A Question of Upbringing

1

THE MEN AT WORK at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes. Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. One of them, a spare fellow in blue overalls, taller than the rest, with a jocular demeanour and long, pointed nose like that of a Shakespearian clown, suddenly stepped forward, and as if performing a rite, cast some substance — apparently the remains of two kippers, loosely wrapped in newspaper — on the bright coals of the fire, causing flames to leap fiercely upward, smoke curling about in eddies of the north-east wind. As the dark fumes floated above the houses, snow began to fall gently from a dull sky, each flake giving a small hiss as it reached the bucket. The flames died down again; and the men, as if required observances were for the moment at an end, all turned away from the fire, lowering themselves laboriously into the pit, or withdrawing to the shadows of their tarpaulin shelter. The grey, undecided flakes continued to come down, though not heavily, while a harsh odour, bitter and gaseous, penetrated the air. The day was drawing in. For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world — legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea — scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance. Classical associations made me think, too, of days at school, where so many forces, hitherto unfamiliar, had become in due course uncompromisingly clear.

*

As winter advanced in that river valley, mist used to rise in late afternoon and spread over the flooded grass; until the house and all the outskirts of the town were enveloped in opaque, chilly vapour, tinted like cigar-smoke. The house looked on to other tenement-like structures, experiments in architectural insignificance, that intruded upon a central concentration of buildings, commanding and antiquated, laid out in a quadrilateral, though irregular, style. Silted-up residues of the years smouldered uninterruptedly — and not without melancholy — in the maroon brickwork of these medieval closes: beyond the cobbles and archways of which (in a more northerly direction) memory also brooded, no less enigmatic and inconsolable, among water-meadows and avenues of trees: the sombre demands of the past becoming at times almost suffocating in their insistence.

Running westward in front of the door, a metalled road continued into open country of a coarser sort than these gothic parklands — fields: railway arches: a gas-works: and then more fields — a kind of steppe where the climate seemed at all times extreme: sleet: wind: or sultry heat; a wide territory, loosely enclosed by inflexions of the river, over which the smells of the gasometer, recalled perhaps by the fumes of the coke fire, would come and go with intermittent strength. Earlier in the month droves of boys could be seen drifting in bands, and singly, along this trail, migrating tribes of the region, for ever on the move: trudging into exile until the hour when damp clouds began once more to overwhelm the red houses, and to contort or veil crenellations and pinnacles beyond. Then, with the return of the mist, these nomads would reappear again, straggling disconsolately back to their deserted habitations. By this stage of the year — exercise no longer contestable five days a week — the road was empty; except for Widmerpool, in a sweater once white and cap at least a size too small, hobbling unevenly, though with determination, on the flat heels of spiked running-shoes. Slowly but surely he loomed through the dusk towards me as I walked back — well wrapped-up, I remember — from an expedition to the High Street. Widmerpool was known to go voluntarily for “a run” by himself every afternoon. This was his return trotting across the plough in drizzle that had been falling since early school. I had, of course, often seen him before, because we were in the same house; even spoken with him, though he was a bit older than myself. Anecdotes relating to his acknowledged oddness were also familiar; but before that moment such stories had not made him live. It was on the bleak December tarmac of that Saturday afternoon in, I suppose, the year 1921 that Widmerpool, fairly heavily built, thick lips and metal-rimmed spectacles giving his face as usual an aggrieved expression, first took coherent form in my mind. As the damp, insistent cold struck up from the road, two thin jets of steam drifted out of his nostrils, by nature much distended, and all at once he seemed to possess a painful solidarity that talk about him had never conveyed. Something comfortless and inelegant in his appearance suddenly impressed itself on the observer, as stiffly, almost majestically, Widmerpool moved on his heels out of the mist.

His status was not high. He had no colours, and although far from being a dunce, there was nothing notable about his work. At this or any other time of year he could be seen training for any games that were in season: in winter solitary running, with or without a football: in summer, rowing “courses” on the river, breathing heavily, the sweat clouding his thick lenses, while he dragged his rigger through the water. So far as I know he never reached even the semi-finals of the events for which he used to enter. Most of the time he was alone, and even when he walked with other boys he seemed in some way separate from them. About the house he was more noticeable than in the open air, because his voice was pitched high and he articulated poorly: as if tongue were too big for mouth. This delivery made his words always appear to protest, a manner of speaking almost predictable from his face. In addition to that distinctly noisy manner of utterance, thick rubber reinforcements on soles and heels caused his boots — he wore boots more often than what Stringham used to call “Widmerpool’s good sensible shoes” — to squeal incessantly: their shrill rhythmic bursts of sound, limited in compass like the notes of a barbaric orchestra, giving warning of his approach along the linoleum of distant passages; their sullen whining dirge seeming designed to express in musical terms the mysteries of an existence of toil and abnegation lived apart from the daily life of the tribe. Perhaps he sounds a grotesque and conspicuous figure. In excess, Widmerpool was neither. He had his being, like many others, in obscurity. The gap in age caused most of my knowledge of him to have come second-hand; and, in spite of this abrupt realisation of him as a person that took place on that winter evening, he would have remained a dim outline to me if he had not at an earlier date, and before my own arrival, made himself already memorable as a new boy, by wearing the wrong kind of overcoat.

At this distance of time I cannot remember precisely what sort of an overcoat Widmerpool was said to have worn in the first instance. Stories about it had grown into legend: so much so that even five or six years later you might still occasionally hear an obtrusive or inappropriate garment referred to as “a Widmerpool;” and Templer, for example, would sometimes say: “I am afraid I’m wearing rather Widmerpool socks to-day,” or, “I’ve bought a wonderfully Widmerpool tie to go home in.” My impression is that the overcoat’s initial deviation from normal was slight, depending on the existence or absence of a belt at the back, the fact that the cut was single- or double-breasted, or, again, irregularity may have had something to do with the collar; perhaps the cloth even, was of the wrong colour or texture.

As a matter of fact the overcoat was only remarkable in itself as a vehicle for the comment it aroused, insomuch that an element in Widmerpool himself had proved indigestible to the community. An overcoat (which never achieved the smallest notoriety) belonging to a boy called Offord whose parents lived in Madeira, where they had possibly purchased the garment, was indeed once pointed out to me as “very like Widmerpool’s.” There was on no occasion the slightest question of Widmerpool being bullied, or even seriously ragged about the matter. On the contrary, his deviation seems scarcely to have been mentioned to him, except by cruder spirits: the coat becoming recognised almost immediately as a traditionally ludicrous aspect of everyday life. Years later, if you questioned his contemporaries on the subject, they were vague in their answers, and would only laugh and say that he wore the coat for a couple of terms; and then, by the time winter came round again, he was found to possess an overcoat of a more conventional sort.

This overcoat gave Widmerpool a lasting notoriety which his otherwise unscintillating career at school could never wholly dispel. How fully he was aware of this reputation it was hard to say. His behaviour certainly indicated that he hoped for more substantial credit with other people than to be known solely on account of a few months given over to out-of-the-way dress. If such was his aim, he was unsuccessful; and the only occasion when I heard these exertions of his receive some small amount of public recognition had been about a month before this, so to speak transcendental, manifestation of himself to me in the mist. Everyone had been summoned to the house library to listen to complaints that Parkinson, captain of games, wanted to make on the subject of general slackness. Parkinson, rather a feeble figure who blushed easily, had ended his little speech with the words: “It is a pity that some of you are not as keen as Widmerpool.” There had been loud laughter at this. Parkinson himself grinned sheepishly, and, as usual, went red, as if he had said something that might be considered, even in his own eyes, more than a little indecent; lightly touching, as his habit was, a constellation of spots accumulated on one of his cheekbones.

Widmerpool himself had not smiled, though he could hardly have failed to notice the laughter. He had stared seriously at his boots with their thick rubber reinforcements, apparently trying to avoid any imputation of priggishness. While he did this, his fingers twitched. His hands were small and gnarled, with nails worn short and cracked, as if he spent his spare time digging with them deep down into the soil. Stringham had said that the nails of the saint who had hollowed his own grave without tools might fairly have competed against Widmerpool’s in a manicure contest. If Widmerpool had not developed boils soon after this crumb of praise had been let fall, he would, by the end of the season, have scraped into the house football team. This achievement, however, was not to be; though from the moment that his ailment began to abate he was training again as hard as ever. Some more popular figure was made twelfth man.

