The Acceptance World

by Anthony Powell

  ‘Charles looks as if he has been hitting the martinis pretty hard,’ said Templer.

  I agreed. After a consultation with the wine waiter, Stringham ordered a bottle of champagne. Since Ghika had already provided himself with a whisky and soda there was evidently no question of splitting it with his next-door neighbour. Templer commented on this to me, and laughed. He seemed to have obtained relief from having discussed the collapse of his marriage with a friend who knew something of the circumstances. He was more cheerful now and spoke of his plans for selling the house near Maidenhead. We began to talk of things that had happened at school.

  ‘Do you remember when Charles arranged for Le Bas to be arrested by the police?’ said Templer. ‘The Braddock alias Thorne affair.’

  We were sitting too far away from Le Bas for this remark to be overheard by him. Templer looked across to where Stringham was sitting and caught his eye. He jerked his head in Le Bas’s direction and held his own wrists together as if he wore handcuffs. Stringham seemed to understand his meaning at once. His face brightened, and he made as if to catch Ghika by the collar. This action had to be explained to Ghika, and, during the interlude, Parkinson, who was on Templer’s far side, engaged him in conversation about the Test Match.

  I turned to the man with the grey moustache. He seemed to be expecting an approach of some sort, because, before I had time to speak, he said:

  ‘I’m Tolland.’

  ‘You were at Corderey’s, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I was. Seems a long time ago now.’

  ‘Did you stay on into Le Bas’s time?’

  ‘No. Just missed him.’

  He was infinitely melancholy; gentle in manner, but with a suggestion of force behind this sad kindliness.

  ‘Was Umfraville there in your time?’

  ‘R. H. J. Umfraville?’

  ‘I think so. He’s called “Dicky”.’

  Tolland gave a slow smile.

  ‘We overlapped,’ he admitted.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Umfravillfe was my fag,’ said Tolland, as if drawing the fact from somewhere very deep down within him. ‘At least I believe he was. I was quite a bit higher up in the school, of course, so I don’t remember him very well.’

  A terrible depression seemed to seize him at the thought of this great seniority of his to Umfraville. There was a lack of serenity about Tolland at close quarters, quite different from the manner in which he had carried off his own loneliness in a crowd. I felt rather uneasy at the thought of having to deal with him, perhaps for the rest of dinner. Whitney was on the other side and there was absolutely no hope of his lending a hand in a case of that sort.

  ‘Umfraville a friend of your?’ asked Tolland.

  He spoke almost as if condoling with me.

  ‘I’ve just met him. He said he might be coming tonight.’

  Tolland looked at me absently. I thought it might be better to abandon the subject of Umfraville. However, a moment or two later he himself returned to it.

  ‘I don’t think Umfraville will come tonight,’ he said. ‘I heard he’d just got married.’

  It certainly seemed unlikely that even Umfraville would turn up for dinner at this late stage in the meal, though the reason given was unexpected, even scriptural. Tolland now seemed to regret having volunteered the information.

  ‘Who did he marry?’

  This question discomposed him even further. He cleared his throat several times and took a gulp of claret, nearly choking himself.

  ‘As a matter of fact I believe she is a distant cousin of mine—perhaps not,’ he said. ‘I can never remember that sort of thing—yes, she is, though. Of course she is.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘One of the Bridgnorth girls—Anne, I think.’

  ‘Anne Stepney?’

  ‘Yes, yes. That’s the one. You probably know her.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Thought you would.’

  ‘But she is years younger.’

  ‘She is a bit younger. Yes, she is a bit younger. Quite a bit younger. And he has been married before, of course.’

  ‘It makes his fourth wife, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I believe it does. His fourth wife. Pretty sure it does make his fourth.’

  Tolland looked at me in absolute despair, I think not so much at the predicament in which Anne Stepney had involved herself, as at the necessity for such enormities to emerge in conversation. The news was certainly unforeseen.

  ‘What do the Bridgnorths think about it?’

  It was perhaps heartless to press him on such a point, but, having been told something so extraordinary as this, I wanted to hear as much as possible about the circumstances. Rather unexpectedly, he seemed relieved to report on that aspect of the marriage.

  ‘The fellow who told me in the Guards’ Club said they were making the best of it.’

  ‘There was no announcement?’

  ‘They were married in Paris,’ said Tolland. ‘So this fellow in the Guards’ Club—or was it Arthur’s?—told me. My brother, Warminster, when he was alive, used to talk about Umfraville. I think he liked him. Perhaps he didn’t. But I think he did.’

  ‘I was at school with a Tolland.’

  ‘My nephew. Did you know his brother, Erridge? Erridge has succeeded now. Funny boy.’

  Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson had mentioned a ‘Norah Tolland’ as friend of his daughter, Eleanor. She turned out to be a niece.

  ‘Warminster had ten children. Big family for these days.’

  We rose at that moment to drink the King’s health; and Le Bas’s. Then Le Bas stood up, gripping the table with both hands as if he proposed to overturn it. This was in preparation for the delivery of his accustomed speech, which varied hardly at all year by year. His guttural, carefully enunciated consonants echoed through the room.

