• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3136 0

Templer, in a recently purchased car, had driven Stringham and myself into the ditch, together with a couple of shop-girls and another unprepossessing friend of Templer’s called Brent. That episode had been during the single term that Stringham had remained in residence at the university. The incident seemed absurd enough when looked back upon, but I had not greatly liked Duport. Now I felt, for some reason, inexplicably annoyed that he should own a house like this one, however ineptly decorated, and also be the possessor of a wife whom my informant—whose manner suggested absolute infallibility on such matters—regarded as attractive; while I myself, at the same time, lived a comparative hand-to-mouth existence in rooms, in my own case, there had never been any serious prospect of getting married. This seemed, on examination, a contrast from which I came out rather poorly.

Since living in London, I had seen Peter Templer several rimes, but, in the course of an interminable chain of anecdotes about his ever-changing circle of cronies, I could not remember the name of Duport figuring, so that I did not know whether or not the two of them continued to see each other. Peter himself had taken to the city like a duck to water. He now talked unendingly of “cleaning up a packet” and “making a killing”; money, with its multifarious imagery and restrictive mystique, holding a place in his mind only seriously rivalled by preoccupation with the pursuit of women: the latter interest having proportionately increased with opportunity to experiment in a wider field than formerly.

When we had lunched or dined together, the occasions had been enjoyable, although there had hardly been any renewal of the friendship that had existed between us at school. Peter did not frequent the world of dances because—like Stringham—he was bored by their unduly respectable environment.

“At least,” he said once, when discussing the matter, “I don’t go as a habit to the sort of dance you see reported in The Morning Post or The Times. I don’t say I have never attended similar entertainments in some huge and gloomy house in Bayswater or Holland Park—probably Jewish—if I happened to take a fancy to a girl who moves in those circles. There is more fun to be found amongst all that mahogany furniture and Moorish brasswork than you might think.”

In business, at least in a small way, he had begun to “make a bit on his own, and there seemed no reason to disbelieve his account of himself as looked upon in his firm as a promising young man. In fact, it appeared that Peter, so far from becoming the outcast from society prophesied by our housemaster, Le Bas, now showed every sign of being about to prove himself a notable success in life: an outcome that seemed to demand another of those revisions of opinion, made every day more necessary, in relation to such an enormous amount of material, accepted as incontrovertible at an earlier period of practical experience.

Thinking that if the young man with the orchid knew Duport, he might also know Peter, whom I had not by then seen for about a year, I asked if the two of them had ever met.

“I’ve never run across Templer,” he said. “But I’ve heard tell of him. As a matter of fact, I believe Duport married Templer’s sister, didn’t he? What was her name?”

“Jean.”

“That was it. A thin girl with blue eyes. I think they got married abroad—South America or somewhere, was it?”

The sudden awareness of displeasure felt a second earlier at the apparent prosperity of Duport’s general state was nothing to the pang I suffered on hearing this piece of news: the former sense of grievance caused, perhaps, by premonition that worse was to come. I had not, it was true, thought much of Jean Templer for years, having relegated any question of being, as I had once supposed, “in love” with her to a comparatively humble position in memory; indeed, regarding the incident as dating from a time when any such feelings were, in my own eyes, hopelessly immature, in comparison, for example, with sentiments felt for Barbara. However, I now found, rather