Still pondering on this vision of Widmerpool, I entered the house, encountering in the hall its familiar exhalation of carbolic soap, airing blankets, and cold Irish stew — almost welcoming after the fog outside — and mounted the staircase towards tea. A thick black stripe of paint divided the upper, and yellow, half of the wall from the magenta dado beneath. Above this black line was another, mottled and undulating, where passers-by, up and down the stairs, rested arm or shoulder, discolouring the distemper in a slanting band of grey. Two or three boys were as usual standing in front of the notice-board on the first floor, their eyes fixed on the half-sheets of paper attached by drawing-pins to the green baize, gazing at the scrawled lists and regulations as if intent on a tape-machine liable at any moment to announce the winner. There was nothing more recent than one of the recurrent injunctions emanating from Le Bas, our housemaster, requiring that all boots should be scraped on the scraper, and then once more scoured on the door-mat on entering the hall, to avoid dispersion of mud throughout the house. On the corner of this grubby fiat Stringham, some days before, had drawn a face in red pencil. Several pairs of eyes were now resting glassily on that outward protest against the voice of authority.

Since the beginning of the term I had messed with Stringham and Templer; and I was already learning a lot from them. Both were a shade older than myself, Stringham by about a year. The arrangement was in part a matter of convenience, dictated by the domestic economy of the house: in this case the distribution of teas. I liked and admired Stringham: Templer I was not yet sure about. The latter’s boast that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life did not predispose me in his favour: though he knew far more than I of the things about which books are written. He was also an adept at breaking rules, or diverting them to ends not intended by those who had framed them. Having obtained permission, ostensibly at his parents’ request, to consult an oculist, Templer was spending that day in London. It was unlikely that he would cut this visit short enough to enable him to be back in time for tea, a meal taken in Stringham’s room.

When I came in, Stringham was kneeling in front of the fire, employing a paper-knife shaped like a scimitar as a toasting-fork. Without looking up, he said: “There is a jam crisis.”

He was tall and dark, and looked a little like one of.those stiff, sad young men in ruffs, whose long legs take up so much room in sixteenth-century portraits: or perhaps a younger — and far slighter — version of Veronese’s Alexander receiving the children of Darius after the Battle of Issus: with the same high forehead and suggestion of hair thinning a bit at the temples. His features certainly seemed to belong to that epoch of painting: the faces in Elizabethan miniatures, lively, obstinate, generous, not very happy, and quite relentless. He was an excellent mimic, and, although he suffered from prolonged fits of melancholy, he talked a lot when one of these splenetic fits was not upon him: and ragged with extraordinary violence when excited. He played cricket well enough to rub along: football he took every opportunity of avoiding. I accepted the piece of toast he held out towards me.

“I bought some sausages.”

“Borrow the frying-pan again. We can do them over the fire.”

The room contained two late eighteenth-century coloured prints of racehorses (Trimalchio and The Pharisee, with blue-chinned jockeys) which hung above a picture, cut out of one of the illustrated weeklies and framed in passe-partout, of Stringham’s sister at her wedding; the bridegroom in khaki uniform with one sleeve pinned to his tunic. Over the fireplace was a large, and distinctly florid, photograph of Stringham’s mother, with whom he lived, a beauty, and an heiress, who had remarried the previous year after parting from Stringham’s father. She was a South African. Stuck in the corner of the frame was a snapshot of the elder Stringham, an agreeable-looking man in an open shirt, smoking a pipe with the sun in his eyes. He, too, had remarried, and taken his second, and younger, wife, a Frenchwoman, to Kenya. Stringham did not often talk about his home, and in those days that was all I knew about his family; though Templer had once remarked that “in that direction there was a good deal of money available,” adding that Stringham’s parents moved in circles that lived “at a fairly rapid pace.”

I had been so struck by the conception of Widmerpool, disclosed almost as a new incarnation, shortly before on the road in front of the house, that I described, while the sausages cooked, the manner in which he had materialised in a series of jerks out of the shadows, bearing with him such tokens of despondency. Stringham listened, perforating each of the sausages with the scimitar. He said slowly: “Widmerpool suffers — or suffered — from contortions of the bottom. Dickinson told me that, in the days when the fags used to parade in the library at tea-time, they were all standing by the wall one evening when suddenly there were inarticulate cries. Owing to this infirmity of his, Widmerpool’s legs had unexpectedly given way beneath him.”

“Did he fall?”

“He clung to the moulding of the wall, his feet completely off the ground.”

“What next?”

“He was carted off.”

“I see. Have we any mustard?”

“Now I’ll tell you what I saw happen last summer,” Stringham went on, smiling to himself, and continuing to pierce the sausage. “Peter Templer and I had — for an unaccountable reason — been watching the tail-end of some cricket, and had stopped for a drink on the way back. We found Widmerpool standing by himself with a glass of lemonade in front of him. Some of the Eleven were talking and ragging at the far end of the counter and a skinned banana was thrown. This missed its target and hit Widmerpool. It was a bull’s-eye. The banana was over-ripe and it burst all over his face, knocking his spectacles sideways. His cap came off and he spilt most of the lemonade down the front of his clothes.”

“Characteristic of the Eleven’s throwing-in.”

“Budd himself was responsible. Widmerpool took out his handkerchief and began to clean up the mess. Budd came down the shop, still laughing, and said: “Sorry, Widmerpool. That banana wasn’t intended for you.” Widmerpool was obviously astonished to hear himself addressed by name, and so politely, by no less a person than the Captain of the Eleven — who could only have known what Widmerpool was called on account of the famous overcoat. Budd stood there smiling, showing a lot of those film-star teeth of his, and looking more than ever like the hero of an adventure story for boys.”

“That noble brow.”

“It doesn’t seem to help him to pile up runs,” said Stringham, “any more than do those fine cutting shots of his which photograph so well.”

He paused and shook his head, apparently in sadness at the thought of Budd’s deficiencies as a cricketer; and then continued: “Anyway, Budd — exuding charm at every pore — said: ‘I’m afraid I’ve made you in a bit of a mess, Widmerpool,’ and he stood there inspecting the havoc he had just caused. Do you know an absolutely slavish look came into Widmerpool’s face. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind at all, Budd. It doesn’t matter in the least.’”

Stringham’s dexterity at imitating the manner in which Widmerpool talked was remarkable. He stopped the narrative to put some bread into the fat in which the sausages were frying, and, when this was done, said: “It was as if Widmerpool had experienced some secret and awful pleasure. He had taken off his spectacles and was wiping them, screwing up his eyes, round which there were still traces of banana. He began to blow on the glasses and to rub them with a great show of good cheer. The effect was not at all what might have been hoped. In fact all this heartiness threw the most appalling gloom over the shop. Budd went back to his friends and finished whatever he was eating, or drinking, in deathly silence. The other members of the Eleven — or whoever they were — stopped laughing and began to mutter self-consciously to themselves about future fixtures. All the kick had gone out of them. I have never seen anything like it. Then Budd picked up his bat and pads and gloves and other belongings, and said: ‘I must be getting along now. I’ve got the Musical Society tonight,’ and there was the usual business of ‘Good night, Bill, good night—’”

“‘Good night, Guy… good night, Stephen… good night, John… good night, Ronnie… good night, George…’”

“Exactly,” said Stringham. “‘Good night, Eddie… good night, Simon… good night, Robin…’ and so on and so forth until they had all said good night to each other collectively and individually, and shuffled off together, arm-in-arm. Templer wanted to move because he had to go down-town before lock-up; so we left Widmerpool to himself. He had put on his spectacles again, and straightened his cap, and as we went through the door he was rubbing his gritty little knuckles together, still smiling at his great encounter with Budd.”

The account of this incident, illustrating another of Widmerpool’s aspects, did not at that moment make any deep impression on me. It was like a number of other anecdotes on the subject that circulated from time to time, differing only in the proficiency with which Stringham told his stories. My own renewed awareness of Widmerpool’s personality seemed to me closer and more real. Stringham, however, had not finished with the matter. He said: “As we walked past the fives courts, Templer remarked: ‘I’m glad that ass Widmerpool fielded a banana with his face.’ I asked why he did not like him — for after all there is little harm in the poor old boy — and it turned out that it was Widmerpool who got Akworth sacked.”

Stringham paused to allow this statement to sink in, while he arranged the sausages in a new pattern. I could not recall at all clearly what Akworth’s story had been: though I remembered that he had left the school under a cloud soon after my arrival there, and that various rumours regarding his misdoings had been current at the time.

“Akworth tried to set fire to his room, didn’t he? Or did he steal everything that was not nailed down?”

“He well may have done both,” said Stringham; “but he was principally shot out for sending a note to Peter Templer. Widmerpool intercepted the note and showed it to Le Bas. I must admit that it was news to me when Peter told me.”

“And that was why Peter had taken against Widmerpool?”

“Not only that but Widmerpool got hold of Peter and gave him a tremendous jaw on morals.”

“That must have been very good for him.”

“The jaw went on for so long, and Widmerpool came so close, that Templer said that he thought Widmerpool was going to start something himself.”

" Peter always thinks that about everybody.”

“I agree his conceit is invincible,” said Stringham, turning the sausages thoughtfully, as if contemplating Templer’s vanity.

“Did Widmerpool start anything?” I asked.