  ‘… cannot fail to be gratifying to see so many of my former pupils here tonight … do not really know what to say to you all … certainly shall not make a long speech … these annual meetings have their importance … encourage a sense of continuity … give perhaps an opportunity of taking stock … friendship … I’ve said to some of you before … needs keeping up … probably remember, most of you, lines quoted by me on earlier occasions …

  And I sat by the shelf till I lost myself,

  And roamed in a crowded mist,

  And heard lost voices and saw lost looks,

  As I pored on an old School List.

  … verses not, of course, in the modern manner … some of us do not find such appeals to sentiment very sympathetic … typically Victorian in their emphasis … all the .. . rather well describe what most of us—well—at least some of us—may—feel—experience—when we meet and talk over our …’

  Here Le Bas, as usual, paused; probably from the conviction that the word ‘schooldays’ had accumulated various associations in the minds of his listeners to which he was unwilling to seem to appeal. The use of hackneyed words had always been one of his preoccupations. He was, I think, dimly aware that his own bearing was somewhat clerical, and was accordingly particularly anxious to avoid the appearance of preaching a sermon. He compromised at last with ‘… other times …’ returning, almost immediately, to the poem; as if the increased asperity that the lines now assumed would purge him from the imputation of sentimentality to which he had referred. He cleared his throat harshly.

  ‘…You will remember how it goes later …

  There were several duffers and several bores,

  Whose faces I’ve half forgot,

  Whom I lived among, when the world was young

  And who talked no end of rot;

  … of course I do not mean to suggest that there was anyone like that at my house …’

  This comment always caused a certain amount of mild laughter and applause. That evening Whitney uttered some sort of a cry reminiscent of the hunting field, while Widmerpool grinned and drummed on the tablecloth with his fork, slightly shaking hi
s head at the same time to indicate that he did not at all concur with Le Bas in supposing his former pupils entirely free from such failings.

  ‘… certainly nobody of that sort here tonight … but at the same time … no good pretending that all time spent at school was—entirely blissful… certainly not for a housemaster …’

  There was more restrained laughter. Le Bas’s voice tailed away. In his accustomed manner he had evidently tried to steer clear of any suggestion that schooldays were the happiest period of a man’s life, but at the same time feared that by tacking too much he might become enmeshed in dangerous admissions from which escape could be difficult. This had always been one of his main anxieties as a schoolmaster. He would go some distance along a path indicated by common sense, but overcome by caution, would stop half-way and behave in an unexpected, illogical manner. Most of the conflicts between himself and individual boys could be traced to these hesitations at the last moment. Now he paused, beginning again in more rapid sentences:

  ‘… as I have already said … do not intend to make a long, prosy after-dinner speech … nothing more boring … in fact my intention is—as at previous dinners—to ask some of you to say a word or two about your own activities since we last met together … For example, perhaps Fettiplace-Jones might tell us something of what is going forward in the House of Commons …’

  Fettiplace-Jones did not need much pressing to oblige in this request. He was on his feet almost before Le Bas had finished speaking. He was a tall, dark, rather good-looking fellow, with a lock of hair that fell from time to time over a high forehead, giving him the appearance of a Victorian statesman in early life. His maiden speech (tearing Ramsay MacDonald into shreds) had made some impression on the House, but since then there had been little if any brilliance about his subsequent parliamentary performances, though he was said to work hard in committee. India’s eventual independence was the subject he chose to tell us about, and he continued for some little time. He was followed by Simson, a keen Territorial, who asked for recruits. Widmerpool broke into Simson’s speech with more than one ‘hear, hear’. I remembered that he had told me he too was a Territorial officer. Whitney had something to say of Tanganyika. Others followed with their appointed piece. At last they came to an end. It seemed that Le Bas had exhausted the number of his former pupils from whom he might hope to extract interesting or improving comment. Stringham was sitting well back in his chair. He had, I think, actually gone to sleep.

  There was a low buzz of talking. I had begun to wonder how soon the party would break up, when there came the sound of someone rising to their feet. It was Widmerpool. He was standing up in his place, looking down towards the table, as he fiddled with his glass. He gave a kind of introductory grunt.

  ‘You have heard something of politics and India,’ he said, speaking quickly, and not very intelligibly, in that thick, irritable voice which I remembered so well. ‘You have been asked to join the Territorial Army, an invitation I most heartily endorse. Something has been said of county cricket. We have been taken as far afield as the Congo Basin, and as near home as this very hotel, where one of us here tonight worked as a waiter while acquiring his managerial training. Now I—I myself—would like to say a word or two about my experiences in the City.’

