There Came Both Mist and Snow

by Michael Innes

  ‘And now,’ said Basil, ‘you have the world’s biggest and brightest bottle.’ He spoke without rancour.

  Horace Cudbird nodded gravely. ‘That may be,’ he said. ‘But the brewery can never mean to me what those four canaries did. They were a start.’ He turned to me. ‘Like the first manuscript that didn’t come back from the publishers, Mr Ferryman.’

  Here was a man very aware of the world. There was a silence. Cudbird stepped back and again surveyed Belrive. ‘You never can tell,’ he said in his former gnomic manner, ‘what will come of an idea.’

  6

  I am discovering that a narrative of this sort presents technical difficulties of a sort which would not confront me were I writing a novel. The discovery is interesting; I feel like turning back and writing a Jamesian preface on the problems of a romancer turned chronicler. But what reader wouldn’t skip anything of the sort? I had better go straight ahead.

  One difficulty, though, may be noted down. At this preliminary stage – which is, at least, now nearly over – one has to marshal a number of incidents and individuals the significant connection between which and whom may, if logic is to be preserved, only appear later. Of these relations of mine of whom I am writing I doubt if there is a single one of whom I have not by this time had to record some more or less cryptic remark. And though the cryptic is beguiling in moderation it can very quickly become boring. Sir Mervyn Wale, for instance, quotes Shakespeare in an obscurely significant way – and well and good. But when all these other people begin to spread themselves in much the same fashion the reader may well come to feel that it is a little tiresome. Working as a novelist I should so twist my facts as to enable me to cut down this element to that judicious proportion at which it is a spur to interest. But here the facts are given me by God – or by the Devil, maybe. I simply have to go on recording what appear to be disjointed incidents until I am out of the wood. And I am nearly out now. Still, a number of things have their place before catastrophe. How Ralph Cambrell, the cotton spinner, joined in the shooting after all; how he had an embarrassingly public quarrel with Basil; how Hubert Roper set about his nephew Cecil’s portrait; how Basil kept up his joke about the mysterious Mr X who was coming to dinner: these seem to be the chief remaining elements of the prologue. Over them I promise not to waste the professional writer’s too-ready ink.

  I had met Cambrell before. Being unable, like Cecil, to endow individuals with vague characteristics in terms of their occupations and interests – not believing, in fact, in an abstraction called the British industrialist – I was able to judge him for what I thought he was. And I thought of Ralph Cambrell as a smooth scoundrel.

  The emphasis must be on smooth. He was more obviously this than scoundrel. But, again, it was of his mind only that smoothness was a characteristic. It would be wholly misleading to suggest that he had an oily – or even a particularly supple – manner. His manner was direct and covered mental processes which were indistinctively oblique: of this obliqueness I take the business of Balltrop’s seeds and the housing estates to have been characteristic – the profits not so substantial as the intrigue pleasurable in itself. Perhaps I was too ready to judge the man unfavourably. He was a gentleman – an abstraction, this, which means something to my way of thinking – and I have a prejudice (in England at least three centuries out of date) against gentlemen giving themselves wholly to huckstering, money-changing, and what the Victorians called the progress of manufactures. It is not in the least my position that these activities are beyond the pale. But a man brought up liberally and to a position of privilege should be able to tuck them away. Wilfred, to do him justice, could do this; he could disentangle ends and means; he understood leisure. Cambrell, on the other hand, I felt lived in his mills; he carried them about with him; when he presented himself as concerned with anything else that something else was a fraud – and a fraud undertaken in the interest of some ulterior commercial design.

  All this was rather more than I really knew about the man. I had him typed that way. But I found myself, as he strode across the grass towards us now during the revolver practice, involuntarily taking this train of thought a step further. I compared Cambrell with Horace Cudbird.