“It is a grim thought, isn’t it?”

“What is the answer?”

Stringham laughed. He said: “Peter made an absolutely typical Templer remark when I asked him the same question. He said: ‘No, thank God, but he moved about the room breathing heavily like my sister’s white pekinese. Did you see how pleased he was just now to be noticed by Budd? He looked as if he had just been kissed under the mistletoe. Bloody fool. He’s so wet you could shoot snipe off him.’ Can you imagine a more exquisitely Templer phrase? Anyhow, that is how poor old Widmerpool looks to our little room-mate.”

“But what is he like really?”

“If you are not sure what Widmerpool is like,” said Stringham, “you can’t do better than have another look at him. You will have an opportunity at prayers tonight. These sausages are done.”

He stopped speaking, and, picking up the paper-knife again, held it upright, raising his eyebrows, because at that moment there had been a kind of scuffling outside, followed by a knock on the door: in itself a surprising sound. A second later a wavering, infinitely sad voice from beyond said: “May I come in?”

Obviously this was no boy: the approach sounded unlike a master’s. The hinge creaked, and, as the door began to open, a face, deprecatory and enquiring, peered through the narrow space released between the door and the wall. There was an impression of a slight moustache, grey or very fair, and a well-worn, rather sporting tweed suit. I realised all at once, not without apprehension, that my Uncle Giles was attempting to enter the room.

I had not seen my uncle since the end of the war, when he had been wearing some sort of uniform, though not one of an easily recognisable service. This sudden appearance in Stringham’s room was an unprecedented incursion: the first time that he had found his way here. He delayed entry for a brief period, pressing the edge of the door against his head, the other side of which touched the wall: rigid, as if imprisoned in a cruel trap specially designed to catch him and his like: some ingenious snare, savage in mechanism, though at the same time calculated to preserve from injury the skin of such rare creatures. Uncle Giles’s skin was, in point of fact, not easily injured, though experience of years had made him cautious of assuming as a matter of course that his company would be welcome anywhere — anywhere, at least, where other members of his family might be gathered together. At first, therefore, he did not venture to advance farther into the room, meekly conscious that his unexpected arrival might, not unreasonably, be regarded by the occupants as creating a pivot for potential embarrassment.

“I was just passing through on the way to Reading,” he said. “Thought I might look you up.”

He stood by the door and appeared a little dazed, perhaps overcome by the rich smell of sausages that permeated the atmosphere of the room: possibly reminding him of what might easily have been a scanty luncheon eaten earlier in the day. Why he should be going to Reading was unguessable. If he had come from London, this could hardly be termed “on the way;” but it might well be that Uncle Giles had not come from London. His locations were not, as a rule, made public. Stringham stood up and pushed the sausages on to a plate.

“This is my uncle — Captain Jenkins.”

Checking the sausages with the paper-knife, Stringham said: “I’ll get another cup. You’ll have tea with us, won’t you?”

“Thank you, I never take tea,” said Uncle Giles. “People who eat tea waste half the afternoon. Never wanted to form the habit.” He added: “Of course, I’m not speaking of your sort of tea.”

He looked round at us, as if for sympathy, a bit uncertain as to whether or not this declaration expressed a justifiable attitude towards tea; unsure — and with good reason — if an assertion that he made efforts, however small, to avoid waste of time would prove easily credible, even in the company in which he now found himself. We borrowed a hard chair from next door, and he sat down, blowing his nose into a bandana handkerchief in a series of little grunts.

“Don’t let me keep you fellows from your sausages,” he said. “They will be getting cold. They look damned good to me.”

Neat, and still slightly military in appearance — though he had not held a commission for at least twenty years and “captain” was probably a more or less honorary rank, gazetted to him by himself and the better disposed of his relations — my father’s brother was now about fifty. His arrival that night made it clear that he had not emigrated: a suggestion put forward at one moment to explain his disappearance for a longer period than usual from public view. There had also been some rather uneasy family jokes regarding the possibility of his having overstepped the limits set by the law in the transaction of everyday business, some slip in financial dealings that might account for an involuntary absence from the scene; for Uncle Giles had been relegated by most of the people who knew him at all well to that limbo where nothing is expected of a person, and where more than usually outrageous actions are approached, at least conversationally, as if they constituted a series of practical jokes, more or less enjoyable, according to where responsibility for clearing up matters might fall. The curious thing about persons regarding whom society has taken this largely self-defensive measure is that the existence of the individual himself reaches a pitch when nothing he does can ever be accepted as serious. If he commits suicide, or murder, only the grotesque aspects of the event dominate the circumstances: on the whole, avoidance of such major issues being an integral part of such a condition. My uncle was a good example of the action of this law; though naturally I did not in those days see him with anything like this clearness of vision. If Reading were his destination, there could be no hint of immediate intention to leave the country: and, unless on ticket-of-leave, he was evidently under no sort of legal restraint. He finished blowing his nose, pushed the handkerchief back up his sleeve, and, using without facetious implication a then popular catchword, said: “How’s your father?”

“All right.”

“And your mother?”

“Very well.”

“Good,” said Uncle Giles, as if it were a relief to him personally that my parents were well, even when the rest of the world might feel differently on the same matter.

There was a pause. I asked how his own health had been, at which he laughed scornfully.

“Oh, me,” he said. “I’ve been about the same. Not growing any younger. Trouble with the old duodenal. I rather wanted to get hold of your father about signing some papers. Is he still in Paris? I suppose so.”

“That bit of the Conference is finished.”

“Where is he?”

“London.”

“On leave?”

“Yes.”

“The War Office haven’t decided where they are going to send him?”

“No.”

My uncle looked put out at this piece of news. It was most unlikely, hardly conceivable, that he really intended to impose his company on my father, who had for many years discouraged close association with his brother, except when possessed with an occasional and uncontrollable desire to tell Uncle Giles to his face what he thought of him, a mood that rarely lasted more than thirty-six hours; by the end of which period of time the foredoomed inefficacy of any such contact made itself clear.

“In London, is he?” said Uncle Giles, wrinkling the dry, reddish skin at the sides of his nostrils, under which a web of small grey veins etched on his nose seemed to imply preliminary outlines for a game of noughts-and-crosses. He brought out a leather cigarette-case and — before I could prevent him — lighted a cigarette.

“Visitors are not really supposed to smoke here.”

“Oh, aren’t they?” said Uncle Giles. He looked very surprised. “Why not?”

“Well, if the place smells of smoke, you can’t tell if someone else smokes too.”

“Of course you can’t,” said Uncle Giles readily, blowing, outward a long jet of smoke. He seemed puzzled.

“Le Bas might think a boy had been smoking.”

“Who is Le Bas?”

“Our housemaster.”

How he had managed to find the house if he were ignorant of Le Bas’s identity was mysterious: even inexplicable. It was, however, in keeping with the way my uncle conducted his life that he should reach his destination without knowing the name of the goal. He continued to take small puffs at his cigarette.

“I see,” he said.

“Boys aren’t allowed to smoke.”

“Quite right. Stunts the growth. It is a great mistake to smoke before you are twenty-one.”

Uncle Giles straightened his back and squared his shoulders. One had the impression that he was well aware that young people of the day could scarcely attempt to compete with the rigorous standards that had governed his own youth. He shook his head and flicked some ash on to one of the dirty plates.

“It is a hundred to one Le Bas won’t come in,” said Stringham. “I should take a chance on it.”

“Take a chance on what?” Uncle Giles asked.

“On smoking.”

“You mean I really ought to put this out?”

“Don’t bother.”

“Most certainly I shall bother,” said Uncle Giles. “I should not dream of breaking a rule of that sort. Rules are made to be obeyed, however foolish they may sometimes seem. The question is where had I best put this, now that the regulation has been broken?”

By the time my uncle had decided to extinguish the cigarette on the sole of his shoe, and throw the butt into the fire, there was not much left of it. Stringham collected the ash, which had by now found its way into several receptacles, brushing all of this also into the cinders. For the rest of tea, Uncle Giles, who, for the time being at least, had evidently dismissed from his mind the question of discussing arrangements for meeting my father, discoursed, not very lucidly, on the possibility of a moratorium in connection with German reparations and the fall of the mark. Uncle Giles’s sympathies were with the Germans. “They work hard,” he said. “Therefore they have my respect.” Why he had suddenly turned up in this manner was not yet clear. When tea came to an end he muttered about wanting to discuss family matters, and, after saying good-bye — for my uncle, almost effusively — to Stringham, he followed me along the passage.

“Who was that?” he asked, when we were alone together.

As a rule Uncle Giles took not the slightest interest in anyone or anything except himself and his own affairs — indeed was by this time all but incapable of absorbing even the smallest particle of information about others, unless such information had some immediate bearing on his own case. I was therefore surprised when he listened with, a show of comparative attention to what I could tell him about Stringham’s family. When I had finished, he remarked:

“I used to meet his grandfather in Cape Town.”

