by Evelyn Waugh
One afternoon in November Julia and I stood at a window in the drawing-room watching the wind at work stripping the lime trees, sweeping down the yellow leaves, sweeping them up and round and along the terrace and lawns, trailing them through puddles and over the wet grass, pasting them on walls and window-panes, leaving them at length in sodden piles against the stonework.
‘We shan’t see them in spring,’ said Julia; ‘perhaps never again.’
‘Once before,’ I said, ‘I went away, thinking I should never return.’
‘Perhaps years later, to what’s left of it, with what’s left of us…’
A door opened and shut in the darkling room behind us. Wilcox approached through the firelight into the dusk about the long windows.
‘A telephone message, my Lady, from Lady Cordelia.’
‘Lady Cordelia! Where was she?’
‘In London, my Lady.’
‘Wilcox, how lovely! Is she coming home?’
‘She was just starting for the station. She will be here after dinner.’
‘I haven’t seen her for twelve years,’ I said — not since the evening when we dined together and she spoke of being a nun; the evening when I painted the drawing-room at Marchmain House. ‘She was an enchanting child.’
‘She’s had an odd life. First, the convent; then, when that was no good, the war in Spain. I’ve not seen her since then. The other girls, who went with the ambulance came back when the war was over; she stayed on, getting people back to their homes, helping in the prison-camps. An odd girl. She’s grown up quite plain, you know.’
‘Does she know about us?’
‘Yes, she wrote me a sweet letter.’
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. It was odd, I thought, how the same ingredients, differently dispensed, could produce Brideshead, Sebastian, Julia, and her. She was unmistakably their sister, without any of Julia’s or Sebastian’s grace, without Brideshead’s gravity. 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; she straddled a little as she sat by the fire, and when she said, ‘It’s wonderful to be home,’ it sounded to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.
Those were the impressions of the first half hour, sharpened by the contrast with Julia’s white skin and silk and jewelled hair and with my memories of her as a child.
‘My job’s over in Spain,’ she said; ‘the authorities were very polite, thanked me for all I’d done, gave me a medal, and sent me packing. It looks as though there’ll be plenty of the same sort of work over here soon.’
Then she said: ‘Is it too late to see nanny?’
‘No, she sits up to all hours with her wireless.’
We went up, all three together, to the old nursery. Julia and I always spent part of our day there. Nanny Hawkins and my father were two people who seemed impervious to change, neither an hour older than when I first knew them. A wireless set had now been added to Nanny Hawkins’ small assembly of pleasures — the rosary, the Peerage with its neat brown-paper wrapping protecting the red and gold covers, the photographs, and holiday souvenirs — on her table. When we broke it to her that Julia and I were to be married, she said: ‘Well, dear, I hope it’s all for the best,’ for it was not part of her religion to question the propriety of Julia’s actions.
Brideshead had never been a favourite with her; she greeted the news of his engagement with: ‘He’s certainly taken long enough to make up his mind,’ and, when the search through Debrett afforded no information about Mrs Muspratt’s connections: ‘She’s caught him, I daresay.’
We found her, as always in the evening, at the fireside with her teapot, and the wool rug she was making.
‘I knew you’d be up,’ she said. ‘Mr Wilcox sent to tell me you were coming.’
‘I brought you some lace.’
‘Well, dear, that is nice. Just like her poor Ladyship used to wear at mass. Though why they made it black I never did understand, seeing lace is white naturally. That is very welcome, I’m sure.’
‘May I turn off the wireless, nanny?’
‘Why, of course; I didn’t notice it was on, in the pleasure of’ seeing you. What have you done to your hair?’
‘I know it’s terrible. I must get all that put right now I’m back. Darling nanny.’
As we sat there talking, and I saw Cordelia’s fond eyes on all of us, I began to realize that she, too, had a beauty of her own.
‘I saw Sebastian last month.’
‘What a time he’s been gone! Was he quite well?’
‘Not very. That’s why I went. It’s quite near you know from Spain to Tunis. He’s with the monks there.’
‘I hope they look after him properly. I expect they find him a regular handful. He always sends to me at Christmas, but it’s not the same as having him home. Why you must all always be going abroad I never did understand. Just like his Lordship. When there was that talk about going to war with Munich, I said to myself, “There’s Cordelia and Sebastian and his Lordship all abroad; that’ll be very awkward for them.”‘
‘I wanted him to come home with me, but he wouldn’t. He’s got a beard now, you know, and he’s very religious.’
