There Came Both Mist and Snow

There Came Both Mist and Snow

First published in 1940

© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1940-2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

Typeset by House of Stratus.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 0755121163   EAN: 9780755121168

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of
Florio’s
translation of
Montaigne’s Essays
and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel,
Death at the President’s Lodging
. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the
Oxford History of English Literature
.

Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

I have seldom paid my annual visit to Basil without reflecting on the irrational nature of our feelings on birth and pedigree. Grandparents are, I suppose, necessary to an Englishman who would move in good society; great-grandparents are an advantage. But there the practical utility of ancestors stops. It has always been possible to make a gentleman in three generations; nowadays – when families are smaller and the upper class has to be recruited hastily – the thing is done in two. Nevertheless remote ancestors continue to be prized; the remoter they are the more proudly we regard them. And this is peculiarly illogical. Descent from our grandparents we share with only a few persons. But descent from any one ancestor in the reign, say, of John we share with virtually everyone in England. There is, in fact, sound elementary genetics behind the proposition that we are all sons of Adam. And this makes the pedigree business absurd. But what I am noting here is that it is a pleasant and stealing absurdity, and one which I have always felt come over me on going to stay at Belrive Priory.

My name is Arthur Ferryman. Pause over and – if you are of the common visualizing type – you will see a vaguely tattered fellow poking a flat-bottomed boat across a river. To this picture, however, you will have been betrayed by a false etymology; my ancestors gained their name by wielding a strikingly iron fist –
ferreus manus
– in the medieval period. We are the slaves of words – writers particularly so – and I believe that this aristocratic derivation, together with the fact that at my private school I was called Punts, is responsible for such of my make-up Lineage –

a successive title, long and dark,

Drawn from the mouldy rolls of Noah’s ark –

can always fascinate me.

And so, more rationally, can the whole panorama of history. ‘O goodly usage of those antique times.’ Spenser expresses what is a profound secret conviction of mine. Fashionable contemporary novelist though I am, I believe the past to have been a far, far better thing than the present is. And Belrive, where the two toss uneasily in one narrow bed, quickens this antiquarian sentiment even more than it quickens the sentiment of birth.

Now the fascination of the past, according to psychologists, consists in its air of security. The past is over and done with; nothing more can happen in it; it is therefore a refuge from the difficult today and the problematical tomorrow. For me the Priory is the past; it symbolizes an environment in which, to follow out this idea, one need not be perpetually braced to meet the shock of the unexpected. It may have been because I was relaxed in this way that the disaster at the Priory – so sudden and so unprepared for – bowled me over as it did.

A man likes to receive news of violence more or less impassively, and it looks as if an impulse to apologize in advance for my behaviour has made me approach my subject in a very roundabout way. I shall get more surely on the rails if I drop ancestry and the
hortus conclusus
of history and begin again with some account of the Priory itself.

Hortus conclusus
. The Priory is that. For park, mansion, and ruins are surrounded by a high wall – an early nineteenth-century wall which represents a last and costly protest against encroaching neighbours. When the Honourable John Byng toured the north of England in 1792 Cambrell and Wimms’ cotton-mills were already rising hard by Belrive. Byng notes the deplorable fact that monks and cotton-manufacturers both need water, and that there is in consequence a tendency for the latter to spin where the former washed, meditated, or fished. He notes too with disgust – it was a solitary tour and the future viscount when alone was inclined to gloomy judgements – the desuetude of agriculture round about and the sinister fact that the new industrial population is being fed from Liverpool on imported wheat. The mills have grown since the days of the Torrington Diaries but the same family still controls them; the Cambrell home – noted by Byng as a foolish overgrown citizen’s box in the bad new taste – is now a mellow enough mansion on the outskirts of the town. The mills themselves, which dominate the Priory ruins to the south, are almost mellow by this time. A good part of Satan’s kingdom is.

But quite new and staring is Cudbird’s brewery, flanking the little park on the west. Brewers too need water; I understand that their wealth and curious social elevation arise from the fact that they need little else. Not that the Cudbirds are elevated. They are frankly plebeian. Horace Cudbird, a figure who comes into this narrative, I found it impossible to dislike. So, unfortunately, did Basil.

Belrive then, which centuries ago stood in a solitary valley up which opened a distant prospect of the Yorkshire dales, stands today – a plain anachronism – surrounded by a manufacturing town. A cotton-mill, a brewery, a high road: its triangle of territory is bounded by these. The high road, in my opinion, is the worst neighbour. It is true that the brewery smells. But until recently smells and civilization have marched together; indeed, they do so today in some of the pleasantest places I know. It is true that the Cambrell mills have poisoned the fish – this despite numerous regulations on the whole, I believe, conscientiously observed. Still, with the mills has come the internal combustion engine, and with the aid of that one can make some of the finest fishing in the riding in just over an hour. Mills and brewery yield to the high road, which has obsolete electric trams, buses, a constant stream of heavy industrial traffic, impatient business men twice a day in cars, impatient workers twice a day on bicycles, screaming children, and shrill-voiced women from dawn to dusk – besides football fans in a char-à-bancs, drunks, Salvation Army bands, and electric drills at frequent intervals. I have always thought the trams particularly wanton; they charge along their indifferent track at a dangerous speed while the drivers thump steadily with their feet at harsh, cracked warning bells. A conductor has told me that they must keep to their time-tables or lose their jobs, and that this persevering malignant torture is the only way of avoiding imminent fatality every few score of yards; the existence of trams unsignalled by this horrid carillon would simply not be acknowledged by wayfarers. This may well be true. There are accidents enough as it is. The little lodge at the Priory gates is used so frequently as an emergency dressing station that the corporation might very reasonably be asked to pay a regular rent.

I am tempted to let this matter of the sheer noise by which the Priory is assaulted spill over into another long paragraph. There is, for instance, the curious fact that while the human inhabitants are most disturbed by those noises which are incessant the red deer in the park seem to be troubled only by special and occasional effects: the trams they ignore; the Salvation Army disturbs them; electric drills produce a panicky scattering most distressing to observe. But perhaps I have made my main effect heavily enough. The ruined Priory which yet speaks the quiet of the cloister, the Queen Anne mansion breathing the peace of the Augustans: these strangely environed by the clamour of our modern world.