The kindly ones by Anthony Powell

Road, where those kept up late by business or pleasure could enjoy rather especially good bacon-and-eggs at any hour of the night. Rarely full at night-time, the place remained closed, I think, during the day. Certainly I never heard of anyone’s eating there except in the small hours. The waiter, white-haired and magisterial, a stage butler more convincing than any to be found in private service, would serve the bacon-and-eggs with a flourish to sulky prostitutes, who, nocturnal liabilities at an end, infiltrated the supper-room towards dawn. Moreland and I had come from some party in the neighbourhood, displeasing, yet for some reason hard to vacate earlier. Moreland had been talking incessantly – by then a trifle incoherently – on the theme that action, stemming from sluggish, invisible sources, moves towards destinations no less indefinable.
    ‘If action is to be one’s aim,’ he was saying, ‘then is it action to write a symphony satisfactory to oneself, which no one else wants to perform, or a comic song every errand-boy whistles? A bad example – a comic song, obviously. Nothing I should like to do better, if I had the talent. Say some ghastly, pretentious half-baked imitation of Stravinsky that makes a hit and is hailed as genius. We know it’s bad art. That is not the point. Is it action? Or is that the point? Is art action, an alternative to action, the enemy of action, or nothing whatever to do with action? I have no objection to action. I merely find it impossible to locate.’
    ‘Ask the Surrealists. They are keen on action. Their magazine had a photograph on the cover the other day with the caption: One of our contributors insulting a priest.’
    ‘Exactly,’ said Moreland. ‘Violence – revolt – sweep away the past. Abandon bourgeois values. Don’t be a prisoner of outworn dogmas. I’m told on all sides that’s how one should behave, that I must live intensely. Besides, the abominable question of musical interpretation eternally bedevils a composer’s life. What could make one brood on action more than a lot of other people taking over when it comes to performance, giving the rendering of the work least sympathetic to yourself?’
    ‘You might say that happens in love, too, when the other person takes charge of the performance in a manner unsympathetic to yourself.’
    ‘All right,’ said Moreland, ‘love, then. Is it better to love somebody and not have them, or have somebody and not love them? I mean from the point of view of action – living intensely. Does action consist in having or loving? In having – naturally – it might first appear. Loving is just emotion, not action at all. But is that correct? I’m not sure.’
    ‘It is a question Barnby would consider absurd.’
    ‘Nevertheless, I put it to you. Can the mere haver be said to live more intensely than the least successful lover? That is if action is to live with intensity. Or is action only when you bring off both – loving and having – leaving your money on, so to speak, like a double-event in racing. Speaking for myself, I get the worst of all worlds, failing to have the people I love, wasting time over the others, whom I equally fail to have.’
    ‘You should commit a crime passionnel to liven things up.’
    ‘When I read about crimes passionnels in the papers,’ said Moreland, scraping his plate from which the last vestige of egg had already been long removed, ‘I am struck not by the richness of the emotions, but by their desperate poverty. On the surface, the people concerned may seem to live with intensity. Underneath, is an abject egotism and lack of imagination.’
    ‘Stendhal did not think so. He said he would rather his wife tried to stab him twice a year than greeted him every evening with a sour face.’
    ‘Still, he remained unmarried. I’ve no doubt my own wife will do both. Besides, Stendhal was equally keen on the glance, the kiss, the squeeze of the hand. He was not really taken in by the