Sheiks and Adders by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

character. Appleby had declared himself to the elder Miss Chitfield; he now looked around for the younger – who, he hoped, might be come upon in the company of her young man. Tibby, it occurred to him, was really a girl’s name: a diminutive of Isabel which Professor McIlwraith would probably declare to be imported from Scotland. Perhaps in this case it was short for Theobald. In neither form, somehow, did it sound a very promising name for a sheik.
    Professor McIlwraith himself, as it happened, was the next acquaintance Appleby encountered. His presence seemed a little surprising, since one would somehow not have expected a severe scholar to turn up at such an affair. He was, of course, still virtually a stranger to Appleby, and it was conceivable that he put in much of his retirement roving the countryside in quest of just such diversions as Mr Chitfield was affording today. But he had not accommodated himself to the spirit of the occasion by assuming fancy dress, and he was thus among the small minority of those present who might be described as rationally attired. Perhaps, however, he had come as an Eminent Lexicographer (just as Appleby might have come as a Commissioner of Police). Before he opened his mouth you could almost guess that he was that. Like the man in Yeats’s poem, Appleby thought, he seemed to cough in ink.
    ‘Good afternoon, Sir John,’ McIlwraith said genially. ‘Worse than death, would you be inclined to say?’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘One sometimes speaks of a fate as that, does one not?’
    ‘Oh, I see.’
    ‘The jest is a little blunted, I fear, because the two words are only approximately homonymic. And doubtless there are worse fêtes than this one – although one is conscious of it as being on the disorganized side. It is an unexpected pleasure to find you at it.’ Professor McIlwraith accompanied this polite remark with a sharp glance.
    ‘I may be said to have turned up a little on impulse.’
    ‘It is almost so with me. But the son of the house, as it happens, was one of my last pupils.’
    ‘Mark Chitfield?’
    ‘The same. It was, of course, as a postgraduate student, as I had long since ceased to have any concern with undergraduates. He is a clever young man, and came to me professing to have discovered an interest in phonemic analysis. Has phonemic analysis, by any chance, been among your own studies, Sir John?’
    ‘No, I can’t say that it has.’ Appleby felt this to be a shade bald. ‘Not hitherto,’ he added – rather as if at this very moment the interest in question was rising up in him.
    ‘Ah! Well, I fear that in Mark Chitfield’s case “professing” was what is vulgarly termed the operative word. He wanted to remain in residence at the university to pursue what I conjecture to have been less intellectual interests, and phonemic analysis was the first resource to come into his head.’
    ‘It is something that he had heard of it, I suppose.’
    ‘Perfectly true. It is to be accounted to him for virtue, no doubt. And I rather took to young Mark. We have maintained our acquaintance – and hence my turning up here this afternoon.’
    ‘I’d rather like to meet Mark.’
    ‘My dear Sir John, you are about to do so.’ McIlwraith was glancing over Appleby’s shoulder. ‘For here he is.’
    Appleby turned round, and found himself confronting a spectacle of the most horrendous and revolting sort. The crippled creature bent nearly double before him was dressed mainly in dirt and rags – and more, seemingly, in the former than the latter. At a casual glance he appeared to have only one tooth, one ear, and an eye that had been knocked sideways in his head. It was a head, however, that wore a battered crown; his rotting clothes were here and there slashed and patched with silk and ermine; two burdensome leather bags chained to his waist were dragging behind him; at his side hung a broken sword.
    ‘Good afternoon,’ this appearance said urbanely, and without