There Came Both Mist and Snow Read online

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  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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  About the Author

  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.

  1

  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 t
hemselves, 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.

  The situation has its odd visual aspects as well. At night there is Cudbird’s new neon sign. Standing on the terrace of the house one sees it just over the ruined tower. For a second there is darkness and the outline of the tower is barely visible against the dull glow of an urban sky. Then miraculously in the dark a great bottle leaps into being; this tilts itself like some crazy constellation in the heavens; a hundred flickering electric bulbs stimulate the issuing beverage; the tower, cupped like a goblet below, receives the beery deluge. Thus does Horace Cudbird, a latter-day Ganymede, place cupbearer to his own obscure gods.

  After dinner, guests unfamiliar with this spectacle will go out to the terrace and watch it for minutes on end. The thing has undeniably a certain bizarre beauty of its own. And down among the ruins Cudbird’s sign produces more subtle effects. Here the monstrous bottle itself is invisible and one is aware only of a rhythmical succession of soft reflected lights playing over the crumbling walls and amid the shadows. First comes the suggestion of an acid green – a skin of light which furs the massive masonry like an aura; the bottle has lit up. Next, rose-coloured shafts pass across the ruins like fingers up a keyboard; the city is being told in giant’s lettering that Cudbird’s Beers are Best. Suddenly the world lurches, wheels, circles; in a series of jerks the bottle is turning on its axis. And then a dull amber flood falls like a low curtain; for a moment the Priory floats in a rippling sea of ale; then for seconds, and before the bottle again lights up, darkness reigns. It is in these seconds of inactivity, while Cudbird pauses between libations, that the effect is strangest. For in the darkness and by some trick of the retina these shadowy phenomena rapidly and confusedly repeat themselves; the mind is momentarily distracted between a flickering creation of its own and what it knows actually to lie immobile before it. A distinctly uncanny effect results. The Priory servants used to be fond of taking their sweethearts ‘to see the ruins’; since the sign went up it is in the other direction that one has to remember not to walk at night if one would avoid embarrassing encounters.

  This fiery flagon by night, the city’s pall of smoke by day, the uproar which slackens only in the small hours of the morning: these make the setting, the foil, the frame for my cousin Basil’s very beautiful home. The Ropers are artistically gifted – I acknowledge that it is from their side that I get such talent as I possess – and for generations they have applied to Belrive a taste which is conservative but never inert. As a result the place has that air of immemorial grooming which one associates with some of the great houses of England. The gardens are formal without being uneasily exotic; they do not, as some overwrought gardens do, call for other than a northern sky. The park is full of unobstructive artifice, a margin illuminated in a hundred greens around the warm but sadly soot-stained stone of the ruins. The house in its exterior aspect is at once old and immaculate; it speaks of those two excellent things, continuity and a sound balance in the bank. Inside, one moves amid the blending and contrasting tastes of a succession of cultivated owners; there is that effect of a mild conflict of personalities within an acknowledged tradition which makes a house alive. In short, I find Belrive a most satisfactory place. And turning up the drive on the day this chronicle opens I found myself meditating, against the background I have now sketched, the slightly problematical figure of its master.

  Basil Roper, the seventh baronet, was at this time a man in the middle fifties, a bachelor, famous, and just coming to the realization that his career lay for the most part behind him. An explorer and mountaineer, he knew that never again would he stand so high above the sea as he had stood. At fifty one can climb to twenty thousand feet, perhaps to twenty-five thousand. Thereafter one’s job is at the telescope and with the stores. The ultimate spires and pinnacles of earth will yield only to the faultless mechanism of a young man’s heart.

  Basil, like most climbers, had no single passion for altitude; he could get as much from the Central Gully on Lliwedd, a day’s run from London, as he could from the traverse of some monstrous rock face in the Himalaya. Nevertheless the heart, as it has its tether as a piece of mechanism, has, as a principle of life, its goals. One of Basil’s goals had been going very high indeed; the possibility had slipped away, and with it some tension which it was not perhaps easy to do without.

  A man who has served an idea makes only an uneasy retreat upon practical affairs. But from youth Basil had been a scientist and he had his finger now in a number of pies – of those immaterial pies of the mind at which a man may stir to his heart’s content, disturbing nobody and without a fret or fuss. Into geographical speculations he could step like a man entering the solitude of an arctic tent. To explore with a hammer among the rocks the barren aeons of the earth gave him much the same satisfaction, I believe, as a physical vista of inviolate ice and untrodden snow. For such austerities I have myself small taste; I prefer the peopled earth – the field full of folk. Nevertheless I like to understand the ascetic type, and driving up Basil’s avenue I made my yearly resolution: to study my cousin once more with professional standards of assiduity. This perhaps has its forbiddingly austere ring. But
the imaginative writer is far from living on air. He has to apply himself to his fellows very much in the spirit in which Basil was wont to apply himself to archaen schists and eruptive rocks.

  My taxi rounded a bend and the little park came into full view. It occurred to me what a remarkably valuable property it must be. Only the day before a friend had shown me a beautiful gold goblet recently excavated from some Viking hoard, an object of very considerable intrinsic worth which was yet far more precious in its character as a museum piece. Belrive was rather like that. Its position in the industrial district of a town by no means suffering from stagnation or depression must surely render every acre worth a large sum of money; at the same time it possessed high value in another and indefinable currency, that of antiquarian or sentimental regard. I recollected that Basil’s care of the Priory had always been scrupulous – but how strongly, I wondered, did he feel the responsibility of such a heritage? It came to me with something of a shock that my cousin cared nothing for the past. Or nothing for what I call the past. He would have been just the man to write that sort of outline of history which includes a great many illustrations of mammoths and pterodactyls and which relegates man to an appendix. Perhaps this sally is a little unfair. I realized that there was nothing vulgar or half-baked about Basil’s historical sense. It was simply that human institutions of a sort with which we have any connection did not interest him. To certain remote and swarming cultures – Sumerians, Babylonians, and the like – he gave, I believe, a sort of field naturalist’s attention. But at the point where real history begins – the coming of the Dorian Greeks – his interest left off. And the chronology which really held his imagination and engaged his intellect was of the sort that reckons its years by the million. Just what value, I wondered, did Basil set on a twelfth-century ruin, or on ground which ancestors had owned ever since they had successfully stolen it nearly three hundred years ago? The Tudor age must seem to Basil the merest yesterday. I glanced from my taxi and saw the iron skeleton of Cudbird’s sign just dipping behind the Priory tower. To Basil these must appear virtually contemporaneous constructions. And for the first time it occurred to me to speculate on the legal position in regard to Belrive. Was its owner entitled to do what he liked with it? Or were at least the ruins in some way protected from possible caprice?