‘That I won’t believe, not even if I see it. He was always a little heathen. Brideshead was one for church, not Sebastian. And a beard, only fancy; such a nice fair skin as he had; always looked clean though he’d not been near water all day, while Brideshead there was no doing anything with, scrub as you might.’
‘It’s frightening,’ Julia once said, ‘to think how completely you have forgotten Sebastian.’
‘He was the forerunner.’
‘That’s what you said ‘in the storm. I’ve thought since, perhaps I am only a forerunner, too.’
‘Perhaps,’ I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke — a thought to fade and vanish like, smoke without a trace — ‘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.
‘That’s cold comfort for a girl,’ she said when I tried to explain. ‘How do I know I shan’t suddenly turn out to be somebody else? It’s an easy way to chuck.’
I had not forgotten Sebastian; every stone of the house had a memory of him, and hearing him spoken of by Cordelia as someone she had seen a month ago, my lost friend filled my thoughts. When we left the nursery, I said, ‘I want to hear all about Sebastian.’
‘Tomorrow. It’s a long story.’
And next day, walking through the windswept park, she told me:
‘I heard he was dying,’ she said. ‘A journalist in Burgos told me, who’d just arrived from North Africa. A down-and-out called Flyte, who people said was an English lord, whom the fathers had found starving and taken in at a monastery near Carthage. That was how the story reached me. I knew it couldn’t be quite true — however little we did for Sebastian, he at least got his money sent him — but I started off at once.
‘It was all quite easy. I went to the consulate first and they knew all about him; he was in the infirmary of the head house of some missionary fathers. T
he consul’s story was that Sebastian had turned up in Tunis one day in a motor bus from Algiers, and had applied to be taken on as a missionary lay-brother. The Fathers took one look at him and turned him down. Then he started drinking. He lived in a little hotel on the edge of the Arab quarter. I went to see the place later; it was a bar with a few rooms over it, kept by a Greek, smelling of hot oil and garlic and stale wine and old clothes, a place where the small Greek traders came and played draughts and listened to the wireless. He stayed there a month drinking Greek absinthe, occasionally wandering out, they didn’t know where, coming back and drinking again. They were afraid he would come to harm and followed him sometimes, but he only went to the church or took a car to the monastery outside the town. They loved him there. He’s still loved, you see, wherever he goes, whatever condition he’s in. It’s a thing about him he’ll never lose. You should have heard the proprietor and his family talk of him, tears running down their cheeks; they’d clearly robbed him right and left, but they’d looked after him and tried to make him eat his food. That was the thing that shocked them about him; that he wouldn’t eat; there he was with all that money, so thin. Some of the clients of the place came in while we were talking in very peculiar’ French; they all had the same story; such a good man, they said, it made them unhappy to see him so low. They thought very ill of his family for leaving him like that; it couldn’t happen with their people, they said, and I daresay they’re right.
‘Anyway, that was later; after the consulate I went straight to the monastery and saw the Superior. He was a grim old Dutchman who had spent fifty years in Central Africa. He told me his part of the story; how Sebastian had turned up, just as the consul said, with his beard and a suitcase, and asked to be admitted as a lay brother. “He was very earnest,” the Superior said’ Cordelia imitated his-guttural tones; she had an aptitude for mimicry, I remembered, in the schoolroom — ‘“Please do not think there is any doubt of that — he is quite sane and quite in earnest.” He wanted to go to the bush, as far away as he could get, among the simplest people, to the cannibals. The Superior said: “We have no cannibals in our missions.” He said, well, pygmies would do, or just a primitive village somewhere on a river, or lepers, lepers would do best of anything. The Superior said: “We have plenty of lepers, but they live in our settlements with doctors and nuns. It is all very orderly.” He thought again, and said perhaps lepers were not what he wanted, was there not some small church by a river — he always wanted a river you see which he could look after when the priest was away. The Superior said: “Yes, there are such churches. Now tell me about yourself.” “Oh, I’m nothing,” he said. “We see some queer fish,”‘ Cordelia lapsed again into mimicry; ‘“he was a queer fish but he was very earnest.” The Superior told him about the novitiate and the training and said: “You are not a young man. You do not seem strong to me.” He said: “No, I don’t want to be trained. I don’t want to do things that need training.” The Superior said: “My friend, you need a missionary for yourself,” and he said: “Yes, of course.” Then he sent him away.
