Basil nodded. ‘Mr X.’
We stared at him.
‘I cannot,’ said Basil with mocking seriousness, ‘tell you more. Except this: for one of you Mr X is a special treat. And he will be here for dinner.’
I do not think that my walk that morning was much disturbed by the mysterious currents which were beginning to stir in my cousin’s house party. A powdering of snow had fallen and in the park the trees, bare and soot-begrimed, showed like frozen fountains of ebony. Everywhere the eye saw silence; the hubbub from without, itself something diminished at this hour, was doubly an invasion and a wrong: against it a single hidden storm cock, the missel thrush of the north, sang a clear defiant strain. A gardener’s boy, breaking off from the satisfied contemplation of frost on his recently dug beds, trundled his barrow over to greet me; I had known his father and could just remember his grandfather too.
I felt at home. Many of my school holidays had been spent at Belrive; indeed, it was the nearest thing to a fixed centre that I had known. My father was an engineer, frequently occupied in South America; his passion was for the continent of Europe and when not constructing bridges in Brazil he would be prowling with a Baedeker through the streets of Bonn or arguing with a courier on the best route from Modena to Montagnana. And like many prosperous Englishmen of his day he thought it the natural thing to travel en famille: nurses, governesses, tutors succeeding each other with the years. My schooling was perfunctory; my early expressions are all of a Europe in ceaseless motion: the rock and olive of the Dalmation coast heaving past the deck of a foul-smelling Greek steamer out of Trieste; Holland flowing smoothly across the windows of a Pullman car and a scuffling excitement to observe, running along a dyke, the incredible novelty of an electric tram; the vineyards of the Viennese hills circling slowly as a carriage laboriously climbed – beside me an elderly Englishwoman, fortuitously met, extracting watercolour sketches from a portfolio to show my mother. As an education it was incomparable; by seventeen I had acquired what every novelist would beg of the gods: a tolerably intimate knowledge of three capitals. I don’t know that Scheherazade herself had more.
But as a way of life it had not conduced to the formation of any local piety and I would have grown up wholly rootless but for Belrive. A villa at Ventimiglia or San Remo, a flat in Paris, a London club as a jumping-off ground for the houses of acquaintances discreetly cultivated: from just that Belrive had, I suppose, swung me away. It had given me a taste for ground of my own; it was the reason of my possessing today a solid house in Chelsea, pleasantly cluttered with the accumulated possessions of years. This meditation, pursued as I strolled now over snow and now over crisply frosted grass, did not make me less pleased with my surroundings. In the solitude which one could gain in Belrive’s little park there was something peculiarly attractive. So strangely secluded from the city, the place had the quality of all unlikely retreats: the hollow to which one can sometimes clamber behind a waterfall, a cave which delivers one unexpectedly from the beat and the glitter of the sea. I was slightly annoyed when, on turning the corner of an isolated shrubbery, I came upon Cecil and Mervyn Wale.
They had brushed the light snow from an upturned cattle-trough and were perched in somewhat uneasy dignity on the resulting low seat. I noticed a robin perched on a twig hard by – and it was the robin which made me pause as I was about to advance upon them. For the bird struck me as viewing the scene with the inquisitive and considering air of its kind; it seemed to be asking itself what was going forward; and a mysterious sympathy prompted me to do the same. For a moment I stayed my steps, and in that moment an odd conviction came upon me. I was about to interrupt a professional consultation.
If Cecil had been thrusting out his tongue or Wale manipulating a stethoscope I could not have been more convinced – though actually the two men were only conversing earnestly together. It must have been Cecil who gave the thing away. He was something of a poseur and a little more than slightly self-important; his type is not at its ease when consulting inscrutable fate in the guise of a Harley Street medico. I paused awkwardly, very much as if by some mistake of a nurse or servant I had been ushered into a consulting room where another patient was being palpated on a couch.
