A Question of Upbringing (6 page)

‘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 buzz 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 notebook. 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 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 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 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 in
difference, 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.