“What was he doing there?”

“His mother’s father, that was. He made a huge fortune. Not a bad fellow. Knew all the right people, of course.”

“Diamonds?”

I was familiar with detective stories in which South African millionaires had made their money in diamonds.

“Gold,” said Uncle Giles, narrowing his eyes.

My uncle’s period in South Africa was one of the several stretches of his career not too closely examined by other members of his family — or, if examined, not discussed — and I hoped that he might be about to give some account of experiences I had always been warned not to enquire into. However, he said no more than: “I saw your friend’s mother once when she was married to Lord Warrington and a very good-looking woman she was.”

“Who was Lord Warrington?”

“Much older than she was. He died. Never a good life, Warrington’s. And so you always have tea with young Stringham?”

“And another boy called Templer.”

“Where was Templer?” asked Uncle Giles, rather suspiciously, as if he supposed that someone might have been spying on him unawares, or that he had been swindled out of something.

“In London, having his eyes seen to.”

“What is wrong with his eyes?”

“They ache when he works.”

My uncle thought over this statement, which conveyed in Templer’s own words his personal diagnosis of this ocular complaint. Uncle Giles was evidently struck by some similarity of experience, because he was silent for several seconds. I spoke more about Stringham, but Uncle Giles had come to the end of his faculty for absorbing statements regarding other people. He began to tap with his knuckles on the window-pane, continuing this tattoo until I had given up attempting, so far as I knew it, to describe Stringham’s background.

“It is about the Trust,” said Uncle Giles, coming abruptly to the end of his drumming, and adopting a manner at once accusing and seasoned with humility.

The Trust, therefore, was at the bottom of this visitation. The Trust explained this arrival by night in winter. If I had thought harder, such an explanation might have occurred to me earlier; but at that age I cannot pretend that I felt greatly interested in the Trust, a subject so often ventilated in my hearing. Perhaps the enormous amount of time and ingenuity that had been devoted by other members of my family to examining the Trust from its innumerable aspects had even decreased for me its intrinsic attraction. In fact the topic bored me. Looking back, I can understand the fascination that the Trust possessed for my relations: especially for those, like Uncle Giles, who benefited from it to a greater or lesser degree. In those days the keenness of their interest seemed something akin to madness.

The money came from a great-aunt, who had tied it up in such a way as to raise what were, I believe, some quite interesting questions of legal definition. In addition to this, one of my father’s other brothers, Uncle Martin, also a beneficiary, a bachelor, killed at the second battle of the Marne, had greatly complicated matters, although there was not a great deal of money to divide, by leaving a will of his own devising, which still further secured the capital without making it absolutely clear who should enjoy the interest. My father and Uncle Giles had accordingly come to a “gentleman’s agreement” on the subject of their respective shares (which brought in about one hundred and eighty-five pounds annually, or possibly nearly two hundred in a good year); but Uncle Giles had never been satisfied that he was receiving the full amount to which he was by right entitled: so that when times were hard — which happened about every eighteen months — he used to apply pressure with a view to squeezing out a few pounds more than his agreed portion. The repetition of these tactics, forgotten for a time and then breaking out again like one of Uncle Giles’s duodenal ulcers, had the effect of making my father exceedingly angry; and, taken in conjunction with the rest of my uncle’s manner of life, they had resulted in an almost complete severance of relations between the two brothers.

“As you probably know,” said Uncle Giles, “I owe your father a small sum of money. Nothing much. Decent of him to have given me the use of it, all the same. Some brothers wouldn’t have done as much. I just wanted to tell him that I proposed to let him have the sum in question back.”

This proposal certainly suggested an act to which, on the face of it, there appeared no valid objection; but my uncle, perhaps from force of habit, continued to approach the matter circumspectly. “It is just a question of the trustees,” he said once or twice; and he proceeded to embark on explanations that seemed to indicate that he had some idea of presenting through myself the latest case for the adjustment of his revenue: tacking on repayment of an ancient debt as a piece of live bait. Any reason that might have been advanced earlier for my becoming the medium in these negotiations, on the grounds that my father was still out of England, had been utterly demolished by the information that he was to be found in London. However, tenacity in certain directions — notably that of the Trust — was one of Uncle Giles’s characteristics. He was also habitually unwilling to believe that altered circumstances might affect any matter upon which he had already made up his mind. He therefore entered now upon a comprehensive account of the terms of the Trust, his own pecuniary embarrassment, the forbearance he had shown in the past — both to his relations and the world at large — and the reforms he suggested for the future.

“I’m not a great business expert,” he said, “I don’t claim to be a master brain of finance or anything of that sort. The only training I ever had was to be a soldier. We know how much use that is. All the same, I’ve had a bit of experience in my day. I’ve knocked about the world and roughed it. Perhaps I’m not quite so green as I look.”

Uncle Giles became almost truculent for a man with normally so quiet a manner when he said this; as if he expected that I was prepared to argue that he was indeed “green,” or, through some other similar failing, unsuited to run his own affairs. I felt, on the contrary, that in some ways it had to be admitted that he was unusually well equipped for looking after himself: in any case a subject I should not have taken upon myself to dispute with him. There was, therefore, nothing to do but agree to pass on anything he had to say. His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.

“Quand même,” he said at the end of a tremendous parade of facts and figures, “I suppose there is such a thing as family feeling?”

I mumbled.

“After all there was the Jenkins they fought the War of Jenkins’s Ear about.”

“Yes.”

“We are all descended from him.”

“Not directly.”

“Collaterally then.”

“It has never been proved, has it?”

“What I mean is that he has a relation and that should keep us together.”

“Well, our ancestor, Hannibal Jenkins, of Cwm Shenkin, paid the Hearth Tax in 1674 —”

Perhaps justifiably, Uncle Giles made a gesture as if to dismiss pedantry — and especially genealogical pedantry — in all its protean shapes: at the same time picking up his hat. He said: “All I mean is that just because I am a bit of a radical, it doesn’t mean that I believe tradition counts for nothing.”

“Of course not.”

“Don’t think that for a moment.”

“Not a bit.”

“Then you will put it to your father?”

“All right.”

“Can you get leave to walk with me as far as the station?”

“No.”

We set off together down the stairs, Uncle Giles continually stopping on the way to elaborate points omitted in his earlier argument. This was embarrassing, as other boys were hanging about the passages, and I tried, without success, to hurry him along. The front door was locked, and Cattle, the porter, had to be found to obtain the key. For a time we wandered about in a kind of no-man’s-land of laundry baskets and coke, until Cattle, more or less asleep, was at last discovered in the boot-room. A lumbering, disagreeable character, he unlocked the door under protest, letting into the house a cloud of fog. Uncle Giles reached the threshold and plunged his hand deep into his trouser, pocket as if in search of a coin: stood for what seemed an age sunk in reverie: thought better of an earlier impulse: and stepped briskly out into the mist with a curt “Good night to you.” He was instantly swallowed up in the gloom, and I was left standing on the steps with Cattle, whose grousing, silenced for the passage of time during which there had seemed hope of money changing hands, now began to rumble again like the buzz of distant traffic. As I returned slowly up the stairs, this sound of complaint sank to a low growling, punctuated with sharp clangs as the door was once more laboriously locked, bolted, and chained.

On the whole it could not be said that one felt better for Uncle Giles’s visit. He brought with him some fleeting suggestion, always welcome at school, of an outside world: though against this had to be weighed the disturbing impact of home-life in school surroundings: even home-life in its diminished and undomestic embodiment represented by my uncle. He was a relation: a being who had in him perhaps some of the same essence that went towards forming oneself as a separate entity. Would one’s adult days be spent in worrying about the Trust? What was he going to do at Reading? Did he manage to have quite a lot of fun, or did he live in perpetual hell? These were things to be considered. Some apology for his sudden appearance seemed owed to Stringham: after that, I might try to do some work to be dealt with over the week-end.

When I reached the door I heard a complaining voice raised inside the room. Listening for a moment, I recognised the tone as Le Bas’s. He was not best pleased. I went in. Le Bas had come to find Templer, and was now making a fuss about the cigarette smoke.

“Here is Jenkins, sir,” said Stringham. “He has just been seeing his uncle out of the house.”

He glanced across at me, putting on an expression to indicate that the ball was now at my foot. The room certainly smelt abominably of smoke when entered from the passage. Le Bas was evidently pretty angry.