The robin, as if satisfied with having occasioned this fatal hesitation, whisked its tail and flew away. In the same moment I realized that I had not been observed, and thought good to follow its example. Retreating behind the shrubbery, I glanced round for some other route which I might take. As I did so I wondered if here was the reason for Wale’s being at Belrive. Could Cecil, unbeknown to us all, be so confirmed a valetudinarian that he must have a trusted doctor with him wherever he went? It seemed almost impossible. Without much knowledge of the economics of the medical profession, I could yet guess that to retain Wale in such a way would be to face an almost astronomical bill.
My speculations – which were those of the merest busybody, I must confess – were abrupted by two quick reports from the direction of the ruins. The pistol-shooting was beginning. With some thought of going in that direction I turned half round and saw Cecil moving off alone across the park. The consultation – if consultation it had been – was over. I went on my previous way.
Wale was still sitting on the trough, a shrunken and curiously concentrated figure. And once more I made that awkward pause. Solitary though he was, there seemed yet something I was loath to interrupt. He was looking after Cecil; his face was in little more than profile: there was no mistaking his expression, nevertheless.
Or there ought to have been none, for just that expression I had seen and marked before. As I advanced upon him now – for it was impossible to skulk longer at the bidding of these fugitive impressions – I reflected that if only I could recall on whom and upon what occasion I had remarked it in the past I should know something odd about Sir Mervyn Wale.
5
The Dutch and Flemish artists painted sitting on a stool; the Italian Old Masters painted standing. I have noticed that a majority of modern painters of my acquaintance follow the Italian habit, and I believe this has been general since the time of the Impressionists. The painter stands before his canvas, retreats from it backwards like a courtier before royalty, contemplates his subject, advances rapidly, strikes at the canvas and again retreats. Young Geoffrey Roper, I knew, painted like this. And this is why I was surprised that he was such a bad shot. A man who could bear swiftly down upon an easel and flick a splash or speck of pigment just where it was wanted might reasonably be expected to make a better show as a marksman than Geoffrey was contriving on his uncle Basil’s range.
At the beginning I was next to hopeless myself. With a shot-gun I can acquit myself just below mediocrity; my efforts raise friendly ridicule in others, but not the embarrassment which attends going out with a positive duffer. A revolver was an unfamiliar weapon and, I felt, a futile one. If one is inexpert one has to stand so near the target that it is difficult not to feel that it would be altogether simpler to step up to it and use one’s fists. And I doubt if I should have attempted to improve had it not been for Wilfred.
Wilfred abundantly entertained us with what may be termed the lore of the revolver: its evolution from a primitive form, its mechanisms, the ballistic laws involved. To escape this I concentrated on marksmanship and as the morning’s rather desultory sport wore on I found myself making progress. But Geoffrey, if anything, seemed less proficient than at the start. At eight paces he was unable to put two bullets within a foot of each other. Anne was laughing at him and this – perhaps because their alliance was commonly unflagging and directed upon every trifle – he seemed not to like. He continued to take part with a sort of scornful irritation infinitely shocking, I don’t doubt, to those who cherished orthodox attitudes to sport.
And among these, inevitably, was Cecil. Cecil had taken upon himself what I thought of as his touch-line pose. Just so would he stand on his playing fields, encouraging (at a sort of modified shout, which ingeniously consulted both dignity
and vehemence) the muddy manoeuvrings of his pupils. He had never himself stepped on a rugger field in his life; I could remember him, on the strength of a weak heart, spending most of his afternoons in the school library. But it would have been difficult to guess this of the headmaster who was keen on the game. Or difficult for all but schoolboys. Wilfred had told me how Cecil was found out. He had for some fatal weeks failed to master the significance of the shout, ‘All on’. This, apparently a technical term connected with the off-side rule, Cecil had carelessly taken for granted as an exclamation of simple encouragement. He had used it as that – to the horror of the school, so that the thing became a legend. The mistake was, one can guess, an uneasy memory in Cecil’s mind. But here he was in his best athletic impersonation exclaiming ‘By Jove’ with manly vehemence and ‘Oh, good shot!’ as if a bull’s-eye was the rational passport to his extreme regard.
‘Cousin Cecil is ardent,’ Anne said.
‘He relaxes the bow,’ said Geoffrey. ‘He pulls the trigger. He encourages the warriors. He calls upon the gods. And presently, surely, he will distribute the prizes.’
‘But Cousin Wilfred distributes marks. There is emphasis on good conduct and second in importance is general knowledge. A prize may conceivably follow at the end of the year.’
They were at it again. Cecil and Wilfred were out of earshot; the parody was for my benefit alone. I realized that they had been reading my last book, The Kinsmen – having borrowed, no doubt, the copy I had sent to Basil. The reiterated mockery irritated me; perhaps it was because of this that I suddenly saw these two as a couple of precious spongers. They were quite frankly out to extract money – an income, a settlement or whatever it might be – from Wilfred. And they thought to veil the social indecency of this attitude behind a screen of sophisticated talk. At the moment my talk. I turned to Anne. ‘Are you sure,’ I asked, ‘that you are conducting your operations in quite the right way?’
I ought not to have intervened; it was no business of mine. Basically, too, my sympathies were on their side. As a painter Geoffrey had a real line, and he was sticking to it. I had myself once stuck a sort of fiction in which a year’s work brought in forty pounds; if it came to a little moral pressure on a wealthy relative I was far from wanting to disapprove. And Anne too was a hopelessly uneconomic proposition: intellectual, odd, a reviewer of little volumes of verse nobody else read. Could she at a pinch boil an egg? I doubted it. Most injudiciously, she had been brought up in an environment in which ringing the bell for eggs is part of the law of nature. They were nature’s own spongers, inconsiderable members of a class which sweetens life with imagination. I repeated my question with a more friendly intonation.
Anne laughed. ‘Wilfred,’ she said, ‘is going to gather his dependents round the death-bed. And then how infinitely charitable he will be.’
Geoffrey stared at her reflectively and nodded. ‘He will keep only the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In that he will read his own last offices and hope to retain a good deal of information that they have long forgotten in heaven.’
‘May I, Sir, recall an interesting fact about the throne on which You are at present seated?’ Anne had put her hands together as if in prayer. ‘It is equally compounded of chrysoprase, chrysoberyl, beryl, and chrysolite, and it was constructed to an original design by Moloch himself.’
A pistol banged. There was no sense to be got out of them. But Anne was my niece and I tried once more, turning to Geoffrey. ‘But aren’t you being rather impatient? And are there not other ways of arranging things? Surely your father, who has such solid expectations…’
Geoffrey jerked his head backwards. ‘Look at my father now.’
I looked. Hubert Roper was standing a little removed from the shooting, staring back at the house. He was in a brown study; about his whole attitude there was something extraordinary sombre.
‘And look,’ continued Geoffrey as if continuing an argument, ‘at Horace Cudbird.’
I turned round. Advancing across the frosted grass was a small stout smiling man in a new, very cheap suit. Between the banging pistols one could hear the loud creak of his boots. This was indeed Horace Cudbird, the wealthiest man in the town.
‘Ferryman?’ Cudbird said to me when we were introduced. ‘You’re one of the family though. I can tell that.’ And he glanced first at Basil and then back at myself with brisk appraisement. I got the impression that my cousin and I might be two tubs of malt or loads of hops. ‘Canaries are wonderful for sharpening the eye that way.’
The shooting had been interrupted and a little circle had formed for the purpose of introduction. Cudbird looked round it in the most friendly fashion and continued to talk. ‘For following out a strain of blood there’s nothing like practice on canaries. And I’ve kept them, Sir Basil, for as long as I can remember now. And kept notes on the breeding of them. And a funny thing happened about that.’
We made polite murmurs.
‘It came of my lad’s wanting an electric train. He was saving up for that and he thought: “Why not get hold of Dad’s notes on the canaries and send them to the Fancier?” It won’t be known to you, but you can guess that’s a paper for those that keep birds.’
Cudbird paused. I realized that in the trivial anecdote which was going forward we were all oddly prepared to be interested.
‘And send them the nipper did. A few weeks later they were printed, and there was a couple of guineas more towards the train.’
Cudbird had produced a very old pipe. He stopped to begin a cleaning operation – obviously a simple rhetorical wile to achieve suspense.
