A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell Read Free Book Online Page B

an instantaneous effect. Le Bas’s face cleared at once, and he broke in with more reverberance even than before:
    ‘ “Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake, For Death he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.”
    ‘I think you are right, Stringham. Good. Very good. In fact, alpha plus. It all has the same note of nineteenth-century nostalgia for a classical past largely of their own imagining.’
    Le Bas sighed, and, removing his spectacles, began in his accustomed manner to massage his eyelids, which appeared to be a trifle less inflamed than normally.
    ‘I looked up Heraclitus in the classical dictionary, sir,’ said Stringham, ‘and was rather surprised to find that he fedmostly on grass and made his house on a dung-hill. I can quite understand his wanting to be a guest if that is how he lived at home, but I shouldn’t have thought that he would have been a very welcome one. Though it is true that one would probably remember him afterwards.’
    Le Bas was absolutely delighted at this remark. He laughed aloud, a rare thing with him. ‘Splendid, Stringham, splendid,’ he said. ‘You have confused the friend of Callimachus with a philosopher who lived probably a couple of centuries earlier. But I quite agree that if the other Heraclitus’s habits had been those you describe, he would not have been any encouragement to hospitality.’
    He laughed a lot, and this would have been the moment to leave him, and go on our way. We should probably have escaped without further trouble if Templer—feeling no doubt that Stringham had been occupying too much of the stage—had not begun to shoot out radiations towards Le Bas, long and short, like an ocular Morse code, saying at the same time in his naturally rather harsh voice: ‘I am afraid we very nearly jumped on you, sir.’
    Le Bas at once looked less friendly. In any case it was an unwise remark to make and Templer managed to imply a kind of threat in the tone, probably the consequence in some degree of his perpetual war with Le Bas. As a result of this observation, Le Bas at once launched into a long, and wholly irrelevant, speech on the topic of his new scheme for the prevention of the theft of books from the slab in the hall: a favourite subject of his for wearing down resistance in members of his house. It was accordingly some time before we were at last able to escape from the field, and from Le Bas: who returned to his book of verse. Fortunately the pipe seemed to have extinguished itself during the latter period of Le Bas’s harangue; or perhaps its smell wasabsorbed by that of the gas-works, which, absent in the earlier afternoon, had now become apparent.
    Behind the next hedge Templer took the pipe from his pocket and tapped it out against his heel.
    ‘That was a near one,’ he said. ‘I burnt my hand on that bloody pipe. Why on earth did you want to go on like that about poetry?’
    ‘How Le Bas failed to notice the appalling stink from your pipe will always be a mystery,’ Stringham said. ‘His olfactory sense must be deficient—probably adenoids. Why, therefore, did he make so much fuss about Jenkins’s uncle’s cigarette? It is an interesting question.’
    ‘But Heraclitus, or whoever it was,’ said Templer. ‘It was all so utterly unnecessary.’
    ‘Heraclitus put him in a good temper,’ said Stringham. ‘It was your threatening to jump on him that made the trouble.’
    ‘It was your talking about Oscar Wilde.’
    ‘Nonsense.’
    ‘Anyway,’ said Templer, ‘Le Bas has thoroughly spoiled my afternoon. Let’s go back.’
    Stringham agreed, and we pursued a grassy path bordered with turnip fields. A short distance farther on, this track narrowed, and traversed a locality made up of allotments, dotted here and there with huts, or potting-sheds. Climbing a gate, we came out on to the road. There was a garage opposite with a shack beside it, in front of which stood some battered iron tables and chairs. A notice offered