He was a tall, untidy man, clean-shaven and bald with large rimless spectacles that gave him a curiously Teutonic appearance: like a German priest. Whenever he removed these spectacles he used to rub his eyes vigorously with the back of his hand, and, perhaps as a result of this habit, his eyelids looked chronically red and sore. On some occasions, especially when vexed, he had the habit of getting into unusual positions, stretching his legs far apart and putting his hands on his hips; or standing at attention with heels together and feet turned outwards so far that it seemed impossible that he should not overbalance and fall flat on his face. Alternatively, especially when in a good humour, he would balance on the fender, with each foot pointing in the same direction. These postures gave him the air of belonging to some highly conventionalised form of graphic art: an oriental god, or knave of playing cards. He found difficulty with the letter “R,” and spoke — like Widmerpool — rather as if he were holding an object about the size of a nut in his mouth. To overcome this slight impediment he was careful to make his utterance always slow and very distinct. He was unmarried.

“Stringham appears to think that you can explain, Jenkins, why this room is full of smoke.”

“I am afraid my uncle came to see me, sir. He lit a cigarette without thinking.”

“Where is your uncle?”

“I have just been getting Cattle to let him out of the house.”

“How did he get in?”

“I think he came in at the front door, sir. I am not sure.”

I watched Stringham, from where he stood behind Le Bas, make a movement as of one climbing a rope, following these gestures with motions of his elbows to represent the beating of wings, both dumb-shows no doubt intended to demonstrate alternative methods of ingress possibly employed by Uncle Giles.

“But the door is locked.”

“I suppose he must have come in before Cattle shut the door, sir.”

“You both of you —” he turned towards Stringham to include him in the indictment “ — know perfectly well that visitors are not allowed to smoke in the house.”

He certainly made it sound a most horrible offence. Quite apart from all the bother that this was going to cause, I felt a twinge of regret that I had not managed to control Uncle Giles more effectively: insomuch that I had been brought up to regard any form of allowing him his head as a display of weakness on the part of his own family.

“Of course as soon as he was told, sir …”

“But why is there this smell?”

Le Bas spoke as if smoking were bad enough in all conscience: but that, if people must smoke, they might at least be expected to do so without the propagation of perceptible fumes. Stringham said: “I think the stub — the fag-end, sir — may have smouldered. It might have been a Turkish cigarette. I believe they have a rather stronger scent than Virginian.”

He looked round the room, and lifted a cushion from. one of the chairs, shaking his. head and sniffing. This was not the sort of conduct to improve a bad situation. Le Bas, although he disliked Templer, had never showed any special animus against Stringham or myself. Indeed Stringham was rather a favourite of his, because he was quick at knowing the sources of the quotations that Le Bas, when in a good temper, liked to make. However, like most schoolmasters, he was inclined to feel suspicious of all boys in his house as they grew older; not because he was in any sense an unfriendly man, though abrupt and reserved, but simply on account of the increased difficulty in handling the daily affairs of creatures who tended less and less to fit into a convenient and formalised framework: or, at least, a framework that was convenient to Le Bas because he himself had formalised it. That was how Le Bas’s attitude of mind appeared to me in later years. At the time of his complaint about Uncle Giles’s cigarette, he merely seemed to Stringham and myself a dangerous lunatic, to be humoured and outwitted.

“How am I to know that neither of you smoked too?” he said, sweeping aside the persistent denials that both of us immediately offered. “How can I possibly tell?”

He sounded at the same time angry and despairing. He said: “You must write a letter to your uncle, Jenkins, and ask him to give his word that neither of you smoked.”

“But I don’t know his address, sir. All I know is that he was on his way to Reading.”

“By car?”

“By train, I think, sir.”

“Nonsense, nonsense,” said Le Bas. “Not know your own uncle’s address? Get it from your parents if necessary. I shall make myself very objectionable to you both until I see that letter.”

He raised his hands from his sides a little way, and clenched his fists, as if he were about to leap high into the air like an athlete, or ballet dancer; and in this taut attitude he seemed to be considering how best to carry out his threat, while he breathed heavily inward as if to imbibe the full savour of sausages and tobacco smoke that still hung about the room. At that moment there was a sound of talking, and some laughter, in the passage. The door was suddenly flung open, and Templer burst into the room. He was brought up short by the sight of Le Bas: in whom Templer immediately called up a new train of thought.

“Ah, Templer, there you are. You went to London, didn’t you? What time did your train get in this evening?”

“It was late, sir,” said Templer, who seemed more than usually pleased with himself, though aware that there might be trouble ahead: he dropped his voice a little: “I couldn’t afford a cab, sir, so I walked.”

He had a thin face and light blue eyes that gave out a perpetual and quite mechanical sparkle: at first engaging: then irritating: and finally a normal and inevitable aspect of his features that one no longer noticed. His hair came down in a sharp angle on the forehead and his large pointed ears were like those attributed to satyrs, “a race amongst whom Templer would have found some interests in common,” as Stringham had said, when Templer’s ears had been dignified by someone with this classical comparison. His eyes flashed and twinkled now like the lamps of a lighthouse as he fixed them on Le Bas, while both settled down to a duel about the railway time-table. Although Templer fenced with skill, it seemed pretty clear that he would be forced, in due course, to admit that he had taken a train later than that prescribed by regulations. But Le Bas, who not uncommonly forgot entirely about the matter in hand, suddenly seemed to lose interest in Templer’s train and its time of arrival (just as he had for the moment abandoned the subject of Uncle Giles’s cigarette); and he hurried away, muttering something about Greek unseens. For the moment we were free of him. Templer sat down in the arm-chair.

“Did he come in when you were having a gasper?” he said. “The room reeks as if camels had been stabled in it.”

“You don’t suppose we should be such fools as to smoke in the house,” said Stringham. “It was Jenkins’s uncle. But my dear Peter, why do you always go about dressed as if you were going to dance up and down a row of naked ladies singing ‘Dapper Dan was a very handy man,’ or something equally lyrical? You get more like an advertisement for gents’ tailoring every day.”

“I think it is rather a good get-up for London,” said Templer, examining a handful of his suit. “Every item chosen with thought, I can assure you.”

Stringham said: “If you’re not careful you will suffer the awful fate of the man who always knows the right clothes to wear and the right shop to buy them at.”

Templer laughed. He had a kind of natural jauntiness that seemed to require to be helped out by more than ordinary attention to what he wore: a quality that might in the last resort save him from Stringham’s warning picture of the dangers of dressing too well. As a matter of fact, although he used to make fun of him to his face, Stringham was stimulated, perhaps a little impressed, by Templer; however often he might repeat that: “Peter Templer’s affectation that he has to find time to smoke at least one pipe a day bores me to death: nor did it cut any ice with me when he pointed out the empty half-bottle of whisky he had deposited behind the conservatory in Le Bas’s garden.” The previous summer, Stringham and Templer had managed to attend a race-meeting together one half-holiday afternoon without being caught. Such adventures I felt to be a bit above my head, though I enjoyed hearing about them. I was, as I have said, not yet sure that I really liked Templer. His chief subjects of conversation were clothes, girls, and the persecutions of Le Bas, who, always sensitive to the possibility of being ragged, tended to make himself unnecessarily disagreeable in any quarter that might reasonably be thought to arouse special apprehension. Besides this, Templer could not possibly be looked upon as a credit to the house. He was not much of a hand at the sort of games that are played at school (though his build made him good at tennis and golf), so that he was in a weak position, being fairly lazy at work, to withstand prolonged aggression from a housemaster. Consequently Templer was involved in a continuous series of minor rows. The question of the train was evidently to become the current point for Le Bas’s attack.

“Well, that all seems to have blown over for the moment,” Stringham said. “You ought to keep your uncles in better order, Jenkins.”

I explained that Uncle Giles was known for being impossible to keep in order, and that he always left trouble in his wake. Templer said: “I suppose Le Bas will go on pestering about that train. You know, I used to be a great pet of his. Now his only object seems to be to get me sacked.”

“He ought to be able to bring that off sooner or later with your help,” said Stringham. “After all he is not an absolute fool: though pretty near it.”

“I believe he was quite an oar in his youth,” said Templer. “At least he won the Diamond Sculls. Still, past successes at Henley don’t make him any more tolerable to deal with as a housemaster.”

“He started life as a poet,” Stringham said. “Did you know that? Years ago, after coming back from a holiday in Greece, he wrote some things that he thought were frightfully good. He showed them to someone or other who pointed out that, as a matter of fact, they were frightfully bad. Le Bas never got over it.”

“I can’t imagine anything more appalling than a poem by Le Bas,” said Templer, “though I’m surprised he doesn’t make his pupils learn them.”

“Who did he show them to?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Stringham. “Henry James, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or someone like that.”

“Who on earth told you?”

“An elderly character who came to lunch. I believe he is an ambassador somewhere; or was. He used to run round with the same gang as Le Bas. He said Le Bas used to be tremendously promising as a young man. He was good at everything.”

“I can’t imagine he was ever much good with the girls,” said Templer.

“Maybe not,” said Stringham. “Not everyone has your singleness of aim. As a matter of fact do you think Le Bas has any sex life?”

“I don’t know about Le Bas,” said Templer, who had evidently been waiting since his arrival back from London for the right moment to make some important announcement about himself, “but I have. The reason I took the later train was because I was with a girl.”

