I was reminded of Stringham’s disparagement of Buster on the ground that he was “too grand;” and also of the reservations he had expressed regarding Templer himself. Clearly some complicated process of sorting-out was in progress among those who surrounded me: though only years later did I become aware how early such voluntary segregations begin to develop; and of how they continue throughout life. I asked more questions about Templer’s objection to house-parties at Glimber. He said: “Well, I imagine it was all rather pompous even at lunch, wasn’t it?”
“Buster seemed rather an ass. His mother was awfully nice.”
Even at the time I felt that the phrase was not a very adequate way of describing Mrs Foxe’s forceful, even dazzling, characteristics.
“Oh, she is all right, I have no doubt,” said Templer. “And damned good-looking still. She gave Stringham’s sister absolute hell, though, until she married the first chap that came along.”
“Who was he?”
“I can’t remember his name. A well-known criminal with one arm.”
“Stringham certainly seemed in bad form when she was there.”
“She led his father a dance, too.”
“Still, he need not join in all that if he doesn’t want to.”
“He will want to,” said Templer. “Take my word for it, he will soon disappear from sight so far as we are concerned.”
Armed, as I have said, with the knowledge of Stringham’s admission regarding his own views on Templer, I recognised that there must be some truth in this judgment of Stringham’s character; (though some of its implications — notably with regard to myself — I failed, rather naturally, to grasp at that period. That was the only occasion when I ever heard Templer speak seriously about Stringham, though he often used to refer to escapades in which they had shared, especially the incident of Le Bas’s arrest.
So far as Templer and I were concerned, nothing further had taken place regarding this affair, though Templer’s relations with Le Bas continued to be strained. Although so little involved personally in the episode, I found myself often thinking of it. Why, for example, should Stringham, singularly good-natured, have chosen to persecute Le Bas in this manner? Was it a matter for regret or congratulation: had it, indeed, any meaning at all? The circumstances revealed at once Stringham’s potential assurance, and the inadequacy of Le Bas’s defences. If Stringham had been brutal, Le Bas had been futile. In spite of his advocacy of the poem, Le Bas had not learned its lesson:“And then we turn unwilling feet
And seek the world — so must it be –
We may not linger in the heat
Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea!”
He was known for a long time after as “Braddock alias Thorne,” especially among his colleagues, whose theory was that the hoaxer had recently left the school, and, while passing through the town, probably in a car, had decided to tease Le Bas. Certainly Stringham would never have been thought capable of such an enormity by any master who had ever come in contact with him. Not unnaturally, however, Le Bas’s tendency to feel that the world was against him was accentuated by an experience in many ways humiliating enough; and he persecuted Templer — or, at least, his activities in this direction were represented by Templer as persecution — more energetically than ever.
Finally Templer’s habitual carelessness gave Le Bas an opportunity to close the account. This conclusion was the result of Templer leaving his tobacco pouch — on which, characteristically, he had inscribed his initials — lying on the trunk of a tree somewhere among the fields where we had happened on Le Bas. Cobberton, scouting round that neighbourhood, had found the pouch, and passed it on to Le Bas. Nothing definite could be proved against Templer: not even the ownership of the half-filled tobacco pouch, though no one doubted it was his. However, Le Bas moved heaven and earth to be rid of Templer, eventually persuading the headmaster to the view that life would be easier for both of them if Templer left the school. In consequence, Peter’s father was persuaded to remove him a term earlier than previously intended. This pleased Templer himself, and did not unduly ruffle his father; who was reported to take the view that schools and universities were, in any case, waste of time and money: on the principle that an office was the place in which to learn the realities of life. And so I was left, as it seemed to me, alone.
Templer was not a great hand at letter-writing after his departure; though an occasional picture post-card used to arrive, stating his score at the local golf tournament, or saying that he was going to Holland to learn business methods. Before he left school, he had suggested several times that I should visit his home, always qualifying his account of the amusements there offered by a somewhat menacing picture of his father’s habitually cantankerous behaviour. I did not take these warnings about his father too seriously because of Templer’s tendency to impute bad temper to anyone placed in a position of authority in relation to himself. At the same time, I had the impression that Mr. Templer might be a difficult man to live with; I even thought it possible that Peter’s dealings with Le Bas might derive from experience of similar skirmishes with his father. Peter’s chief complaint, so far as his father was concerned, seemed directed not towards any violent disagreement between them in tastes, or way of life, so much as to the fact that his father, in control of so much more money than himself, showed in his son’s eyes on the whole so little capacity for putting this favourable situation to a suitable advantage. “Wait till you see the car we have to use for station work,” Peter used to say. “Then you will understand what sort of a man my father is.”
The invitation arrived just when the mechanical accessories of leaving school were in full swing. Later in the summer it had been arranged that, before going up to.the university, I should spend a period in France; partly with a view to learning the language: partly as a solution to that urgent problem — inviting one’s own as much as other people’s attention — of the disposal of the body of one of those uneasy, stranded beings, no longer a boy and hardly yet a man. The Templer visit could be fitted in before the French trip took place.
Stringham’s letters from Kenya reported that he liked the place better than he had expected. They contained drawings of people met there, and of a horse he sometimes rode. He could not really draw at all, but used a convention of blobs and spidery lines, effective in expressing the appearance of persons and things. One of these was of Buster selling a car; another of Buster playing polo. I used to think sometimes of the glimpse I had seen of Stringham’s life at home; and — although this did not occur to me at once — I came in time to regard his circumstances as having something in common with those of Hamlet. His father had, of course, been shipped off to Kenya rather than murdered; but Buster and his mother were well adapted to play the parts of Claudius and Gertrude. I did not manage to get far beyond this, except to wonder if Miss Weedon was a kind of female Polonius, working on Hamlet’s side. I could well imagine Stringham stabbing her through the arras. At present there was no Ophelia. Stringham himself had a decided resemblance to the Prince of Denmark; or, as Templer would have said: “It was the kind of part the old boy would fancy himself in.”
*
At first sight the Templers’ house seemed to be an enormously swollen villa, red and gabled, facing the sea from a small park of Scotch firs: a residence torn by some occult power from more appropriate suburban setting, and, at the same time, much magnified. It must have been built about twenty or thirty years before, and, as we came along the road, I saw that it stood on a piece of sloping ground set about a quarter of a mile from the cliff’s edge. The clouded horizon and olive-green waves lapping against the stones made it a place of mystery in spite of this outwardly banal appearance: a sea-palace for a version of one of those embarkation scenes of Claude Lorraine — the Queen of Sheba, St. Ursula, or perhaps The Enchanted Castle — where any adventure might be expected.