There Came Both Mist and Snow Read online

  These reflections were interrupted by a squeal of brakes and I was astounded to see Wilfred Foxcroft skipping hastily to the side of the drive.

  Wilfred is a cousin of mine. Most of the people in this narrative are.

  2

  I was astounded to see Wilfred; I got a further shock when he turned towards me and waved what was distinguishably a revolver. The taxi drew up, and despite its doing so merely because I had tapped on the glass I could almost have believed myself involved in some incident of banditry. Wilfred opened the door, climbed in, and tossed his weapon carelessly on the seat. ‘I hope,’ I enquired, ‘that it isn’t loaded?’

  My cousin laughed, at the same time sitting down so heavily that I felt myself bounced towards the roof of the cab. ‘My dear Arthur,’ he said, ‘you understand the principle of the Verona drop?’

  ‘Emphatically not.’

  ‘The Verona drop is a fragile bubble of glass which, under certain conditions, will resist a sharp blow with a hammer. What is called the safety catch on a rifle or revolver embodies just the same principle. A bump or joint’ – and Wilfred tossed the revolver to the floor – ‘merely increases the security with which the whole mechanism is locked.’

  Somewhat reassured, I reflected that Wilfred Foxcroft had not changed. Or his little habits had not changed. I remembered the jar against one’s spine which that same slumping down on a hard bench at school could cause. From his schooldays too dated the irritating trick of accompanying every act of communication with some fragment of useless lore; he had the mental habits of an industrious but unimaginative squirrel and his head was a lumber-room of Verona drops and similar debris. I have sometimes thought that his quarrel with Basil – that enduring mountaineering quarrel which made me so surprised to see him at Belrive now – was not unconnected with this turn of mind. Wilfred’s conversation was like an automatic machine: you dropped in some piece of conversation small coin and out came a dry biscuit – always virtually the same dry biscuit. And Basil’s was perhaps rather like a comptometer: you pressed the keys and could rely on the relevant factual analysis taking place. The two tendencies came sufficiently close to each other to be mutually irritating. This irritation, exacerbated by enforced companionship and by privation, had been responsible as I always supposed for the rift. But here now was Wilfred back at the Priory and it would be decent to express my pleasure in the fact. I did this as simply as I could. ‘Wilfred,’ I said, ‘it is delightful to see you here again.’

  Wilfred tapped at the butt of the revolver with his foot until the barrel satisfied his sense of order lying parallel to the driver’s seat. ‘The suggestion of coming down,’ he said, ‘was a good one. A change at this time of the year is a capital thing. During the three winter months the incidence of common cold is nearly seven per cent lower in the provinces than in London.’

  I looked at him curiously. The statistics were of no interest to me, but my attention was held by the turn of phrase which had preceded them. The suggestion of coming down was a good one. Wilfred was perfectly capable of talking the King’s English and this clumsy phrase was a deliberate ambiguity. Had the quarrel been made up on his initiative or on Basil’s? It was impossible to say.

  ‘Quite a family party,’ Wilfred was continuing. ‘Hubert and Geoffrey, Lucy, Cecil, Anne. I’m told that there are now only eight serious painters in England contriving to make more than four hundred a year. How lucky for you that people still buy books.’

  ‘Still read books,’ I corrected – taking an involuntary nibble at the biscuit as it shot from the machine. ‘Bankers, I suppose, are still in demand?’

  Wilfred, a banker and a wealthy one, smiled complacently. ‘Hubert, of course, is doing well enough. The portrait commissions keep coming in. But Geoffrey, who hasn’t at all followed in his father’s tradition, doesn’t make a penny. It’s hard on that thwarted little tigress Anne. Do you know the price of a small prepared canvas?’ And Wilfred, although devoid as I knew of any interest in the fine arts, proceeded to a detailed estimate of the working expenses of a painter. This monologue the reader will not expect me to report and I shall attempt instead to give some account of those relations whom I now knew I was to meet at the Priory.