  Cudbird, while waiting his turn at the targets, was listening to Lucy Chigwidden talking expressively about chapterization. Or it may have been about the interior monologue. The point is that Cudbird, an uncultivated person, was listening to Lucy’s shop, and that Lucy despite considerable intellectual naïveté was sufficiently a woman of the world not to direct that shop wholly ineptly. That Cudbird’s Beers are Best was doubtless the cardinal proposition of the brewer’s existence; nevertheless he was prepared to interest himself in other propositions not remotely connected with this one. Whereas in the general conversation of Cambrell, despite its county tone, one suspected the designing volubility of the draper who hopes that one will take out one’s change in ribbons. And perhaps the contrast between the two men went a little further than this. Cudbird had not Cambrell’s directness of manner. He was, in an inoffensive way, almost shifty – having the wariness, certainly, of the man who has had to discover everything for himself. But the mind behind seemed to me peculiarly simple and direct.

  ‘I wondered,’ said Cambrell easily, ‘if I might come early and join in?’ He held up what was evidently a case of pistols. ‘I heard the popping and couldn’t resist knocking off and coming over for another try.’

  Basil looked at his watch. It was not the most courteous way to greet an early guest and – because Basil was decidedly not gauche – it set me thinking. From Cambrell’s words it was plain that today he had been asked only to luncheon and a business talk. I felt that I could almost see those ribbons protruding from his pockets.

  As if answering Basil’s gesture, Cambrell glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Just going twelve,’ he said. ‘I am afraid that in a few seconds you will have to stop your ears to our dreadful siren. But, unlike Cudbird’s dazzling bottle, it doesn’t go on for hours at a time. Good morning, Mrs Chigwidden. Morning to you, Cudbird.’

  To this last salutation there was appended a sort of ghostly ‘my good man’ which made us all slightly uncomfortable. Cecil, though still doubtless yielding to nobody in his admiration for Cambrell’s sort, presented his cigarette case to Cudbird – emphatically in the matter-of-fact way in which one would perform this gesture to a neighbour in a club. The brewer shook his head with a faint grin which showed him amusedly rather than gratefully aware of the symbolism involved. ‘Well, well, Cambrell,’ he said, ‘if it isn’t a right surprise to see you neglecting the needs of the consumer like this.’ His accent had broadened. He glanced at the case of pistols. ‘I expect it’s a pretty long shot you’re thinking of this morning?’ He looked at us slyly and before we could quite take this in went on: ‘And how’s the grand canteen? Not too heavy a charge on the benevolence of the firm?’ He turned to Basil. ‘There’s nothing like a really old-fashioned firm, Sir Basil, for benevolent dealing. Some of them employ lads called industrial psychologists just to think out new schemes of benevolence all the time. But I believe Cambrell thought out the canteen himself.’ He shook his head in transparently simulated envy. ‘That’s education, that is. I wouldn’t be surprised if Plato or Cicero or such a one said that education is the mother of benevolence.’

  It struck me that a career such as Cudbird’s is a training in belligerence, and that he enjoyed countering Cambrell’s faintly insolent attitude with an abundance of obscure repartee. And whatever the last stroke had signified Cambrell plainly did not relish it. He turned to Basil. ‘How have you been getting on, Roper, at fifty paces?’

  Geoffrey and Anne, however, wanted a little more fun. ‘A canteen?’ said Geoffrey. ‘You run a canteen, sir?’ He planted the question as it were respectfully but firmly before Cambrell’s nose.

  ‘But surely what I think they call,’ said Anne, ‘a dry canteen – one following the precepts of Our Ford?’

  Cambrell laughed a s
hade uncertainly at this shamelessly stolen witticism. ‘A dry canteen, certainly,’ he said. ‘If one tried to start a pub in a factory, you know Bumbledon would have a fit – from the local licensing board right up to Whitehall. So it’s just a dry canteen, with a diet scientifically worked out and so on. Ought to be an excellent thing for the operatives’ health.’

  ‘The Cambrell canteen,’ said Geoffrey, ‘deserves success. But is it successful?’

  Cambrell frowned and his easy manner became slightly pompous. ‘There is prejudice,’ he replied; ‘there is prejudice as there always is. The idea will win its way, but at the moment we have had rather to reduce the scale of the thing.’