“You devil.”

“I was a devil, I can assure you.”

“I suppose we shall have to hear about it,” said Stringham. “Don’t spare my feelings. Did you hold hands at the cinema? Where did you meet?”

“In the street.”

“Do you mean you picked her up?”

“Yes.”

“Fair or dark?”

“Fair.”

“And how was the introduction effected?”

“She smiled at me.”

“A tart, in other words.”

“I suppose she was, in a kind of way,” said Templer, “but quite young.”

“You know, Peter, you are just exactly the sort of boy my parents warned me against.”

“I went back to her flat.”

“How did you acquit yourself?”

“It was rather a success; except that the scent she used was absolutely asphyxiating. I was a bit afraid Le Bas might notice it on my clothes.”

“Not after the cigarette smoked by Jenkins’s uncle. Was it a well appointed apartment?”

“I admit the accommodation was a bit on the squalid side,” said Templer. “You can’t have everything for a quid.”

“That wasn’t very munificent, was it?”

“All I had. That was why I had to walk from the station.”

“You seem to have been what Le Bas would call ‘a very unwise young man’.”

“I see no reason why Le Bas should be worried by the matter, if he didn’t notice the scent.”

“What an indescribably sordid incident,” said Stringham. “However, let’s hear full details.”

“Not if you don’t want to be told them.”

“We do.”

Templer was supplying further particulars when Le Bas appeared in the room again. He seemed increasingly agitated, and said: “Templer, I want you to come and show me in the time-table which train you took. I have telephoned to the station and have been told that the one you should have travelled on was not late — and Jenkins, don’t forget that I shall expect to see that letter from your uncle by the end of the week. You had better keep him up to it, Stringham, as it is just as much in your interests as his that the matter should be cleared up.”

He tore off up the passage with Templer following behind at a slower pace. Stringham said: “Peter is crazy. He really will get shot out sooner or later.”

Although incomplete, the story of Templer’s London adventure — to be recapitulated on countless future occasions — had sufficiently amplified the incident for its significance to be inescapably clear to Stringham and myself. This was a glimpse through that mysterious door, once shut, that now seemed to stand ajar. It was as if, sounds of far-off conflict, or the muffled din of music and shouting, dimly heard in the past, had now come closer than ever before. Stringham smiled to himself and whistled. I think he felt a little uneasy in the awareness that Templer was one up on him now. He did not discuss the matter further: I too had no comment to make before thinking things over. After a time Templer returned to the room. He said: “What an infernal nuisance that man Le Bas is. I think he is going to write to my father. I particularly do not want trouble at this moment.”

“He seems to have developed a mania for letters flying in all directions,” said Stringham. “However, I feel competent to deal with his puny onslaughts. Meanwhile, I should like to hear more of this unfortunate incident which you were in the course of describing with such a wealth of colour. Begin at the beginning, please.”

*

The episode that Stringham continued to call “Templer’s unfortunate incident,” not startlingly interesting in itself, somehow crystallised my impression of Templer’s character: rather in the same way that seeing Widmerpool coming home from his “run” had established a picture of him in my mind, not different from the earlier perception held there, but one set in a clearer focus. Templer’s adventure indicated the lengths to which he was prepared to go, and behaviour that had previously seemed to me needless — and even rather tiresome — bravado on his part harmonised with a changing and widening experience. I found that I suddenly liked him better. His personality seemed to have fallen into place. There could be no doubt that he himself felt a milestone to have been passed; and, probably for this reason, became in some ways a quieter, more agreeable, friend. In due course, though not before the end of the term had been reached, Le Bas agreed to some sort of a compromise about the train: Templer admitting that he had been wrong in not returning earlier, at the same time producing evidence to show that alterations in the timetable might reasonably be supposed to have misled him. This saved Le Bas’s face, and the matter was allowed to drop at the expense of some minor penalty. The question of Uncle Giles’s cigarette was, however, pursued with extraordinary relentlessness into the New Year. My uncle’s lapse seemed in some manner to have brought home to Le Bas the suspicion that Stringham and I might have developed a tendency, no less pernicious than Templer’s, to break rules; and he managed in a number of small ways to make himself, as he had promised, decidedly obnoxious to both of us. I wrote twice to Uncle Giles, though without much hope of hearing from him. Months later the second letter arrived back from his last address marked “Gone Away:” just as if — as Stringham had remarked — my uncle had been a fox. This envelope finally satisfied Le Bas; but in future he was never quite the same either to Stringham or myself, the deterioration of his relations with Stringham leading ultimately to the incident of “Braddock alias Thorne,” an occasion which illustrated, curiously enough, another aspect of Widmerpool, though in it he played an entirely subordinate part.

This rather absurd affair, which did no one great credit, took place the following summer. Stringham, Templer and I were still messing together; and by then both of them had become so much part of my existence at school that it seemed strange to me that I had ever had doubts about either as a companion: though Stringham remained the one with whom I had most in common. Even now it seems to me that I spent a large proportion of my life in their close company, although the time that we were all three together was less than eighteen months. Their behaviour exemplified two different sides of life, in spite of some outward similarity in their tastes. For Templer, there was no truth except in tangible things: though he was not ambitious. Stringham, as I now see him, was romantic, and would perhaps have liked to play a somewhat different role from that which varying moods, and love of eccentricity, entailed upon him. Personally, I was aware of no particular drift to my life at that time. The days passed, and only later could their inexorable comment be recorded; and, pointless in some respects as was the Braddock alias Thorne episode, it retains a place, though not a specially admirable one, in my recollections of Stringham especially.

The three of us had gone for a walk one Sunday afternoon and were wandering about, rather aimlessly, in the heat; Stringham and Templer having wished to proceed in opposite directions. Passing the police-station, which we had finally reached without yet deciding on a line of march, Stringham had paused to read the posters pasted up outside: where, among a collection of notices referring to lost dogs, stolen jewellery, and foot-and-mouth disease, was reproduced the likeness of a man wanted for fraud. He was called “Braddock alias Thorne,” and his portrait showed one of those blurred, nondescript countenances, familiar in advertisements depicting persons who testify that patent medicine has banished their uric acid, or that application of some more efficacious remedy has enabled them to dispense with the use of a truss. The writing under the picture said that Braddock alias Thorne (who seemed to have committed an unusually large number of petty offences) was a man of respectable appearance, probably dressed in a black suit. The description was hardly borne out by what could be resolved from the photograph, which showed a bald, middle-aged criminal in spectacles, who looked capable of any enormity. Stringham remarked that the picture resembled President Woodrow Wilson. Templer said: “It is much more like Le Bas.”

“More of a poet,” said Stringham, who loved to emphasise this side of Le Bas’s personality; and had indeed built up a picture of his housemaster as a man whose every spare moment was spent in scribbling verses with the help of a rhyming dictionary. He said: “There is a touch of distinction about Braddock alias Thorne, and absolutely none about Le Bas.”

“Must we spend the whole afternoon reading this stuff?” said Templer. “It is about as interesting as the house notice-board. Let’s go somewhere where I can have my pipe. There is no point in trudging about the town on Sunday.”

And so we turned about towards the fields, passing the house again, and entering an area of dusty cow-parsley and parched meadows. While still on the road the figure of Widmerpool appeared in front of us. He was tramping along in the sunlight, swinging arms and legs like an automaton of which the mechanism might be slightly out of order. We walked behind him for a time, Stringham doing an imitation of the way Widmerpool put his feet to the ground. From an unreasoning fear of the embarrassment that would be caused me if Widmerpool should look back and himself observe Stringham’s agitated pantomime, I persuaded him to stop this improvisation. I had remained in some odd manner interested in Widmerpool since that night in the fog; and, although Stringham’s imitation was ludicrously exact, to think that Widmerpool might see it was for some reason painful to me; though I was almost sorry when the time came to turn off the road and leave Widmerpool to disappear in a distant cloud of dust.

“I don’t know what I should do without Widmerpool,” Stringham said. “He keeps me young.”

“I sometimes wonder whether he is a human being at all,” Templer said. “He certainly doesn’t move like one.”

We passed beyond the railway line to pasture, where Templer lit up his horrible stubby pipe, and argued as we walked along about the age of the Dolly Sisters, one of whom Stringham held to be the mother of the other. The sun was too hot to make our way straight across the grass, so that we moved along by hedges, where there was some little shade. Templer was still vigorously contesting Stringham’s theory of relationship, when we came through some trees and faced a low bank, covered with undergrowth, which stood between us and the next field. The road was by this time fairly far away. Stringham and Templer now ceased to discuss the Dolly Sisters, and both took a run at this obstacle. Stringham got over first, disappearing down the far side: from which a sort of cry, or exclamation sounded. As Templer came to the top of the mound of grass, I noticed him snatch his pipe from his mouth and jump. I came up the slope at my leisure, behind the other two, and, reaching the crest, saw them at the foot of the bank. There was an unexpectedly deep drop to the ground. In the field below, Stringham and Templer were talking to Le Bas, who was reclining on the ground, leaning on one elbow.

