There Came Both Mist and Snow (7 page)

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.’

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 that 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.

I turned to Cecil. Civilized man, I reflected, retains dangerously little of the sense of danger. But perhaps it was a matter of ear. I should have been scared if just that quality of voice had come in my direction. Cecil, no doubt, had simply not heard. Indeed he seemed to have been deaf not only to the implicit emotion but to the mere prose statement; he showed no resentment at having been charged with a muddled mind on his own field. Anything so outrageous simply failed to find the passages to his mind. On ordered freedom, on preparation for the battle of life, on the sense of fair play he continued to discourse throughout luncheon. And I noticed that Wale, as if with the instinct of a man who fears to have betrayed himself, took occasion to interpolate a number of civil and colourless observations.

The meal ended; it was the last placid meal that Belrive was to enjoy. Basil led Ralph Cambrell away to his study, presumably for that business talk for which he had come to the Priory. At the door my cousin turned round to us with an apology. ‘Will you all amuse yourselves? And, Lucy, will you look after tea again? I have a lot to do – there’s an appeal I must get out – and I shall probably be working right through to dinner. Cudbird, can you possibly stop for that?’

Cudbird replied that he could not stop, but would return. And on that Basil and Cambrell disappeared and the rest of us went our several ways. I took myself off to the library, where I was presently joined by Lucy, once more draped in proofs. Feeling some reason to apprehend the emergence of the interior monologue, together with a good deal of reluctance to confront it at this slightly somnolent hour, I took down a heavy extra-illustrated history of Belrive – my favourite among Basil’s treasures – and applied myself to it at a lectern. For some time Lucy’s pencil strayed about her galleys and I read in silence.

‘Arthur,’ said Lucy suddenly, ‘I have a suspicion.’

I believe I started slightly; certain curious speculations of my own may already have been forming themselves deep in my mind. ‘A suspicion?’ I replied. ‘Believe me, you must have a whole cornucopia of them. They represent your way of life.’

‘I have,’ said Lucy firmly, ‘
a suspicion
.’

‘You mean’ – I turned away reluctantly from my folio – ‘about Basil’s appeal?’

‘Basil’s appeal?’ Lucy rummaged for her pencil and finally found it in its commercial position behind her ear. ‘What is Basil’s appeal?’

We were completely at cross-purposes. ‘You have a suspicion,’ I countered, ‘about what?’

‘About this evening’s mystery, of course. Basil’s Mr X.’

I had forgotten about Basil’s Mr X, the unknown who was coming to dinner and who was to be a special treat for one of us. ‘What you suspect,’ I said, ‘is that Mr X is going to be a special treat for you.’

Lucy lost her pencil again. ‘However did you guess that?’ she asked.

This was awkward. It was evident that Lucy was the only person among us for whom it would occur to one to prepare a surprise of this sort – like something beguilingly wrapped up in coloured paper on a children’s Christmas tree. While I was casting about for some vague reply Lucy went off at a tangent. ‘Arthur,’ she said, ‘I have been thinking about
The Golden Bowl
.’

If Lucy had announced that she had been thinking about
The Hound of the Baskervilles
or
The Woman in White
I might have stayed. As it was, I got up hastily and looked at my watch. ‘Half past two,’ I said. ‘And I promised to look in on this studio affair of Hubert’s.’

Lucy rose too, scattered her proofs about the floor. ‘But how interesting. I think I’ll come with you.’

This again was awkward. That I had made any such promise was a lie, invented on the spur of the moment to save me from a discussion of the higher fiction. I had even no reason to suppose that Hubert would at all welcome an investigation of his activities. But I was fairly caught. Lucy retrieved her pen from the recesses of a large chair, put her bag where she was sure to remember it behind the clock, brilliantly cached her papers in the coal-scuttle and preceded me from the room.

We found the painters, father and son, in a large attic on the north side of the house – and with them Cecil, uneasily islanded amid much inexplicable professional activity. Geoffrey Roper was on top of a step-ladder, tacking a large sheet of some gauze-like material across a skylight. Hubert was abstractedly setting up a surprisingly large canvas on an easel; every now and then he would break off from this and wander off to a table which was already littered with sketches. He would study these for a time and then look sombrely at Cecil; to the entrance of Lucy and myself he gave not the slightest attention.

‘Of course,’ Hubert was saying, ‘Cecil is not uninteresting in himself.’ He accorded his nephew a perfunctory smile which was meant, I supposed, to be the essence of tact.

‘Oh, quite.’ Geoffrey on his perch spoke in the tones of a man who inwardly does not at all agree. ‘I say nothing against Cousin Cecil. There is some good bony structure here and there. Still, it’s not a commission, is it? It seems a chance.’

Cecil, I inferred, being a relation and not a fashionable client, could be dealt with in a spirit of light-hearted – or perhaps of absorbed – experiment. And this supposition was presently confirmed by a succession of bumping noises outside and the entrance of Basil’s butler, chauffeur, and gardener’s boy staggering under the weight of a vast gilt-framed mirror. This was placed against the wall under Hubert’s direction and the men went away. Some minutes later the butler and the chauffeur returned carrying between them a cheval-glass; behind them came a housemaid with one of those circular, concave mirrors which are still a common adornment of drawing-rooms.