  Looking up from replenishing the magazine of a revolver, Cudbird chuckled. ‘The heyday of benevolence,’ he said, ‘was in the time of the despots. “The Benevolent Despots”: I remember that in my history book at Burton Road School.’ He raised the weapon in his hand. ‘You can’t be out-and-out benevolent unless you have the other fellow where you want him. Cambrell’s done pretty well. He bought up all the pie-shops for a mile round – and who was to stop him from that? But then there was the pensions fund. Cambrell said that to be in on that you had to exercise normal care of the health, and that you weren’t doing that if you didn’t eat in the canteen.’ Cudbird chuckled again – rather viciously, I thought, this time. ‘It didn’t work. It was what’s called going too far. In fact, making your hands eat your own sausage and mash is truck. However scientific the cooking, it’s common truck.’ He put a century-old bitterness into the word. ‘And truck’s a trick the benevolent lost control of a long bit back. Cambrell must try again.’

  All this was uncomfortable. It was also bizarre. The setting made it bizarre. About us winter sunshine threw upon the frosted ground the shadow of the Priory ruins – threw shadows as irregular and as subtly, slowly changing as high clouds on a still day. On our left, running the full length of the range, was a long wall with blind arcading which rose to the broken windows of the lay dorter. Before us, and beyond the earth mound against which our targets stood, was the high blank wall of a gate-house – the only part of the ancient buildings which was almost intact, and one which obviated any danger should bullets fly high. To our right was the open park, with beyond its high boundary a confusion of slated roofs and the clang and crackle of electric trams. It was just after noon and the Priory stood in its own narrowed pool of shadow; as the sun sank the slow drift of this would be stalked by other shadows from without. The skeleton of Cudbird’s bottle would mingle with the lengthening tower; the great smokestack of the mills would sweep like a thwarted probing finger just short of the farthest crumbled buttress of the west wall. Meanwhile we stood with the discordant centuries thus hovering about us, a little knot of people watching a clash between the representatives of those great concerns which, fronting each other here across the narrowing triangle of the park, seemed perpetually to threaten the very existence of Belrive. Cambrell’s dry canteen, Cudbird’s cascading bottle, the ruins in their tranquillity and the park in its winter shroud: for a moment all these seemed to me to be suspended in some dramatic relationship. Then the significance evaporated, the tension dissolved. A revolver popped. A whiff of acrid smoke blew across the range. The shooting match was on again.

  Wilfred Foxcroft had produced a magnifying glass and secured a handful of spent bullets; sitting with Lucy Chigwidden on a stone coffin and in a corner faintly warmed by the December sun, he was endeavouring to persuade her that he would group the bullets according to the weapons from which they had been fired. Geoffrey and Anne had drifted off; their voices, raised in excitement as if they were about some foolery of their own, could be heard occasionally from the direction of the house. To the right of the range, in the open park, Sir Mervyn Wale and Horace Cudbird were pacing to and fro in what appeared to be mutually satisfactory casual talk. Hubert Roper and Cecil Foxcroft were also isolated together: Hubert facing his nephew and gesticulating persuasively; Cecil looking, as I thought, somewhat pettishly displeased: it might be guessed that the proposed portrait was being discussed. I was myself turning back towards the range after an uneasily meditative stroll. Basil and Cambrell were in front of me, competing together in alternate shots at rather short range. I noticed that for perhaps a minute they had been silent: Basil absorbed in the targets; Cambrell puffing at a pipe. Just as I drew near they had a brief conversation. Of this and its immediate sequel I was, I believe, the only observer. Cambrell’s rather baffling trick was the subject of general speculation afterwards. Basil and I alone saw the thing happen.

  They had been practising taking aim, shutting their eyes and firing after a count of five or ten – a searching test, apparently, of a steady arm. It was Cambrell’s turn. He stood looking fixedly at the target, his hands by his sides. Suddenly he turned right-about with military precision, so that the range was directly behind him. His right arm went up and across his chest; his revolver disappeared under his left armpit. There was a report; I heard Basil exclaim; I saw Cambrell still staring straight before him, a faint curl of smoke from the pipe in his left hand. Basil strode towards the target and I somehow expected him – Cecil’s habit, I suppose, was in my mind – to exclaim: ‘Oh, good shot!’

  Basil said: ‘A gunman’s trick. I think I could do it myself.’

