The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [97]
The speech came to an end, the listeners demonstrating neither approval nor the reverse. The haggard man stepped down from the soapbox, wiped his spectacles, loosened the peak of his cap from his forehead, lit a cigarette. The children’s gas-mask game reached a pitch of frenzied intensity, so that in their scamperings one of the women selling newspapers almost had the packet knocked from her hand. Widmerpool turned to me. He was about to comment, when our attention was engaged by a new speaker. This was the second newspaper-selling woman, who, having now handed over her papers to the man with the cloth cap, herself jumped on to the soapbox. In a harsh clear voice she opened a tremendous tirade, quite different in approach from the quieter, more reasoned appeal of the spectacled man.
‘… blooming bloody hypocrisy … anybody wants this war except a few crackpots … see a chance of seizing world power and grinding the last miserable halfpence from the frozen fingers of stricken mankind … lot of Fascist, terroristic, anti-semitic, war-mongering, exploiting White Guards and traitors to the masses …’
It was Gypsy Jones. I had not set eyes on her since the days when we used to meet in Mr Deacon’s antique shop. She had lost a front tooth, otherwise did not look greatly changed from what she had been in the Mr Deacon period: older, harder, angrier, further than ever from her last bath, but essentially the same. Her hair was still cut short like a boy’s, her fists clenched, her legs set wide apart. Over her trousers she wore a man’s overcoat, far from new, the aggressive inelegance of the ensemble expressing to perfection her own revolutionary, destructive state of mind. In the old days she had worked for Howard Craggs at the Vox Populi Press, was said to be his mistress. Craggs had moved a long way since the Vox Populi Press. Lately, he had been appointed to a high post in the Ministry of Information. I recalled the night when Gypsy Jones had been dressed as Eve in order to accompany Craggs, as Adam, to the Merry Thought fancy-dress party: the encounter we had had at the back of Mr Deacon’s shop. There had been a certain grubby charm about her. I felt no regrets. Love had played no part. There was nothing painful to recall. Then Widmerpool had fallen for her, had pursued her, had paid for her ‘operation’. Such things seemed like another incarnation.
‘… not appealing to a lot of half-baked Bloomsbury intellectuals and Hampstead ideologues … bourgeois scabs and parlour-socialist nancy boys … scum of weak-kneed Trotskyite flunkeys … betraying the workers and anyone else it suits their filthy bloody blackleg book to betray … I’m talking about politics – socialism – reality – adaptability …’
I felt my arm caught tightly. It was Widmerpool. I turned towards him. He had gone quite pale. His thick lips were trembling a little. The sight of Gypsy Jones, rousing vague memories in myself, had caused him to react far more violently. To Widmerpool, she was not the mere handmaid of memory, she was a spectre of horror, the ghastly reminder of failure, misery, degradation. He dragged at my arm.
‘For God’s sake, come away,’ he said.
We continued our course down the street, over which dusk was falling, Widmerpool walking at a much sharper pace, but without any of his former bravura, the stick now gripped in his hand as if to ward off actual physical attack.
‘You realised who it was?’ he said, as we hurried along.
‘Of course.’
‘How soon did you see her?’
‘Only after she had begun to speak.’
‘Me, too. What an escape. It was a near thing.’
‘What was?’
‘She might have noticed me.’
‘Would that have mattered?’
Widmerpool stopped dead.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Supposing she had seen us, even said something to us?’
‘I didn’t say us, I said me.’
‘You then?’
‘Of course it would have mattered.