The kindly ones by Anthony Powell Page A

tyranny of action.’
    ‘But surely some crimes passionnels are fascinating. Suppose one of his girls murdered Sir Magnus Donners in fantastic circumstances – I leave the setting to your own fevered imagination.’
    ‘Now, Sir Magnus Donners,’ said Moreland. ‘Is he a man of action? In the eyes of the world, certainly. But does he, in fact, live intensely?’
    ‘Like Stendhal, he has never married.’
    ‘Hardly a sine qua non of action,’ said Moreland, now rubbing the plate with a lump of bread.
    ‘But a testing experience, surely. The baronet’s wife’s subsequent married life with the gamekeeper opens up more interesting possibilities than any of their adulterous frolics.’
    ‘D. H. Lawrence’s ideas about sexual stimulation,’ said Moreland, ‘strike me as no less unreal – no less artificial, if you prefer-than any attributed to Sir Magnus Donners. Suburban, narcissistic daydreams, a phallic never-never-land for middle-aged women. However, that is beside the point, which is that I grant, within the sphere of marriage and family life, Sir Magnus has not lived intensely. Setting marriage aside, on the other hand, he has built up a huge fortune, risen to all but the highest peaks in politics, appreciates the arts in a coarse but perfectly genuine manner, always has a succession of pretty girls in tow. Is he to be styled no man of action because he has never married? The proposition is absurd. After all, we are not married ourselves.’
    ‘And, what’s more, must cease to live intensely. It’s nearly three o’clock.’
    ‘So it is. How time flies.’
    ‘Raining, too.’
    ‘And the buses have stopped.’
    ‘We will return to action on another occasion.’
    ‘Certainly, we will.’
    The interest of this conversation, characteristic of Moreland in a discursive mood, lay, of course, in the fact that he subsequently married Matilda Wilson, one of Sir Magnus’s ‘girls’. The modest account he gave during this discussion at the Hay Loft of his own exploits at that period probably did Moreland less than justice. He was not unattractive to women. At the same time, his own romantic approach to emotional relationships had already caused him to take some hard knocks in that very knockabout sphere. At the moment when we were eating bacon-and-eggs, neither Moreland nor I had yet heard of Matilda. In those days, I think, she had not even come the way of Sir Magnus himself. In fact, that was about the stage in her life when she was married to Carolo, the violinist, a marriage undertaken when she was very young, lasting only about eighteen months. However, ‘the great industrialist’ – as Barnby used to call Sir Magnus – was already by then one of Moreland’s patrons, having commissioned him not long before to write the incidental music for a highbrow film which had Donners backing. Barnby, too, was beginning to sell his pictures to Sir Magnus at about that date. Barnby often talked about ‘the great industrialist’, who was, therefore, a familiar figure to me – at least in song and story – although I had myself only seen Sir Magnus twice: once at a party of Mrs Andriadis, which I had attended quite fortuitously; a second time, spending a week-end with the Walpole-Wilsons, when I had been taken over to Stourwater. Later on, one heard gossip about a jolie laide (in contrast with the ‘pretty girls’ Moreland had adumbrated at the Hay Loft) with whom Sir Magnus used occasionally to appear. She was called Matilda Wilson, said to be an actress. Sir Magnus and Matilda had parted company – at least were no longer seen together in public – by the time Moreland first met her. Afterwards, when Matilda became Moreland’s wife, I used sometimes to wonder whether Moreland himself ever recalled that Hay Loft conversation. If so, rather naturally, he never returned to the subject.
    I think it would be true to say of Moreland that, up to a point, he did live with intensity. He worked hard at seasons, at