Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Evelyn Waugh
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical World War II Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
ET IN ACARDIA EGO
‘I HAVE been here before,’ I said; I had been there before; first with
Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the
ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the
scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been
there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart
returned on this, my latest. That day, too, I had come not knowing my
destination. It was Eights Week. Oxford – submerged now and obliterated,
irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding -in –
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. Here,
discordantly, in Eights Week, came a rabble of womankind, some hundreds
strong, twittering and fluttering over the cobbles and up the steps, sightseeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup, eating cucumber
sandwiches; pushed in punts about the river, herded in droves to the college
barges; greeted in the Isis and in the Union by a sudden display of peculiar,
facetious, wholly distressing Gilbert-and-Sullivan badinage, and by peculiar
choral effects in the College chapels. Echoes of the intruders penetrated
every corner, and in my own College was no echo, but an original fount of
the grossest disturbance. We were giving a ball.
The front quad, where I
lived, was floored and tented; palms and azaleas were banked round the
porter’s lodge; worst of all, the don who lived above me, a mouse of a man
connected with the Natural Sciences, had lent his rooms for a Ladies’
Cloakroom, and a printed notice proclaiming this outrage hung not six
inches from my oak. No one felt more strongly about it than my scout.
‘Gentlemen who haven’t got ladies are asked as far as possible to take their
meals out in the next few days,’ he announced despondently.
‘Will you be
lunching in?’ ‘No, Lunt.’ ‘So as to give the servants a chance, they say. What
a chance! I’ve got to buy a pin-cushion for the Ladies’ Cloakroom. What do
they want with dancing? I don’t see the reason in it. There never was
dancing before in Eights Week. Commem. now is another matter being in
the vacation, but not in Eights Week, as if teas and the river wasn’t enough.
If you ask me, sir, it’s all on account of the war. It couldn’t have happened
but for that.
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