Stringham was bending forward a little, talking hard. Templer had managed to get his pipe back into his pocket, or was concealing it in his hand, because when I reached the level of the field, it had disappeared: although the rank, musty odour of the shag which he was affecting at that period swept from time to time through the warm air, indicating that the tobacco was still alight in the neighbourhood. Le Bas had in his hand a small blue book. It was open. I saw from the type face that it contained verse. His hat hung from the top of his walking stick, which he had thrust into the ground, and his bald head was sweating a bit on top. He crouched there in the manner of a large animal — some beast alien to the English countryside, a yak or sea-lion — taking its ease: marring, as Stringham said later, the beauty of the summer afternoon. However, Le Bas appeared to be in a moderately good humour. He was saying to Stringham: “I don’t know why I should tolerate this invasion of my favourite spot. Cannot you all understand that I come here to get away from people like you and Jenkins and Templer? I want peace and quiet for once: not to be surrounded by my pupils.”

“It is a nice place, sir,” said Stringham, smiling, though not in the least committing himself by too much friendliness all at once.

Le Bas turned without warning to his book, and, picking it up from the ground, began to read aloud in his guttural, controlled voice:“‘Ah! leave the smoke, the wealth, the roar

Of London, and the bustling street,

For still, by the Sicilian shore,

The murmur of the Muse is sweet,

Still, still, the suns of summer greet

The mountain-grave of Helike,

And shepherds still their songs repeat,

Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea.“‘Theocritus! thou canst restore

The pleasant years, and over-fleet;

With thee we live as men of yore,

We rest where running waters meet:

And then we turn unwilling feet

And seek the world — so must it be –

We may not linger in the heat

Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea!’”

He shut the book with a snap, and said: “Now can any one of you tell me who wrote that?”

We made various suggestions — Templer characteristically opting for Shakespeare — and then Stringham said: “Matthew Arnold.”

“Not a bad shot,” said Le Bas. “It is Andrew Lang as a matter of fact. Fine lines, you know.”

Another fetid whiff of Templer’s shag puffed its way through the ether. It seemed impossible that Le Bas should remain much longer unaware that a pipe was smoking somewhere near him. However, he seemed to be getting into his stride on the subject of poetry. He said: “There are descriptive verses by Arnold, somewhat similar in metre that may have run in your head, Stringham. Things like:“‘The clouds are on the Oberland,

The Jungfrau’s snows look faint and far;

But bright are those green fields at hand,

And through those fields comes down the Aar.’

“Rather a different geographical situation, it is true, but the same mood of invoking melancholy by graphic description of natural features of the landscape.”

Stringham said: “The Andrew Lang made me think of:“‘O singer of Persephone

In the dim meadows desolate

Dost thou remember Sicily?’

“Do you know that, sir? I don’t know how it goes on, but the lines keep on repeating.”

Le Bas looked a little uneasy at this. It was evident that Stringham had displeased him in some way. He said rather gruffly: “It is a villanelle. I believe Oscar Wilde wrote it, didn’t he? Not a very distinguished versifier.”

Quickly abandoning what had apparently been taken as a hostile standpoint, Stringham went on: “And then Heraclitus —”

The words had an instantaneous effect. Le Bas’s face cleared at once, and he broke in with more reverberance even than before:‘Still are thy pleasant voices, the nightingales awake,

For Death he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.’

“I think you are right, Stringham. Good. Very Good. In fact, alpha plus. It all has the same note of nineteenth-century nostalgia for a classical past largely of their own imagining.”

Le Bas sighed, and, removing his spectacles, began in his accustomed manner to massage his eyelids, which appeared to be a trifle less inflamed than normally.

“I looked up Heraclitus in the classical dictionary, sir,” said Stringham, “and was rather surprised to find that he fed mostly on grass and made his house on a dung-hill. I can quite understand his wanting to be a guest if that is how he lived at home, but I shouldn’t have thought that he would have been a very welcome one. Though it is true that one would probably remember him afterwards.”

Le Bas was absolutely delighted at this remark. He laughed aloud, a rare thing with him. “Splendid, Stringham, splendid,” he said. “You have confused the friend of Callimachus with a philosopher who lived probably a couple of centuries earlier. But I quite agree that if the other Heraclitus’s habits had been those you describe, he would not have been any encouragement to hospitality.”

He laughed a lot, and this would have b.een the moment to leave him, and go on our way. We should probably have escaped without further trouble if Templer — feeling no doubt that Stringham had been occupying too much of the stage — had not begun to shoot out radiations towards Le Bas, long and short, like an ocular Morse code, saying at the same time in his naturally rather harsh voice: “I am afraid we very nearly jumped on you, sir.”

Le Bas at once looked less friendly. In any case it was an unwise remark to make and Templer managed to imply a kind of threat in the tone, probably the consequence in some degree of his perpetual war with Le Bas. As a result of this observation, Le Bas at once launched into a long, and wholly irrelevant, speech on the topic of his new scheme for the prevention of the theft of books from the slab in the hail: a favourite subject of his for wearing down resistance in members of his house. It was accordingly some time before we were at last able to escape from the field, and from Le Bas: who returned to his book of verse. Fortunately the pipe seemed to have extinguished itself during the latter period of Le Bas’s harangue; or perhaps its smell was absorbed by that of the gas-works, which, absent in the earlier afternoon, had now become apparent.

Behind the next hedge Templer took the pipe from his pocket and tapped it out against his heel.

“That was a near one,” he said. “I burnt my hand on that bloody pipe. Why on earth did you want to go on like that about poetry?”

“How Le Bas failed to notice the appalling stink from your pipe will always be a mystery,” Stringham said. “His olfactory sense must be deficient — probably adenoids. Why, therefore, did he make so much fuss about Jenkins’s uncle’s cigarette? It is an interesting question.”

“But Heraclitus, or whoever it was,” said Templer. “It was all so utterly unnecessary.”

“Heraclitus put him in a good temper,” said Stringham. “It was your threatening to jump on him that made the trouble.”

“It was your talking about Oscar Wilde.”

“Nonsense.”

“Anyway,” said Templer, “Le Bas has thoroughly spoiled my afternoon. Let’s go back.”

Stringham agreed, and we pursued a grassy path bordered with turnip fields. A short distance farther on, this track narrowed, and traversed a locality made up of allotments, dotted here and there with huts, or potting-sheds. Climbing a gate, we came out on to the road. There was a garage opposite with a shack beside it, in front of which stood some battered iron tables and chairs. A notice offered “Tea and Minerals.” It was a desolate spot. Stringham said: “We might just drop in here for a cooling drink.”

Templer and I at once protested against entering this uninviting booth, which had nothing whatever to recommend it outwardly. All shops were out-of-bounds on Sunday, and there was no apparent reason for running the risk of being caught in such a place; especially since Le Bas might easily decide to return to the house along this road. However, Stringham was so pressing that in the end we were persuaded to accompany him into the shack. The front room was empty. A girl in a grubby apron with untidy bobbed hair came in from the back, where a gramophone was playing:“Everything is buzz-buzz now,

Everything is buzz, somehow:

You ring up on your buzzer,

And bozz with one anozzer,

Or, in other words, pow-wow.”

The girl moved towards us with reluctance. Stringham ordered ginger-beer. Templer said: “This place is too awful. Anyway, I loathe sweet drinks.”

We sat down at one of the iron tables, covered with a cloth marked with jagged brown stains. The record stopped: the needle continuing to scratch round and round its centre, revolving slower and slower, until at last the mechanism unwound itself and ceased to, operate. Stringham asked the girl if there was a telephone. She made some enquiries from an unseen person, still farther off than the gramophone, and an older woman’s voice joined in discussion of the matter. Then the girl came back and told Stringham he could use the telephone in the office of the garage, if he liked to come with her to the back of the building. Stringham disappeared with the girl. Templer said: “What on earth is happening? He can’t be trying to get off with that female.”

We drank our ginger-beer.

“What the hell is he up to?” said Templer again, after some minutes had passed. “I hope we don’t run into Le Bas coming out of here.”

We finished our drinks and Templer tried, without success, to engage the girl in conversation, when she came to clear plates and glasses from another table. At last Stringham reappeared, rather hurriedly, his usually pale face slightly flushed. He drank off his ginger-beer at a gulp and said: “We might be getting along now. I will pay for this.”

Out on the road again, Templer said: “First we are rushed into this horrible place: then we are rushed out again. What is supposed to be on?”

Stringham said: “I’ve just had a word with the police.”

“What about?”

“On the subject of Braddock alias Thorne.”

“Who’s that?”

