A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [14]
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