Read Online Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell - Free Book Online Page A

he would have gone to any lengths to avoid even meeting
her. If, as Craggs’s wife, she had to come, that would have been sufficient to
keep Widmerpool away. Some overriding political consideration must explain
this, such as the idea of attaching himself to a kind of unofficial deputation
paying last respects to a ‘Man of the Left’. In Widmerpool’s case that would be
a way of establishing publicly his own
bona
fides
, sentiments not sufficiently recognized in himself. Acceptance of Gypsy could be
regarded as a gesture of friendship to the extremities of Left-Wing thought, an
olive branch appropriate (or not) to Erridge’s memory.
    The more one thought about it,
the more relevant – to employ one of their own favourite terms – were Quiggin
and Craggs, in fact the whole group, to consign Erridge to the tomb; in certain
respects more so than his own relations. It was true that Erridge’s abnegation
of the family as a social unit was capable of exaggeration, by no means so
total as he himself liked to pretend, or his cronies, many of those
unsympathetic to him too, prepared to accept. The fact remained that it was
with Quiggin and Craggs he had lived his life, insomuch as he had lived it with
other people at all, sitting on committees, signing manifestoes, collaborating
in pamphlets. (Burton – who provided instances for all occasions, it was hard
not to become obsessed with him – spoke of those who ‘pound out pamphlets on
leaves of which a poverty-stricken monkey would not wipe’.) In fact, pondering
on these latest arrivals, they might be compared with the squad of German POWs
straying across the face of George Tolland’s obsequies, each group a visual
reminder of seamy realities – as opposed to idealistic aspirations – the former
of war, the latter, politics.
    The train of thought invited
comparison between the two brothers, their characters and fates. Erridge,
high-minded, willing to endure discomfort, ridicule, solitude, in a fervent anxiety
to set the world right, had at the same time, as a comfortably situated eldest
son, a taste for holding on to his money, except for intermittent doles – no
doubt generous ones
– to Quiggin and others who represented in his own
eyes what Sillery liked to call The Good Life. Erridge was
wholly uninterested in individuals; his absorption only in ‘causes’.
    George, on the
other hand, had never shown much concern with
righting the world, except that in a sense his death might be regarded as
stemming from an effort at least to prevent the place from becoming worse. He had not been
at all adept at making money, but never, so to speak, set the glass of port he liked after lunch – if there were any excuse – before,
say, educating his step-children in a generous
manner. A competent officer (Tom Goring had praised him
in that sphere), his target was always the regular soldier’s
(one thought of Vigny) to do his duty to the fullest extent, without, at the same time seeking supererogatory burdens or
looking out for trouble.
    With newsprint still in short
supply, Erridge’s obituaries were briefer than might have been the case in
normal times, but he received some little notice: polite reference to lifelong
Left-Wing convictions, political reorientations in that field, final pacifism;
the last contrasted with having ‘fought’ (the months in Spain having by now
taken mythical shape) in the Spanish Civil War. George was, of course,
mentioned only in the ordinary death announcements inserted by the family.
Musing on the brothers, it looked a bit as if, in an oblique manner, Erridge,
at least by implication, had been given the credit for paying the debt that had
in fact been irrefutably settled by George. The same was true, if it came to
that, of Stringham, Templer, Barnby – to name a few casualties known personally
to one – all equally indifferent to putting right the world.
    The sound came
now, unmistakable,