  I must be forgiven if I do not here work out a family tree; it is a writer’s instinct to stick to prose, and in plain prose I think I can make everything clear. The eldest, then, of Basil’s generation of Ropers had been his sister Margaret. She had married into the wealthy banking family of the Foxcrofts and had two sons, Wilfred and Cecil. Wilfred had gone into the banking business; Cecil, whose bent was scholastic, was now the headmaster of a public school. Both were unmarried, and both in age within ten years of their uncle Basil.

  Next to Margaret Roper had come Basil himself and a year later there had been born Hubert, the painter. Hubert’s only child, Geoffrey, also a painter, was now about twenty-five.

  Youngest of Basil’s generation was Lucy, now the widow of a certain Charles Chigwidden, an unsuccessful barrister. Lucy Chigwidden is a novelist: perhaps I may be permitted to remind the reader that the term is an elastic one.

  I am myself the only son of Basil’s aunt, Mary Roper; my relationship with Basil, Hubert, and Lucy is therefore that of first cousin. Anne Grainger, the orphan daughter and only child of my sister Jean, was now twenty-one. Jean’s marriage had been financially rash; she and her husband were drowned in a yachting accident when Anne was in infancy; the child had grown up under the legal guardianship of Wilfred Foxcroft, whose protégée she was now understood to be.

  These paragraphs, I see, cannot pretend to be prose after all. But they are clear and suit the artlessness which this narrative must have; our exact cousinly relationships – though these are scarcely relevant to what is to come – may be worked out readily enough by anyone who is interested.

  We were now nearing the house and I interrupted Wilfred to ask a question. ‘Hubert, Geoffrey, Lucy, Cecil, and Anne. Do I gather then that it is an unrelievedly family party?’

  ‘Just that. A nice old-fashioned Christmas. I am to talk climbs with Basil; Hubert is to start on a portrait of Cecil; Geoffrey and Anne are to make love; and Lucy is going to pursue you into corners and elicit your views on the interior monologue and on chapterization.’

  ‘Chapterization?’

  ‘Her new word. Why one begins a new chapter where one does.’ Wilfred chuckled at the involuntary sigh which must have escaped me. ‘When I come to think of it there is one outsider. Old Mervyn Wale.’

  ‘Sir Mervyn Wale,’ I said in surprise. ‘Surely he is the sort who never tears himself away from town and his expensive patients? And I didn’t know he was any sort of family friend?’

  ‘No more he is. But he and my brother Cecil have got uncommonly thick and Cecil seems to have persuaded Basil to ask him down. As for tearing himself away, he’s looking distinctly ill and probably feels it necessary to ease off.’

  ‘At least,’ I said lightly, ‘someone who will stand outside the family passions.’

  It was not a tactful remark and I regretted it as I spoke. But Wilfred was not disturbed. ‘Wale, my dear Arthur, has no passions anyway. Only genuine scientific curiosity. Under the fashionable leech lies a real researcher – cardiac stuff, I believe. Or if he has a passion it seems to be for poor Cecil – who has certainly never inspired romantic devotion before.’

  I had no wish to listen to Wilfred disparaging his brother, a fault in breeding I had observed in him on previous occasions. I therefore changed the subject abruptly. ‘The lethal weapon: what is the significance of that?’

  For a moment Wilfred stared blankly. Then his eye went to the revolver. ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact there are several. All the fun is to be with them.’

  ‘The fun?’

  Wilfred rubbed his nose – a habit of his when about to open the lumber-room door. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that the greatest number of pistol-duels engaged in by a single man is probably eighty-nine, a recor
d achieved in 1889 by the Comte de Marsan – who was then, by a striking coincidence, just entering on his eighty-ninth year?’ He paused. ‘Whereas with swords…’

  Mercifully, our taxi jerked to a halt. I jumped out and glanced up the steps which led to the front door. Basil was at the top and waved as I began to climb. With sudden unreasoning dismay I saw that he had a revolver too.

