A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement Read online

  ‘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 time-table 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 do
ubts 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 rôle 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 Helikê,

  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: