'You didn't like her. 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.
• MY theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of wartime. <> These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me.
• More even than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. In such buildings England abounded, and, in the last decade of their grandeur, Englishmen seemed for the first time to become conscious of what before was taken for granted, and to salute their achievement at the moment of extinction... The financial slump of the period, which left many painters without employment, served to enhance my success, which was, indeed, itself a symptom of the decline. When the water-holes were dry people sought to drink at the mirage. After my first exhibition I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneer's, a presage of doom.
• Then she knew what was wanted. She had neat, hygienic ways for that too, but there were both relief and triumph in her smile of welcome; later we parted and lay in our twin beds a yard or two distant, smoking.
• who can only say that England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends,... the knowledge that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other's pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the centripetal force of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar space between them.
• 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity. Quomodo sedet sola civitas' (for I had heard that great lament, which Cordelia once quoted to me in the drawing-room of Marchmain House, sung by a half-caste choir in Guatemala, nearly a year ago). {'How does the city sit alone?'}
• But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few welltrodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy.
• when that lovely, spidery child of nineteen, as though brought in for an hour from the nursery and nettled by lack of attention from the grownups, had said: 'I'm causing anxiety, too, you know,' and I had thought at the time, though scarcely, it now seemed to me, in long trousers myself, 'How important these girls make themselves with their love affairs.'
• 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.
• She seemed to say: 'Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?' <> 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.
• purser had, been asked to our party and he, in token of his appreciation, had sent before him the life-size effigy of a swan, moulded in ice and filled with caviar. This chilly piece of magnificence now dominated the room
• Can you tell me, dear Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander—if I am correct in thinking that is how I heard my wife speak of you—why it is that at this moment, while I talk to you, here, about my forthcoming exhibition, I am thinking all the time only of when Julia will come? Why can I talk like this to you, but not to her? Why have I already set her apart from humankind, and myself with her? What is going on in those secret places of my spirit with which you make so free? What is cooking, Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander?'
• 'No, no. Captain Foulenough is an imaginary character in an English paper. You know, like your 'Popeye'.'
  The senator laid down knife and fork. 'To recapitulate: an impostor came to your party and you admitted him because of a fancied resemblance to a fictitious character in a cartoon.'
  'Yes, I suppose that was it really.'
  The senator looked at his wife as much as to say: 'Significant people, huh!'
• My mind reeled; after the parrot-house fever of my wife's party, and unplumbed emotions of the afternoon, after all the exertions of my wife's pleasures in New York, after the months of solitude in the steaming, green shadows of the jungle, this was too much. I felt like Lear on the heath, like the Duchess of Malfi bayed by madmen.
• Bridey has two rooms up in the dome, next to Nanny Hawkins, part of the old nurseries. He's like a character from Chekhov... '...Rex's parties! Politics and money. They can't do anything except for money; if they walk round the lake they have to make bets about how many swans they see...
• I hadn't thought about religion before; I haven't since; but just at that time, when I was waiting for the birth, I thought, 'That's one thing I can give her. It doesn't seem to have done me much good, but my child shall have it.' It was odd, wanting to give something one had—lost oneself. Then, in the end, I couldn't even give that: I couldn't even give her life.
• Once I said, 'You are standing guard over your sadness.'
  'It's all I have earned. You said yesterday. My wages.'
  'An I.O.U. from life. A promise to pay on demand.'
• It was no time for the sweets of luxury; they would come, in their season, with the swallow and the lime flowers. Now on the rough water there was a formality to be observed, no more. It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.
• 'You mustn't disappoint the children.'
  'No.' Her children, my art, the two mysteries of our trades.
• I heard her unmoved, and suddenly realized that she was powerless to hurt me any more; I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest.
• It seemed to me that there was something a little gentlemanly about your painting. You must remember I am not English; I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals... what did I find? Charm again. 'Not quite my cup of tea,' I thought; 'this is too English.' I have the fancy for rather spicy things,... what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.'...  I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. 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.'
• '...That I should live to see my country, the land of Clive and Nelson...'
  '...My country of Hawkins and Drake.'
  '...My country of Palmerston... '
  'Would you very much mind not doing that?' said Grizel to the columnist, who had been attempting in a maudlin manner to twist her wrist; 'I don't happen to enjoy it.'
  'I wonder which is the more horrible,' I said, 'Celia's Art and Fashion or Rex's Politics and Money.'...
  '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.'
• 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 sepulchre 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. <>  'No way back; the gates barred; all the saints and angels posted along the walls. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down; the old man with lupus and the forked stick who limps out at nightfall to turn the rubbish, hoping for something to put in his sack, something marketable, turns away with disgust.
• 'Nameless and dead, like the baby they wrapped up and took away before I had seen her.'
• It hurt to think of Cordelia growing up 'quite plain'; to think of all that burning love spending itself on serum-injections and delousing powder. When she arrived, tired from her journey, rather shabby, moving in the manner of one who has no interest in pleasing, I thought her an ugly woman... She seemed brisk and matter-of-fact, steeped in the atmosphere of camp and dressing-station, so accustomed to gross suffering as to lose the finer shades of pleasure. She looked more than her twenty-six years; hard living had roughened her; constant intercourse in a foreign tongue had worn away the nuances of speech;
• 'It's frightening,' Julia once said, 'to think how completely you have forgotten Sebastian.'
  'He was the forerunner.'...
  perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that other 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.'
  I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days.
• Then they went to Greece when Kurt got well. You know how Germans sometimes seem to discover a sense of decency when they get to a classical country.
• 'Have you told Julia this about Sebastian?'
  'The substance of it; not quite as I told you. She never loved him, you know, as we do.'
  'Do'. The word reproached me; there was no past tense in Cordelia's verb 'to love'.
• 'It's funny,' she said, 'that's exactly the word I thought of for you and Julia. When we were up in the nursery with nanny. 'Thwarted passion,' I thought.' <> She spoke with that gentle, infinitesimal inflection of mockery which descended to her from her mother, but later that evening the words came back to me poignantly.
• Fortunately the two men took a liking to one another, and the thing was solved in a series of three-cornered discussions with Cordelia. Plender and Wilcox became joint grooms of the chambers, like 'Blues' and Life Guards with equal precedence,
• 'Certainly. It's papa's to leave as he likes. I think you and I could be very happy here.' <> 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.
• war was growing nearer, too—we neither of us doubted that—but Julia's tender, remote, it sometimes seemed, desperate longing did not come from any uncertainty outside herself; it suddenly darkened, too, into brief accesses of hate when she seemed to throw herself against the restraints of her love for me like a caged animal against the bars.
• 'Just go on—alone. How can I tell what I shall do? You know the whole of me. You know I'm not one for a life of mourning. I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. 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.
• '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.'