‘Werner is writing a play,’ explained Mrs. Andriadis, speaking now in a much more placatory manner. ‘We sometimes run through the First Act in the evening. How is it going, Werner?’
‘Oh, are you?’ said Anne Stepney. ‘I’m terribly interested in the Theatre. Do tell us what it is about.’
Guggenbühl turned his head at this.
‘I think it would not interest you,’ he said. ‘We have done with old theatre of bourgeoisie and capitalists. Here is Volksbühnen — for actor that is worker like industrial worker — actor that is machine of machines.’
‘Isn’t it too thrilling?’ said Mrs. Andriadis. ‘You know the October Revolution was the real turning point in the history of the Theatre.’
‘Oh, I’m sure it was,’ said Anne Stepney. ‘I’ve read a lot about the Moscow Art Theatre.’
Guggenbühl made a hissing sound with his lips, expressing considerable contempt.
‘Moscow Art Theatre is just to tolerate,’ he said, ‘but what of biomechanics, of Trümmer-Kunst, has it? Then Shakespeare’s Ein Sommernachtstraum or Toller’s Masse-Mensch will you take? The modern ethico-social play I think you do not like. Hauptmann, Kaiser, plays to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, yes. The new corporate life. The socially conscious form. Drama as highest of arts we Germans know. No mere entertainment, please. Lebens-stimmung it is. But it is workers untouched by middle class that will make spontaneous. Of Moscow Art Theatre you speak. So there was founded at Revolution both Theatre and Art Soviet, millions, billions of roubles set aside by Moscow Soviet of Soldier Deputies. Hundreds, thousands of persons. Actors, singers, clowns, dancers, musicians, craftsmen, designers, mechanics, electricians, scene-shifters, all kinds of manual workers, all trained, yes, and supplying themselves to make. Two years to have one perfect single production — if needed so, three, four, five, ten years. At other time, fifty plays on fifty successive nights. It is not be getting money, no.’
His cold, hard voice, offering instruction, stopped abruptly.
‘Any ventriloquists?’ Umfraville asked.
The remark passed unnoticed, because Anne Stepney broke in again.
‘I can’t think why we don’t have a revolution here,’ she said, ‘and start something of that sort.’
‘You would have a revolution here?’ said Guggenbühl, smiling rather grimly. ‘So? Then I am in agreement with you.’
‘Werner thinks the time has come to act,’ said Mrs. Andriadis, returning to her more decisive manner. ‘He says we have been talking for too long.’
‘Oh, I do agree,’ said Anne Stepney.
I asked Guggenbühl if he had come across St. John Clarke that afternoon. At this question his manner at once changed.
‘You know him? The writer.’
‘I know the man and the girl who were pushing him.’
‘Ach, so.’
He seemed uncertain what line to take about St. John Clarke. Perhaps he was displeased with himself for having made disparaging remarks about the procession in front of someone who knew two of the participants and might report his words.
‘He is a famous author, I think.’
‘Quite well known.’
‘He ask me to visit him.’
‘Are you going?’
‘Of course.’
‘Did you meet Quiggin — his secretary — my friend?’
‘I think he goes away soon to get married.’
‘To the girl he was with?’
‘I think so. Mr. Clarke ask me to visit him when your friend is gone for some weeks. He says he will be lonely and would like to talk.’
Probably feeling that he had wasted enough time already with the company assembled in the room, and at the same time unwilling to give too much away to someone he did not know, Guggenbühl returned, after saying this, to the model theatre. Ostentatiously, he continued to play about with its accessories. We drank our beer. Even Umfraville seemed a little put out of countenance by Guggenbühl, who had certainly brought an atmosphere of peculiar unfriendliness and disquiet into the room. Mrs. Andriadis herself perhaps took some pleasure in the general discomfiture for which he was responsible. The imposition of one kind of a guest upon another is a form of exercising power that appeals to most persons who have devoted a good deal of their life to entertaining. Mrs. Andriadis, as a hostess of long standing and varied experience, was probably no exception. In addition to that, she, like St. John Clarke, had evidently succumbed recently to a political conversion, using Guggenbühl as her vehicle. His uncompromising behaviour no doubt expressed to perfection the role to which he was assigned in her mind: the scourge of frivolous persons of the sort she knew so well.
One of the essential gifts of an accomplished hostess is an ability to dismiss, quietly and speedily, guests who have overstayed their welcome. Mrs. Andriadis must have possessed this ingenuity to an unusual degree. I can remember no details of how our party was shifted. Perhaps Umfraville made a movement to go that was quickly accepted. Brief good-byes were said. One way or another, in an unbelievably short space of time, we found ourselves once more in Park Lane.
‘You see,’ said Umfraville. ‘Even Milly …’
Some sort of a discussion followed as to whether or not the evening should be brought to a close at this point. Umfraville and Anne Stepney were unwilling to go home; Barnby was uncertain what he wanted to do; Jean and I agreed that we had had enough. The end of it was that the other two decided to accompany Umfraville to a place where a ‘last drink’ could be obtained. Other people’s behaviour were unimportant to me; for in some way the day had righted itself, and once more the two of us seemed close together.
5
WHEN, in describing Widmerpool’s new employment, Templer had spoken of ‘the Acceptance World’, I had been struck by the phrase. Even as a technical definition, it seemed to suggest what we are all doing; not only in business, but in love, art, religion, philosophy, politics, in fact all human activities. The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element — happiness, for example — is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill. Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed. Besides, in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that.
I did not see Templer himself until later in the summer, when I attended the Old Boy Dinner for members of Le Bas’s house. That year the dinner was held at the Ritz. We met in one of the subterranean passages leading to the private room where we were to eat. It was a warm, rather stuffy July evening. Templer, like a Frenchman, wore a white waistcoat with his dinner-jacket, a fashion of the moment, perhaps by then already a little outmoded.
‘We always seem to meet in these gorgeous halls,’ he said.
‘We do.’
‘I expect you’ve heard that Mona bolted,’ he went on quickly. ‘Joined up with that friend of yours of the remarkable suit and strong political views.’
His voice was casual, but it had a note of obsession as if his nerves were on edge. His appearance was unchanged, possibly a little thinner.
Mona’s elopement had certainly been discussed widely. In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame. In the Templers’ case public opinion had turned out unexpectedly favourable to Mona, probably because Templer himself was unknown to most of the people who talked to me of the matter. Normal inaccuracies of gossip were increased by this ignorance. In one version, Mona was represented as immensely rich, ill treated by an elderly, unsuccessful stockbroker; another described Templer as unable to fulfil a husband’s role from physical dislike of women. A third account included a twenty- minute hand-to-hand struggle between the two men, at the end of which Quiggin had gained the victory: a narrative sometimes varied to a form in which Templer beat Quiggin unconscious with a shooting-stick. In a different vein was yet another story describing Templer, infatuated with his secretary, paying Quiggin a large sum to take Mona off his hands.