Anthony Powell - Hearing Secret Harmonies

Quiggin was not taking Widmerpool’s speech at all well. If he had been looking in poor health at the start of the evening, he now appeared almost at the end of his tether with his cold, and the unlooked for imposition of this flow of revolutionary principles. Ada, too, had begun to show signs of stress. Then Quiggin’s expression suddenly changed. From sourness, irritability, air of being out of sorts, the features became distorted with alarm. He had noticed something about Widmerpool, so it seemed, that disturbed him out of all proportion to the words spoken, many of which he must often have heard before, even if exceptional in the present circumstances. I turned towards Widmerpool’s table to see what the cause of this anxiety might be. The movement was too late. Whatever preparations Quiggin apprehended had by then passed into the sphere of active operation. There was a loud crackling explosion, like fireworks going off in an enclosed space, followed by a terrific bang. Widmerpool’s table was enveloped in a dark cloud that recalled ‘laying down smoke’ in army exercises. Within half a second all that end of the room was hidden in thick fumes, some of which reached as far as the judges’ table. At the same time a perfectly awful smell descended.

‘I knew it would be a mistake to allow those girls in. I have some experience.’

Emily Brightman’s voice was calm. Academic administration had accustomed her to such things as were taking place.

The smell that swept through the room was of stupefying nastiness. When the smoke cleared away — which for some reason it did quite quickly, the smell, in contrast, dilating in volume and foulness — the Quiggin twins had disappeared. They must have made a quick exit through the door at that end of the dining-room. A few wisps of blue smoke hung round Widmerpool himself, like a penumbra, where he still stood upright at the table. He seemed as unprepared as anyone else present for these discharges. His mouth continued to open and close. Either no words came out, or they could be heard no longer at this distance on account of the general turmoil made by people rising from their seats in an effort to escape the nauseating reek. The last I saw of the Donners-Brebner lady was a backview hurrying down the room, handkerchief raised to face. Emily Brightman, puckering her nostrils, fanned herself with a menu.

‘This compares with the Mutilation of the Hermae. Fortunately Russell is used to the antics of students. He is always self-possessed in trying situations. I told you that Lord Widmerpool had become very strange. No one showed much interest in that information at the time.’

Delavacquerie was the first to reach Gwinnett to make some sort of an apology for what had happened. He was followed by others, including the Quiggin parents. Gwinnett himself was behaving as if fire-crackers, artificial smoke, stinkbombs, were all normal adjuncts of any literary prize-giving, in London, or anywhere else. Matilda, too, was taking it all quietly. The scene may even have appealed a little to her own adventurous side.

‘Here’s the maître d’hotel,’ she said. ‘We shall probably be asked to hold the party in another restaurant next year.’

The origin of all this tumult — Widmerpool and his speech, more precisely, Widmerpool and his guests — had been for the moment forgotten in the general confusion.

Now Widmerpool himself appeared in the crowd clustering round Gwinnett. He was in a state of almost uncontrollable excitement, eyes gleaming through his spectacles hands making spasmodic jerky movements.

‘That was a Happening, if you like. Amanda and Belinda don’t do things by halves. I wouldn’t have missed that for a cool million — I mean had money meant anything to me these days.’

He made for Gwinnett, whom Evadne Clapham had at last managed to pin down; Delavacquerie having moved away to speak with Matilda. Widmerpool — something of a feat — elbowed Evadne Clapham aside. He faced Gwinnett. They did not shake hands.

‘Professor Gwinnett — at last I recall the name — I hope you did not mind what I said in my speech.’

‘No, Lord Widmerpool, I did not mind.’

‘Not at all?’

‘Not at all.’

‘You are probably familiar with its trend.’

‘I am.’

‘You have heard some of those concepts ventilated in academic circles?’

‘I have.’

‘Are you staying in this country?’

‘Just a week.’

‘I should like to see you. Where are you staying?’

Gwinnett expressed no view as to whether or not he himself wished to renew such acquaintance as already experienced with Widmerpool. He simply gave the name of his hotel. Widmerpool, who had taken out a pencil, was about to write the address on the back of a menu picked up from the table. He showed immediate signs of recognizing the place, which he must almost certainly have been required to enter in the course of clearing up his wife’s affairs. His mouth twitched. Having gone thus far in making overtures to Gwinnett, expressly stating that he would like to see more of him while he was in England, he firmly went through with noting down the information given. The hotel, macabre as the choice might be, was a minor matter, it might be supposed, compared with the general wish to consort with Gwinnett himself.

‘Will you have time to visit me, Professor Gwinnett — I should like you, as an academic, to inspect my little community in the country? There are young people there you might enjoy meeting. I flatter myself I have bridged the age-gap with success — and in a manner that could be of interest in connexion with your own students. It was a problem to which I gave special attention when I was in the USA.’

Gwinnett said nothing. His silence was altogether uncommitted. It carried neither approval and acceptance, nor disapproval and rejection. His own position was absolutely neutral so far as outward gesture was concerned. It recalled a little his treatment in Venice of Glober, the film tycoon. Widmerpool tore off half the menu he held, and wrote on it his own address.

‘Here you are. Let me know, if you have a moment to come down. I shall leave here now, as I do not propose to stay any longer than necessary at a bourgeois gathering of a sort deeply repugnant to me. I came only to state in public certain things I deeply feel, and this seemed an ideal occasion for stating. I did not guess my words would be reinforced by militant action. So much the better. Why it took place, I myself do not know. Perhaps because you yourself — the winner of the Prize — are of American nationality, a citizen of the United States. If so, you will understand, Professor, that it was called for by your country’s policies, not your own book, and will recognize a gesture of cultural paranoia, from representatives of Youth, in which nothing the least personal is intended.’

Widmerpool grinned unpleasantly for a second, then turned away. He did not say goodbye to Matilda, Delavacquerie, myself, nor anyone else. In fact he now seemed not only unaware that other persons were present, but altogether insensible to the smell, hardly at all abated in frightfulness. The transcendent beauty of the performance put on by the Quiggin twins alone absorbed him; as it were, levitated him into a world of almost absolute moral and political bliss. Deep in thought, he walked slowly down the room, now rapidly emptying.

IN DAYS WHEN UNCLE GILES had been (to borrow the expressive idiom of Dr Trelawney) a restless soul wandering the vast surfaces of the Earth, it had seemed extraordinary that a man of his age — by no means what I now considered venerable — should apparently regard his life as full of incident, take his own doings with such desperate seriousness. These arbitrarily accepted conjectures of one’s earlier years — to the effect that nothing of the slightest interest happens to people, who, for reasons best known to themselves, have chosen to grow old — were not wholly borne out by observation of one’s contemporaries, nor even to some degree by personal experience. Widmerpool was certainly a case in point. The backwash of the Magnus Donners dinner tended, naturally enough, to emphasize the action of the Quiggin twins, rather than Widmerpool’s own performance that night, but, after all, Amanda and Belinda would never have had opportunity to break up the party, if Widmerpool had not negotiated the invitation.