A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [12]
“Did he come in when you were having a gasper?” he said. “The room reeks as if camels had been stabled in it.”
“You don’t suppose we should be such fools as to smoke in the house,” said Stringham. “It was Jenkins’s uncle. But my dear Peter, why do you always go about dressed as if you were going to dance up and down a row of naked ladies singing ‘Dapper Dan was a very handy man,’ or something equally lyrical? You get more like an advertisement for gents’ tailoring every day.”
“I think it is rather a good get-up for London,” said Templer, examining a handful of his suit. “Every item chosen with thought, I can assure you.”
Stringham said: “If you’re not careful you will suffer the awful fate of the man who always knows the right clothes to wear and the right shop to buy them at.”
Templer laughed. He had a kind of natural jauntiness that seemed to require to be helped out by more than ordinary attention to what he wore: a quality that might in the last resort save him from Stringham’s warning picture of the dangers of dressing too well. As a matter of fact, although he used to make fun of him to his face, Stringham was stimulated, perhaps a little impressed, by Templer; however often he might repeat that: “Peter Templer’s affectation that he has to find time to smoke at least one pipe a day bores me to death: nor did it cut any ice with me when he pointed out the empty half-bottle of whisky he had deposited behind the conservatory in Le Bas’s garden.” The previous summer, Stringham and Templer had managed to attend a race-meeting together one half-holiday afternoon without being caught. Such adventures I felt to be a bit above my head, though I enjoyed hearing about them. I was, as I have said, not yet sure that I really liked Templer. His chief subjects of conversation were clothes, girls, and the persecutions of Le Bas, who, always sensitive to the possibility of being ragged, tended to make himself unnecessarily disagreeable in any quarter that might reasonably be thought to arouse special apprehension. Besides this, Templer could not possibly be looked upon as a credit to the house. He was not much of a hand at the sort of games that are played at school (though his build made him good at tennis and golf), so that he was in a weak position, being fairly lazy at work, to withstand prolonged aggression from a housemaster. Consequently Templer was involved in a continuous series of minor rows. The question of the train was evidently to become the current point for Le Bas’s attack.
“Well, that all seems to have blown over for the moment,” Stringham said. “You ought to keep your uncles in better order, Jenkins.”
I explained that Uncle Giles was known for being impossible to keep in order, and that he always left trouble in his wake. Templer said: “I suppose Le Bas will go on pestering about that train. You know, I used to be a great pet of his. Now his only object seems to be to get me sacked.”
“He ought to be able to bring that off sooner or later with your help,” said Stringham. “After all he is not an absolute fool: though pretty near it.”
“I believe he was quite an oar in his youth,” said Templer. “At least he won the Diamond Sculls. Still, past successes at Henley don’t make him any more tolerable to deal with as a housemaster.”
“He started life as a poet,” Stringham said. “Did you know that? Years ago, after coming back from a holiday in Greece, he wrote some things that he thought were frightfully good. He showed them to someone or other who pointed out that, as a matter of fact, they were frightfully bad. Le Bas never got over it.”
“I can’t imagine anything more appalling than a poem by Le Bas,” said Templer, “though I’m surprised he doesn’t make his pupils learn them.”
“Who did he show them to?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Stringham. “Henry James, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or someone like that.”
“Who on earth told you?”
“An eld