‘And the next thing was a professor from Cambridge, with the Fancier in his pocket, ringing the door-bell and chasing me from home to the office. We got in one of the stenographers and spent a morning putting down everything about canaries I ever knew.’
There was a genuinely impressed silence. I think we were chiefly struck by the realization that the man was not bragging. It was his imagination, not his pride, that had been engaged by this incident. That he and the professor from Cambridge should have got together over canaries was natural; the oddity consisted in the way it had happened.
‘It’s curious,’ continued Cudbird, becoming metaphysical and confirming this interpretation, ‘how one thing does follow on another. You never know’ – he raised his head and his eye left us to sweep round the ruins – ‘what your ball won’t set rolling. That talk with the professor meant a contribution to genetics – a thing I’d scarcely thought of before, though I’ve read about it since a fair amount. And it would never have happened’ – his eye returned to us humorously or ironically – ‘if Jim Meech hadn’t thought to deliver potatoes… But, Sir Basil, you’ll want to be getting on with the morning’s sport.’
Some of us undoubtedly wanted to employ ourselves that way. And I myself had another preoccupation; I was beginning to feel the need for reflection on a number of things which had happened at the Priory since my arrival. Nevertheless I was pleased – as were, I think, the others – when Wale said with suave encouragement: ‘I feel a good deal of curiosity, Mr Cudbird, about Jim Meech.’ Nobody could have been less like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner than this prosperous, cheerfully plebeian but by no means vulgar little brewer. But he had something very like the Mariner’s trick. He commanded attention. Any amount of pistol-popping would have been as powerless upon us as was, upon the wedding guest, the loud bassoon.
‘When I was a lad I always wanted canaries. Not just one canary but a little aviary of them, so that I could watch how they behaved. The question was how to get them; there wasn’t any money, of course.’ Again we got a slightly ironical glance.
‘Down at the lower end of the market, where you go in by Stonegate, there was a fellow who sold them; I watched him for a time and saw he didn’t sell any too many. I made a bargain with him. For every ten canaries I sold for him I was to have one for myself. I think now I could have got him down to one for every five – but of course in those days I d
idn’t well know my way about at that sort of thing.’
Basil, who was clearly pleased with Horace Cudbird, gave a rare chuckle. ‘I dare say you’ve learnt since.’
‘Yes, Sir Basil, I have. We all must, unless…’ His eyes flickered disconcertingly towards Geoffrey Roper, who did contrive to give rather obviously an impression of being one of the lilies of the field. He broke off. ‘But now the question was: how to sell any more canaries than the fellow was already selling himself? It was then I heard Jim Meech having started to deliver his potatoes. Jim had a vegetable stall hard by and he’d seen what heavy baskets the women had by the time their marketing was over. It occurred to him he might make pretty well a corner in potatoes – about the heaviest thing – if he’d undertake to deliver them, just as if he had a shop. So he took orders and when market was over he’d get the donkey and round he’d go. It was hard work but it did the trick.’
‘Mr Meech too,’ said Cecil, a little too graciously, ‘was of the learning sort.’
‘No doubt. Well, I took on Jim’s deliveries – for nought.’ Cudbird paused and looked at Cecil. ‘For nothing, that is to say.’
I was pleased to see Cecil slightly confused. Cudbird, friendly though he was, had all his defences in order.
‘And so I got to know the womenfolk in all that part of the town. I’d hear if their men were in work and what they were making, and I’d hear about their kids and I’d give them a bit of a ride in the donkey-cart by turns. I borrowed a cap.’
‘A cap?’ said Anne.
‘Yes, Miss Grainger. I borrowed a cap from some other lad who was made to wear one and didn’t like it. And then I’d walk about those streets in my spare time as if I was on an errand and whenever one of the womenfolk went by I’d touch it in a shy sort of way as if I’d taken a particular liking to her. Like a lad going about in search of a second mother. And then I went to work at the canary stall. The women would come to Jim’s for their potatoes and see me on my new job and they’d come over for a word. In a couple of months I had four canaries of my own.’
There Came Both Mist and Snow Page 4