Anthony Powell - Books Do Furnish a Room

Hoping to remain unobserved, I loitered by the door. That was not to be. The librarian looked up and stared. He took off his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, chose another pair from several spectacle-cases in front of him, put them on his nose and stared again. After a moment of this, he beckoned me. Recognizing that I was not to be allowed to kill five or ten minutes in peace, I prepared for expulsion. No doubt there was a regulation against visitors at this hour. The thing to do would be to delay eviction as long as possible, so that a minimum of time had to be spent in the porch. The librarian’s beckonings became more urgent. He was a man older than normal for the job, more formally dressed. In fact, this was clearly an assistant master substituting for a regular librarian. Professional librarians were probably unprocurable owing to shortage of labour. I went across the room to see what he wanted. Tactics could be decided by his own comportment. This happy-go-lucky approach was cut short. Sitting at the desk was my former housemaster Le Bas. He spoke crossly.

‘Do I know you?’

Boyhood returned in a flash, the instinct to oppose Le Bas — as Bagshaw would say — dialectically. The question was unanswerable. It is reasonable for someone to ask if you know him, because such knowledge is in the hands of the questioned party. How can it be asserted with assurance whether or not the questioner knows one? Powers of telepathy would be required. It could certainly be urged that five years spent under the same roof, so to speak under Le Bas’s guidance, gave him a decided opportunity for knowing one; almost an unfair advantage, both in the superficial, also the more searching sense of the phrase. That was the primitive, atavistic reaction. More mature consideration brought to mind Le Bas’s notorious forgetfulness even in those days. There was no reason to suppose his memory had improved.

‘I was in your house —’

Obviously it would be absurd to call him ‘sir’, yet that still obtruded as the only suitable form of address. What on earth else could he be called? Just ‘Le Bas’? Certainly he belonged to a generation which continued throughout a lifetime to use that excellently masculine invocation of surname, before an irresponsible bandying of first names smothered all subtleties of relationship, in any case, to call Le Bas by a christian name was unthinkable. What would it be, in effect, if so daring an apostrophe were contemplated? The initials had been L. L. Le B. — Lawrence Langton Le Bas, that was it. No one had ever been known to call him Lawrence, still less Langton. Among the other masters, some — his old enemy Cobberton, for example — used once in a way to hail him as ‘Le B.’ There was, after all, really no necessity to call him anything. Le Bas himself grew impatient at this procrastination.

‘What’s your name?’

I told him. That made things easier at once. Direct enquiry of that sort on the part of a former preceptor was much to be preferred to Sillery’s reckless guessing. Confessed ignorance on the point — as on most points — showed a saner attitude towards life. Le Bas had learnt that, if nothing else. He was probably older than Sillery, a few years the wrong side of eighty. Like Sillery, though in a different manner, he too looked well; leathery, saurian; dry as a bone. Taking off the second pair of spectacles, he again rubbed in the old accustomed fashion the deep, painfully inflamed sockets of the eyes. Then he resumed the earlier pair, or perhaps yet a third reserve.

‘What’s your generation, Jenkins?’

This was like coming up for sentence at the Last Judgment. I tried to remember, to speak more exactly, tried to decide how best to put the answer clearly to Le Bas.

‘Fetdplace-Jones was captain of the house when I arrived … my own lot… Stringham… Templer …’

Le Bas glared, as if in frank disbelief. Whether that was because the names conveyed nothing, or my own seemed not to belong amongst them, was only to be surmised. It looked as if he were about to accuse me of being an impostor, to be turned away from the Library forthwith. I lost my head, began to recite names at random as they came into my mind.

‘Simson … Fitzwith … Ghika … Brandreth … Maiden … Bischoffsheim … Whitney … Parkinson … Summers-Miller … Pyefinch … the Calthorpes … Widmerpool…’

At the last name Le Bas suddenly came to life.

‘Widmerpool?’

‘Widmerpool was a year or so senior to me.’

Le Bas seemed to forget that all we were trying to do was approximately to place my own age-group in his mind. He took one of several pens lying on the desk, examined it, chose another one, examined that, then wrote ‘Widmerpool’ on the blotting paper in front of him, drawing a circle round the name. This was an unexpected reaction. It seemed to have nothing whatever to do with myself. Le Bas now sunk into a state of near oblivion. Could it be a form of exorcism against pupils of his whom he had never much liked? Then he offered an explanation.

‘Widmerpool’s down here today. I met him in the street. We had a talk. He told me about a cause he’s interested in. That’s why I made a note. I shall have to try and remember what he said. He’s an MP now. What happened to the others?’

It was like answering enquiries after a match — ’Fettiplace-Jones was out first ball, sir’ …’Parkinson kicked a goal, sir’ … ‘Whitney got his colours, sir’. I tried to recollect some piece of information to be deemed of interest to Le Bas about the sort of boys of whom he could approve, but the only facts that came to mind were neither about these, nor cheerful.

‘Stringham died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.’

‘Yes, yes — so I heard.’

That awareness was unexpected.

‘Templer was killed on a secret operation.’

‘In the Balkans. Somebody told me. Very sad.’

Once more the cognition was unforeseen. Its acknowledgment was followed by Le Bas taking up the pen again. Underneath Widmerpool’s name he wrote ‘Balkans’, drew another circle round the word, which he attached to the first circle by a line. It looked more than ever like some form of incantation.

‘Now I remember what it was Widmerpool consulted me about. Some society he has organized to encourage good relations with one of the Balkan countries. Now which one? Simson was drowned. Torpedoed in a troopship.’

He mentioned Simson as another relevant fact, not at all as if he did not wish to be outdone in consciousness of widespread human dissolution in time of war.

‘What are you doing yourself, Jenkins?’

‘I’m writing a book on Burton — the Anatomy of Melancholy man.’

Le Bas took two or three seconds to absorb that statement, the aspects, good and bad, implied by such an activity. He had probably heard of Burton. He might easily know more about him than did Sillery. Dons were not necessarily better informed than schoolmasters. When at last he spoke, it was clear Le Bas did know about Burton. He was not wholly approving.

‘Rather a morbid subject.’

He had used just that epithet when he found me, as a schoolboy, reading St John Clarke’s Fields of Amaranth . He may have thought reading or writing books equally morbid, whatever the content. To be fair to Le Bas as a critic, Fields of Amaranth — if you were prepared to use the term critically at all — might reasonably be so described. I now agreed, even if on different grounds. The admission had to be made. Time had been on Le Bas’s side.

We were interrupted at this moment by a very small boy, who had come to stand close by where we were talking. It would be fairer to say we were inhibited by his presence, because no direct interruption took place. Dispelling about him an aura of immense, if not wholly convincing goodness, his intention was evidently to accost Le Bas in due course, at the same time ostentatiously to avoid any implication that he could be so lacking in good manners as to break into a conversation or attempt to overhear it. Le Bas, possibly not unwilling to seek dispensation from further talk about the past, distant or immediate, with all its uncomfortably realistic — Trapnel might prefer, naturalistic — undercurrents, turned in the boy’s direction.