There Came Both Mist and Snow (6 page)

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 didn’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.’

‘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.’

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 shade 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.’