  Widmerpool stopped speaking for a moment, and took a sip of water. During dinner he had shared a bottle of Graves with Maiden. There could be no question that he was absolutely sober. Le Bas—indeed everyone present—was obviously taken aback by this sudden, uncomfortable diversion. Le Bas had never liked Widmerpool, and, since the party was given for Le Bas, and Le Bas had not asked Widmerpool to speak, this behaviour was certainly uncalled for. In fact it was unprecedented. There was, of course, no cogent reason, apart from that, why Widmerpool should not get up and talk about the life he was leading. Just as other speakers had done. Indeed, it could be argued that the general invitation to speak put forward by Le Bas required acceptance as a matter of good manners. Perhaps that was how Widmerpool looked at it, assuming that Le Bas had only led off with several individual names as an encouragement for others to take the initiative in describing their lives. All that was true. Yet, in some mysterious manner, school rules, rather than those of the outer world, governed that particular assembly. However successful Widmerpool might have become in his own eyes, he was not yet important in the eyes of those present. He remained a nonentity, perhaps even an oddity, remembered only because he had once worn the wrong sort of overcoat. His behaviour seemed all the more outrageous on account of the ease with which, at that moment on account of the special circumstances, he could force us to listen to him without protest. ‘This is terrific,’ Templer muttered. I looked across at Stringham, who had now woken up, and, having finished his bottle, was drinking brandy. He did not smile back at me, instead twisting his face into one of those extraordinary resemblances to Widmerpool at which he had always excelled. Almost immediately he resumed his natural expression, still without smiling. The effect of the grimace was so startling that I nearly laughed aloud. At the same time, something set, rather horrifying, about Stringham’s own features, put an abrupt end to this sudden spasm of amusement. This look of his even made me feel apprehension as to what Stringham himself might do next. Obviously he was intensely, if quietly, drunk. Meanwhile, Widmerpool was getting into his stride: ‘… tell you something of the inner workings of the Donners-Brebner Company,’ he was saying in a somewhat steadier voice than that in which he had begun his address. ‘There is not a man of you, I can safely say, who would not be in a stronger position to face the world if he had some past experience of employment in a big concern of that sort. However, several of you already know that I am turning my attention to rather different spheres. Indeed, I have spoken to some of you of these changes in my life when we have met in the City …’

  He looked round the room and allowed his eyes to rest for a moment on Templer, smiling again that skull-like grin with which he had greeted us. ‘This is getting embarrassing,’ said Templer. I think Templer had begun to feel he had too easily allowed himself to accept Widmerpool as a serious person. It was impossible to guess what Widmerpool was going to say next. He was drunk with his own self-importance

  ‘… at one time these financial activities were devoted to the satisfaction of man’s greed. Now we have a rather different end in view. We have been suffering—it is true to say that we are still suffering and shall suffer for no little time—from the most devastating trade depression in our recorded history. We have been forced from the Gold Standard, so it seems to me, and others not unworthy of a public hearing, because of the insufficiency of money in the hands of consumers. Very well. I suggest to you that our contemporary anxieties are not entirely vested in the question of balance of payment, that is at least so far as current account may be concerned, and I put it to you that certain persons, who should perhaps have known better, have been responsible for unhappy, indeed catastrophic capital movements through a reckless and inadmissible lending policy.’

  I had a sudden memory of Monsieur Dubuisson talking like this when Widmerpool and I had been at La Grena dière together.

  ‘… where our troubles began,’ said Widmerpool. ‘Now if we have a curve drawn on a piece of paper representing an average ratio of persistence, you will agree that authentic development must be demonstrated by a register alternately ascending and descending the level of our original curve of homogeneous development. Such an image, or, if you prefer it, such a geometrical figure, is dialectically implied precisely by the notion, in itself, of an average ratio of progress. No one would deny that. Now if a governmental policy of regulating domestic prices is to be arrived at in this or any other country, the moment assigned to the compilation of the index number which will establish the par of interest and prices must obviously be that at which internal economic conditions are in a condition of relative equilibrium. So far so good. I need not remind you that the universally accepted process in connexion with everyday commodi
ties is for their production to be systematised by the relation between their market value and the practicability of producing them, a steep ascent in value in contrast with the decreased practicability of production proportionately stimulating, and a parallel descent correspondingly depressing production. All that is clear enough. The fact that the index number remains at par regardless of alterations in the comparative prices of marketable commodities included in it, necessarily expresses the unavoidable truth that ascent or descent of a specific commodity is compensated by analogous adjustments in the opposite direction in prices of residual commodities …’

  How long Widmerpool would have continued to speak on these subjects, it is impossible to say. I think he had settled down in his own mind to make a lengthy speech, whether anyone else present liked it or not. Why he had decided to address the table in this manner was not clear to me. Possibly, he merely desired to rehearse aloud certain economic views of his own, expressing them before an indifferent, even comparatively hostile audience, so that he might judge what minor adjustments ought to be made when the speech was delivered on some far more important occasion. Such an action would not be out of keeping with the eccentric, dogged manner in which he ran his life. At the same time, it was also likely enough that he wanted to impress Le Bas’s Old Boys—those former schoolfellows who had so greatly disregarded him—with the fact that he was getting on in the world in spite of them; that he had already become a person to be reckoned with.

  Widmerpool may not even have been conscious of this motive, feeling it only instinctively, for there could be no doubt that he now thought of his schooldays in very different terms from any that his contemporaries would have used. Indeed, such references as he had ever made to his time at school, for example when we had been in France together, always suggested that he saw himself as a boy rather above the average at work and games: that justice had never been done to his energies in either direction was on account of the unsatisfactory manner in which both these sides of life were administered by those in authority