A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [11]
Le Bas spoke as if smoking were bad enough in all conscience: but that, if people must smoke, they might at least be expected to do so without the propagation of perceptible fumes. Stringham said: “I think the stub – the fag-end, sir – may have smouldered. It might have been a Turkish cigarette. I believe they have a rather stronger scent than Virginian.”
He looked round the room, and lifted a cushion from . one of the chairs, shaking his. head and sniffing. This was not the sort of conduct to improve a bad situation. Le Bas, although he disliked Templer, had never showed any special animus against Stringham or myself. Indeed Stringham was rather a favourite of his, because he was quick at knowing the sources of the quotations that Le Bas, when in a good temper, liked to make. However, like most schoolmasters, he was inclined to feel suspicious of all boys in his house as they grew older; not because he was in any sense an unfriendly man, though abrupt and reserved, but simply on account of the increased difficulty in handling the daily affairs of creatures who tended less and less to fit into a convenient and formalised framework: or, at least, a framework that was convenient to Le Bas because he himself had formalised it. That was how Le Bas’s attitude of mind appeared to me in later years. At the time of his complaint about Uncle Giles’s cigarette, he merely seemed to Stringham and myself a dangerous lunatic, to be humoured and outwitted.
“How am I to know that neither of you smoked too?” he said, sweeping aside the persistent denials that both of us immediately offered. “How can I possibly tell?”
He sounded at the same time angry and despairing. He said: “You must write a letter to your uncle, Jenkins, and ask him to give his word that neither of you smoked.”
“But I don’t know his address, sir. All I know is that he was on his way to Reading.”
“By car?”
“By train, I think, sir.”
“Nonsense, nonsense,” said Le Bas. “Not know your own uncle’s address? Get it from your parents if necessary. I shall make myself very objectionable to you both until I see that letter.”
He raised his hands from his sides a little way, and clenched his fists, as if he were about to leap high into the air like an athlete, or ballet dancer; and in this taut attitude he seemed to be considering how best to carry out his threat, while he breathed heavily inward as if to imbibe the full savour of sausages and tobacco smoke that still hung about the room. At that moment there was a sound of talking, and some laughter, in the passage. The door was suddenly flung open, and Templer burst into the room. He was brought up short by the sight of Le Bas: in whom Templer immediately called up a new train of thought.
“Ah, Templer, there you are. You went to London, didn’t you? What time did your train get in this evening?”
“It was late, sir,” said Templer, who seemed more than usually pleased with himself, though aware that there might be trouble ahead: he dropped his voice a little: “I couldn’t afford a cab, sir, so I walked.”
He had a thin face and light blue eyes that gave out a perpetual and quite mechanical sparkle: at first engaging: then irritating: and finally a normal and inevitable aspect of his features that one no longer noticed. His hair came down in a sharp angle on the forehead and his large pointed ears were like those attributed to satyrs, “a race amongst whom Templer would have found some interests in common,” as Stringham had said, when Templer’s ears had been dignified by someone with this classical comparison. His eyes flashed and twinkled now like the lamps of a lighthouse as he fixed them on Le Bas, while both settled down to a duel about the railway time-table. Although Templer fenced with skill, it seemed pretty clear that he would be forced, in due course, to admit that he had taken a train later than that prescribed by regulations. But Le Bas, who not uncommonly forgot entirely about the matter in hand, suddenly seemed to lose interest in Templer’s train and its time of arrival (just as he had for the moment abandoned