“The chap they wanted for fraud.”

“What about him?”

“Just to inform them of his whereabouts.”

“Is this a joke?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you tell them to look?”

“In a field beyond the railway line.”

“Why?”

“Set your mind to it.”

“Le Bas?”

“Neat, wasn’t it?”

“What did they say?”

“I rang up in the character of Le Bas himself,” Stringham said. “I told them that a man ‘described as looking rather like me’ had been piling up bills at various shops in the town where I had accounts: that I had positive information that the man in question had been only a few minutes earlier at the place I described.”

“Did the police swallow that?”

“They asked me to come to the station. I pretended to get angry at the delay, and — in a really magnificent Le Bas outburst — I said that I had an urgent appointment to address the confirmation candidates — although, as far as I can remember, it is the wrong time of year to be confirmed — that I was late already and must set off at once: and that, if the man were not arrested, I should hold the local police responsible.”

“I foresee the hell of a row,” said Templer. “Still, one must admit that it was a good idea. Meanwhile, the sooner we get back to the house and supply a few alibis, the better.”

We walked at a fairly smart pace down the road Widmerpool had traversed when I had seen him returning from his run at the end of the previous year: the tar now soft under foot from the heat of the summer sun. Inside, the house was quiet and comparatively cool. Templer, who had recently relaxed his rule of never reading for pleasure, took up Sanders of the River, while Stringham and I discussed the probable course that events would take if the police decided to act as a result of the telephone message. We sat about until the bell began to ring for evening chapel.

“Come on,” said Stringham. “Let’s see if there is any news.”

At the foot of the stairs, we met Widmerpool in the hall. He had just come in from outside, and he seemed unusually excited about something. As we passed — contrary in my experience to all precedent so far as his normal behaviour was concerned — he addressed himself to Stringham, in point of age the nearest to him, saying in his shrillest voice: “I say, do you know Le Bas has been arrested?”

He stood there in the shadowy space by the slab in a setting of brown-paper parcels, dog-eared school books, and crumbs — a precinct of which the moral and physical cleansing provoked endless activity in the mind of Le Bas — and stood with his feet apart and eyes expanded, his panting, as Templer had justly described it, like that of an elderly lap-dog: his appearance suggesting rather some unusual creature actually bred in those depths by the slab, amphibious perhaps, though largely belonging to this land-world of blankets and carbolic: scents which attained their maximum density at this point, where they met and mingled with the Irish stew, which, coming from the territories of laundry baskets and coke, reached its most potent force on the first step of the stairs.

Stringham turned to Widmerpool. “I am not surprised,” he said coldly. “How did it happen?”

“I was coming back from my walk,” said Widmerpool, in spite of his excitement lowering his voice a little, as though touching on a very sacred subject in thus referring to his personal habits, “I was coming back from my walk,” he repeated, dwelling on the words, “and, as I strolled across one of the fields by the railway line, I saw Le Bas lying on the ground reading a book.”

“I hope you weren’t smoking, Widmerpool,” said Templer.

Widmerpool ignored this interpolation, and went on: “Then I noticed that there was a policeman making across the field towards Le Bas. When the policeman — a big, fat fellow — reached Le Bas he seemed to begin reading something from a note-book. Anyway, Le Bas looked very surprised at first. Then he began to get up. I suppose he must have caught his foot in something, because he stumbled. Evidently the policeman thought he was going to try and escape.”

“What happened when he stumbled?” asked Stringham.

“The policeman took his arm.”

“Did he handcuff him?”

“No — but he grabbed him rather roughly.”

“What did Le Bas say?”

“I couldn’t hear. It looked as if he were making an awful fuss. You know the way he stutters when he is angry.”

“And so the policeman led him off?”

“What could he have done?” said Widmerpool, who seemed utterly overwhelmed at the idea that his housemaster should have been arrested.

Stringham asked: “Did anyone else see this?”

“A soldier and a girl appeared from a ditch and watched them go off together.”

“Did Le Bas notice you?”

“I kept behind the hedge. I didn’t want to get mixed up with anything awkward.”

“That was wise of you, Widmerpool,” said Stringham. “Have you told anyone what you saw?”

“Only F. F. Fletcher and Calthorpe Major. I met them on the way back. What can Le Bas have done?”

“Do you mean to tell me you don’t know?” said Stringham.

Widmerpool looked taken aback. His breathing had become less heavy while he unburdened himself of his story. Now once more it began to sound like an engine warming up.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I don’t mean anything,” said Stringham, “except that I am not particularly surprised.”

“But tell me what you think it is.”

Widmerpool spoke almost beseechingly.

“Now look here, Widmerpool,” said Stringham, “I am awfully sorry. If you have never noticed for yourself anything about our housemaster, it is hardly my place to tell you. You are higher up in the house than I am. You have to shoulder a certain amount of additional responsibility on that account. It is not for me to spread scandals in advance. I fear that we shall all be reading about Le Bas quite soon enough in the papers.”

We left Widmerpool on the steps of the house: to all intents and purposes, a fish recently hauled from the water, making powerful though failing efforts at respiration.

“That boy will be the death of me,” said Stringham, as J: we walked quickly together up the road.

Most of the crowd who paced up and down by the chapel, passing backwards and forwards over the cobbles, while masters tried to herd them into the building, already knew something of Le Bas’s arrest: though only Calthorpe Major, armed with advanced information from Widmerpool, seemed yet to have had time to write home on the subject. “I sat straight down and sent off a letter to my people about Le Bas having been removed to prison at last,” Calthorpe Major was saying. “They never liked him. He got his Leander the same time as my father. I’ve promised to let them know further details as soon as I can get them.” He moved on, repeating the story to friends who had not yet heard the news. Stringham, too, pushed his way I through the mob of boys, collecting versions of the scene that had taken place. These were many in number. The bell quickened its ring and stopped with a kind of explosion of sound as the clock began to strike the hour. We were swept up the steps. Stringham said: “I am afraid it was all in rather doubtful taste. In some ways I regret having been concerned in it. One is such a creature of impulse.”

Although the air under the high vault struck almost chill after the warmth outside in the yard, the evening sun I streamed through the windows of the chapel. Rows of boys, fidgeting but silent, provoked, as always, an atmosphere of expectancy before the service began. The voluntary droned quietly for a time, gradually swelling into a bellow: then stopped with a jerk, and began again more gently: remaining for a time at this muted level of sound. Emotional intensity seemed to meet and mingle with an air of indifference, even of cruelty within these ancient walls. Youth and Time here had made, as it were, some compromise. Le Bas came in late, just before the choir, and strode unsteadily towards his stall under the high neo-gothic canopy of carved wood. He looked discomposed. The surface of his skull was red and shining, and, more than once, he seemed to mutter to himself.

Cobberton, another housemaster, and a parson, through gold-rimmed spectacles looked across from the far side of the aisle, lips tightly caught together and eyebrows raised. He and Le Bas had chronically strained relations with one another, and, as it turned out, by one of those happy, or unhappy, chances, Cobberton had finally been the man to establish Le Bas’s identity with the police. This fact was subsequently revealed by Cobberton, who also disclosed generally that the policeman who had taken down Stringham’s telephone message on the subject of Braddock alias Thorne had remarked to Le Bas, after the matter had been cleared up: “He’d fair got your manner of speech to a T, sir, whoever he was.”

The congregation rose to sing a hymn. I looked round the packed seats, and lines of faces arranged in tiers. Stringham was opposite, standing with his arms folded, not singing. His cheeks had lost the flush they had taken on during the excitement of all that had followed his telephoning the police-station and had now returned to their usual pallor. He looked grave, lost in thought, almost seraphic: a carved figure symbolising some virtue like Resignation or Self-sacrifice. Templer I could not see, because he sat on the same side of the aisle as myself and was too far distant to be visible from my place. On the other side, away to the left, Widmerpool was holding a book in front of him, singing hard: his mouth opening and shutting sharply, more than ever like some uncommon specimen of marine life. He turned his eyes from time to time towards the rafters and high spaces of the roof. I could see his lips forming the syllables. The words of the verse seemed especially applicable to his case, since he was leaving at the end of the term; and I wondered whether the same thought was passing through his own mind:“As o’er each continent and island

The dawn leads on another day,

The voice of prayer is never silent

Nor dies the strain of praise away.”

Somehow I felt rather moved as the hymn rolled on. A group of boys sitting behind me began to chant a descant of their own; making a good deal of noise, not entirely disagreeable. Cobberton noticed the sound, and frowned. Widmerpool also stopped singing for a second and he too glanced across reprovingly. That was my last memory of him at school, because he left, for good, a few weeks later; although owing to some misunderstanding — perhaps Le Bas’s mind was more confused than usual on account of the trick played on him — Widmerpool’s name continued to appear in the house-list of the following September: a final assertion of the will to remain and strive further for unattainable laurels.

*