  Lucy Chigwidden was armed as well, but only with galley proofs. These were draped around her as she presided over Basil’s tea table. Periodical grabs had to be made to disengage them from the cream cakes; they wrapped themselves round the admirable ankles of the parlourmaid bringing hot water and there was a moment of quintessentially English social embarrassment while they were a shade too deliberately retrieved by young Geoffrey Roper. Lucy had never had galleys before. They were the result of her present absorption in chapterization. If one cannot quite bring oneself to decide where one’s chapters leave off one need not expect paged-up proofs from one’s publisher. Lucy appeared vaguely aware that at the changing dictates of her inspiration sweating men somewhere must break up and push about heavy masses of type-metal. Nevertheless inspiration must be obeyed. ‘Arthur,’ she said – and the spout of her teapot swayed alarmingly, like her own wavering mind – ‘A single pistol-shot rang through the startled hall. Would you say that that is too dramatic a note on which to break off?’

  I experienced the uncomfortable feeling which always besets a writer when the actual and the imaginative seem to be mixing themselves up. The pistols were an established institution in Lucy’s novels; now they appeared to be creeping uncomfortably out of her pages and into the hands of her relations. In a corner of the drawing-room Cecil Foxcroft was fiddling with yet another revolver.

  ‘Really,’ I said, ‘it is difficult to tell; it depends so much on the key of your writing.’ I did my best to appear to be considering intelligently. ‘But it seems all right to me – most effective, indeed. A single pistol-shot rang through the startled hall. What could be more dramatic? There is a very similar effect somewhere in Vanity Fair.’

  Lucy appeared pleased. I ventured to help myself to another cream cake.

  ‘A single pistol-shot?’ Geoffrey, the young painter, who was now sitting beside Anne Grainger in a window recess, spoke across the room. ‘What is the difference, Aunt Lucy, between a single pistol-shot and a pistol-shot?’

  Lucy, although seeking literary criticism, had not been seeking it on this sort of point. Chapterization alone was in her head and this oblique attack disturbed her.

  ‘And why’ – I noticed that my niece Anne took her cue instantly from Geoffrey – ‘was the hall startled? Did the shot really ring through the startled hall, or did it ring through the hall and startle it?’

  Geoffrey’s father, Hubert Roper, who had been staring moodily into the great fire, turned round to his sister amid her litter of papers. ‘Did you say rang, Lucy? If the things were out of doors, now, and in a frost, you might get just that sharp and clear acoustical effect. But in a hall I am not so sure. Have you tried it out?’

  ‘After tea,’ said Anne, ‘we can go up to the gallery and fire a shot there. I’ll put sixpence on the right word’s being “reverberated”.’

  Basil, who was showing Sir Mervyn Wale a large map at a far end of the room, turned quickly round on this. I supposed that he was going to intervene in the baiting of his sister Lucy; it was, however, something else that was in his mind. ‘Certainly not, Anne. If this new amusement is to be safe there must be no shooting whatever except on the range. We had better make a rule that all ammunition is to be kept under lock and key.’

  There was a murmur of approval, in which my own tones were certainly not among the least convinced. The revolver-shooting fad to which I had been unexpectedly introduced appeared to me childish in itself and oddly ‘out’ in the sort of house party characteristic of Belrive. I noticed that even Cecil Foxcroft, who affected the popular schoolmaster’s zest for mechanical things, was handling the weapon he was examining gingerly enough. Why had Basil – if Basil it was – started such a craze?

  Lucy had dropped more galleys and thrust her fountain-pen into a cream jug. ‘It shows,’ she said, ‘how careful one must be with adjectives. I mean, not to use them unless they are absolutely necessary.’ She glanced at me reproachfully, as if I had let her down in not being the first to chasten her style. ‘And do you think the pistol-shot had better “sound”?’

  ‘Unnecessary too,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Unless it had some impossible effective silencer attached, of course it sounded.’

  Lucy considered, retrieved her pen, and began to write in what must have been a curious medium of cream and ink. ‘There was,’ she read aloud presently in a depressed voice, ‘a pistol-shot in the hall. I’m afraid I can’t possibly end the chapter on that.’

  A moment’s silence followed – a silence in which depression suddenly spread through the room. The badgering of Lucy made everyone conscious that the party was indeed a family affair.