  7

  Of luncheon that day what sticks in my mind is Cecil Foxcroft eating roast duck.

  There is, I suppose, no reason why roast duck should not appear on a luncheon table, particularly in chilly weather a few days before Christmas. There was clearly no reason why, when this dish was offered, Cecil should not address himself to it. But while doing so he might have kept off the theme of Sabine fare.

  Cecil was sitting next to Horace Cudbird. And Cudbird, I saw, was a novelist in posse. What was in a man he had an instinct to extract and weigh. From Lucy Chigwidden he had extracted the interior monologue and I don’t doubt that he had been able to estimate accurately enough the degree of penetration which Lucy brought to the subject. From Cecil he was extracting a number of propositions on public schools. Moulding character, the team spirit, trusting the boys, the healthy mind in the healthy body: these hoary counters – to Cudbird perhaps as unfamiliar as Lucy’s equally well-worn dicta on the craft of fiction – were disgorged by Cecil with all the appearance of being the fruits of his own laborious thought. It was charitable to feel that he grossly overdid it; that he was without artistic sense. But I wondered if this was indeed the explanation, or if it was simply that Cecil had grown like that. I have sometimes suspected that the classically trained mind is for some reason peculiarly prone to just such an appalling atrophy. And as I rejected the duck I found myself wondering whether Cudbird was not engaged in formulating to himself very much the same suspicion. The feeling was growing on me – perhaps on a good many of us – that Cudbird was a very clever man.

  Sabine fare. Cecil was for giving boys this in abundance. An abundantly spare diet, the argument seemed to run. Cecil paused to sum it up. He slightly frowned, clearly striving to quarry from the virgin rock of speech the finally pregnant phrase. He succeeded. ‘Plain living and high thinking, Mr Cudbird,’ he said, ‘is what expresses the ideal best.’

  My attention wandered. When it returned Cecil was addressing himself to the delicate theme of the Emotional Life. ‘At the beginning of the spring term,’ he was saying; ‘–for it seems particularly necessary then – I gave them a little talk on what I call Control.’ He paused. ‘And we stop sausages or anything of that sort for breakfast.’

  Anne Grainger, sitting on the other side of Cecil, was not at all disposed to let this opportunity for outrageous commentary pass. ‘Don’t Cecil and his house-masters,’ she asked the table in her clear voice, ‘just sit pretty? Every pound of sausages knocked off the butcher’s order is one more stroke in the cause of virginity.’

  I was malicious enough to feel that Cecil had asked for it; I was old enough to feel that young women should not talk in quite th
at way. What Cudbird thought I didn’t know; he looked uncomfortable for the first time within my observation. But Anne was pleased with the little silence she had produced. She turned to Wale. ‘Don’t you think so, Sir Mervyn? Don’t you think that Cecil has a mastery of physiological fact?’

  ‘I think that in pedagogy,’ said Wale, ‘there is much bad thinking about ends, and much worse information about means.’

  The unkindness of this was scarcely concealed by its being framed as a general proposition, and the words in themselves would have been enough to set me meditating anew on the problematical relationship between Cecil and Wale. But the words, spoken with the level of severity of cultivated argument, had been winged with something quite other. Hate is almost the rarest of the passions to appear on the surface of civilized life. Scorn, indignation, disgust, anger, malice – all common enough – are none of them the same thing. I was at a loss for any reason why Wale should let, of all things, simple hate slip into his comment on his apparent crony Cecil. Hate it had been – and I found myself glancing at Lucy. It was so much her pigeon; so like one of those sudden eruptions of improbable uncharitableness in which characters who are all presently to be suspected of homicide are prone to indulge. But Lucy, characteristically, was not listening; she sat in an abstraction hearkening to ditties of no tone; to voices speaking within her that were not the voices of human kind. I turned back to my problem. Had Wale and Cecil quarrelled over a mistress, a sum of money – or any of the prizes for which men fight? It seemed excessively improbable. And I remembered a poem of Yeats in which it is remarked with penetration that an intellectual hatred is the worst. Likely enough Cecil’s woolly, moralistic, and rag-bag mind offended Wale’s scientific temper. Likely enough it was that. But it remained puzzling all the same.