‘Next day he came back again. He had been drinking. He said he had decided to become a novice and be trained. “Well,” said the Superior, “there are certain things that are impossible for a man in the bush. One of them is drinking. It is not the worst thing, but it is nevertheless quite fatal. I sent him away.” Then he kept coming two or three times a week, always drunk, until the Superior gave orders that the porter was to keep him out. I said, “Oh dear, I’m afraid he was a terrible nuisance to you,” but of course that’s a thing they don’t understand in a place like that. The Superior simply said, “I did not think there was anything I could do to help him except pray.” He was a very holy old man and recognized it in others.’
‘Holiness?’
‘Oh yes, Charles, that’s what you’ve got to understand about Sebastian.
‘Well, 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’s been ever since.
‘I stayed a fortnight with him till he was over the worst of his illness. He looked terrible, any age, rather bald with a straggling beard, but he had his old sweet manner.
They’d given him a room to himself; it was barely more than a monk’s cell with a bed and a crucifix and white walls. At first he couldn’t talk much and was not at all surprised to see me; then he was surprised and wouldn’t talk much, until just before I was going, when he told me all that had been happening to him. It was mostly about Kurt, his German friend. Well, you met him, so you know all about that. He sounds gruesome, but as long as Sebastian had him to look after, he was happy. He told me he’d practically given up drinking at one time while he and Kurt lived together. Kurt was ill and had a wound that wouldn’t heal. Sebastian saw him through that. 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. It seems to have worked With Kurt. Sebastian says he became quite human in Athens. Then he got sent to prison; I couldn’t quite make out why; apparently it wasn’t particularly his fault — some brawl with an official. Once he was locked up the German authorities got at him. It was the time when they were rounding up all their nationals from all parts of the world to make them into Nazis. Kurt didn’t want to leave Greece, but the Greeks didn’t want him, and he was marched straight from prison with a lot of other toughs into a German boat and shipped home.
‘Sebastian went after him, and for a year could find no trace. Then in the end he ran him to earth dressed as a storm-trooper in a provincial town. At first he wouldn’t have anything to do with Sebastian; spouted all the official jargon about the rebirth of his country, and his belonging to his country, and finding self-realization in the life of the race. But it was only skin deep with him. Six years of Sebastian had taught him more than a year of Hitler; eventually he chucked it, admitted he hated Germany, and wanted to get out. I don’t know how much it was simply the call of the easy life, sponging on Sebastian, bathing in the Mediterranean, sitting about in cafés, having his shoes polished. Sebastian says it wasn’t entirely that; Kurt had just begun to grow up in Athens. It may be he’s right. Anyway, he decided to try and get out. But it didn’t work. He always got into trouble whatever he did, Sebastian said. They caught him and put him in a concentration camp. Sebastian couldn’t get near him or hear a word of him; he couldn’t even find what camp he was in; he hung about for nearly a year in Germany, drinking again, until one day in his cups he took up with a man who was just out of the camp where Kurt had been, and learned that he had hanged himself in his hut the first week.
‘So that was the end of Europe for Sebastian. He went back to Morocco, where he had been happy, and gradually drifted down the coast, from place to place, until one day when he had sobered up — his drinking goes in pretty regular bouts now — he conceived the idea of escaping to the savages. And there he was.
‘I didn’t suggest his coming home. I knew he wouldn’t and he was too weak still to argue it out. 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 suppose I’m something of the sort myself But as I don’t happen to drink, I’m more employable.’
We had reached the turn in our walk, the stone bridge at the foot of the last and smallest lake, under which the swollen waters fell in a cataract to the stream below; beyond, the path doubled back towards the house. We paused at the parapet looking down into the dark water.
‘I once had a governess who jumped off this bridge and drowned herself.’
; ‘Yes, I know.’
‘How could you know?’
‘It was the first thing I ever heard about you — before I ever met you.’
‘How very odd…’
‘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’.
‘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 favourite 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 dishevelled 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 Home 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 last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.’