  It was the outsider, Sir Mervyn Wale, who attempted to deal with this uncomfortable pause. Haggard, old, with an eye withdrawn upon some inner labyrinth to which consumingly he must find the clue, he addressed us with professional smoothness from some outer surface of his mind. ‘I am sure,’ he said, ‘that Mrs Chigwidden’s pistol, whatever sound it may choose to make, will one day afford us much more of pleasurable excitement than any of the real weapons which are presently to be popping on Sir Basil’s range.’

  The compliment – neat, if a shade too elaborately turned – fell upon people shifting uneasily in their seats. I suspected that Christmas at Belrive was not going to be a success.

  3

  It was five o’clock and dusk was deepening to dark. In a corner of the room a mellow Dutch clock gave out the hour; the chime was cut on the fifth stroke by the swiftly rising and then sustained shriek of Cudbird’s siren. And seconds later Cambrell’s siren, as if indignant at being caught loitering, gave out a yet more piercing note. Others farther away took up the chorus and for a minute the city might have been environed by a herd of unkindly monsters trumpeting in the advance of night.

  ‘Why,’ asked Cecil Foxcroft, ‘should they not sound some pleasant-toned bell? It has always seemed to me that the siren, so peremptory and so unbeautiful, is as naked an expression of arrogance as could be conceived. Who would willingly be found addressing a fellow creature in tones corresponding to that brutal clamour?’ And Cecil took off his glasses, raised his chin, and slowly surveyed the company. In just this impressive way, one supposed, was he accustomed to deliver himself of the right thing before his assembled school.

  Cecil was a little over forty; his career had been brilliant; his status had always been well ahead of his age. This is not always a misfortune in learned walks of life. An able man can become, say, a fellow of an Oxford college at twenty-three and remain an agreeable twenty-three. But I suspect that it is almost impossible to become headmaster of a great school in the thirties and not grow into a bogus sixty-five at once. It was a capital impersonation; Cecil never ventured on anything he could not do well; only when the real thing was at hand for purposes of comparison could one detect the fiction. On this occasion Cecil had spoken just after the genuinely elderly Mervyn Wale. The effect was to leave a faint hint of mimicry hanging in the air.

  ‘And yet,’ said Cecil – and one could imagine him now standing not before his pupils but before their parents – ‘I yield to no one in my admiration for the British industrialist. Take Ralph Cambrell. His hooter may be raucous but his heart is in the right place. How well he came out of the business of the new housing estates here. I am told he fought like a tiger for good-sized gardens and won the day.’

  ‘Ralph Cambrell controls Balltrop’s,’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘Balltrop’s?’ Cecil set his glasses suspiciously on his nose.

  ‘The biggest seedsman,’ said Anne, ‘in the riding.’

  Again there was uncomfortable silence in the r
oom, silence the quality of which was pointed by the steadily increasing rumble of traffic on the high road. From factories and offices in the city a thousand workers were pouring out to the suburbs, there to cultivate such of Balltrop’s rathe primroses and periwinkles as the rigour of the season allowed.

  Wale murmured something soothing about the legitimate interests of commerce. I spoke at random of the nerve-racking hubbub of a modern city and contrasted it with the pleasant human murmur which must have ruled in medieval times. Wilfred took me up on this. ‘In Shakespeare’s London,’ he announced, moving deliberately across the carpet towards the muffin-dish, ‘there were one hundred and fourteen churches, from the majority of which peals of bells rang intermittently throughout the day and night. In addition every shopkeeper employed a leathern-lunged lad to bawl his wares into the street.’ Wilfred paused with his muffin suspended in air, pleased with the alliterative quality of his phrase. ‘Arthur’s golden age was really an age of iron and bronze, senselessly employed in a process of perpetual percussion.’

  Hubert Roper, tall and lounging, of a generation when artists still distinguished themselves by some trick of hair or dress, had extended his study of the fire to include Cecil sitting before it. ‘The midnight bell,’ he said, ‘who with his iron tongue and brazen mouth sounds on into the drowsy ear of night.’ He looked round as if inviting us to compare Wilfred’s rhetoric with Shakespeare’s. Then losing interest he turned again towards Cecil. It was the firelight on his nephew’s glasses, I believe, which he felt to be important at that moment, and I remembered that there was some project of his making a portrait or sketch.