There Came Both Mist and Snow (3 page)

‘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 record 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.

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 room, 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.

‘Shakespeare’s bells,’ said Lucy Chigwidden; ‘we must make a parlour game of them.’ Cheered by this happy idea, she bundled away her proofs. ‘Who can keep Shakespeare’s bells ringing longest? And I begin.
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh
.’ She nodded to Wilfred Foxcroft.

Wilfred considered. ‘When Cecil speaks in that professional way,’ he said, ‘’
tis like a chime a-mending
.’ He grinned at his brother.

It was my turn and I waved towards the windows and the high road.

‘The bells, in time of pestilence, ne’er made

Like noise, or were in that perpetual motion.’

Basil’s voice came quietly from the big table where he was still studying his map. ‘Not in Shakespeare, Arthur.’ A moment’s reflection told me that he was right; I had recalled the lines from some other Elizabethan dramatist. And here was something characteristic of Basil. Tucked away in his mind, so that I at least had never been aware of it before, was a scholar’s knowledge of Shakespeare’s text. Always from Basil something wholly unexpected might come.

‘Uncle Arthur is out because he cheated,’ said Anne. It was lightly spoken; yet there was something hard in her voice which I could not help resenting, and which made the joke ill-mannered at the best. Lucy hastened to continue the impromptu game. The search for bells in Shakespeare ran round in a circle and came to Wilfred once again. Basil had joined the rest of us now as a sort of umpire.

Wilfred hesitated; Basil began to count ten slowly. Suddenly Wilfred snapped his fingers.

‘
No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled.’

There was a pause; everybody, I think, was surprised that Wilfred had survived a second round. And now Lucy’s laborious game took a somewhat gloomy turn. Most of the bells in Shakespeare – or most of those which we could remember – ring out upon some occasion of man’s mortality. Geoffrey told us of ‘
sweet Helen’s bells’
; Cecil cited ‘
a grief comparèd well To one sore sick that hears the passing-bell
’; Anne remembered ‘
a sullen bell Remembered tolling a departing friend
.’ And presently – for it was a game which even good and informed memories could not keep up for long – only Lucy and Wale were left.

It was Lucy’s turn; she knitted her brows as Basil counted again. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I give in to Sir Mervyn.’ Her expression changed. ‘Stop! I can think of just one more:
My sighing breast shall be thy funeral bell
.’ She glanced at Wale in triumph. ‘
My sighing breast
,’ she repeated to him with emphasis, ‘
shall be thy funeral bell
.’