There Came Both Mist and Snow by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

I had myself once stuck a sort of fiction in which a year’s work brought in forty pounds; if it came to a little moral pressure on a wealthy relative I was far from wanting to disapprove. And Anne too was a hopelessly uneconomic proposition: intellectual, odd, a reviewer of little volumes of verse nobody else read. Could she at a pinch boil an egg? I doubted it. Most injudiciously, she had been brought up in an environment in which ringing the bell for eggs is part of the law of nature. They were nature’s own spongers, inconsiderable members of a class which sweetens life with imagination. I repeated my question with a more friendly intonation.
    Anne laughed. ‘Wilfred,’ she said, ‘is going to gather his dependents round the death-bed. And then how infinitely charitable he will be.’
    Geoffrey stared at her reflectively and nodded. ‘He will keep only the Encyclopaedia Britannica . In that he will read his own last offices and hope to retain a good deal of information that they have long forgotten in heaven.’
    ‘May I, Sir, recall an interesting fact about the throne on which You are at present seated?’ Anne had put her hands together as if in prayer. ‘It is equally compounded of chrysoprase, chrysoberyl, beryl, and chrysolite, and it was constructed to an original design by Moloch himself.’
    A pistol banged. There was no sense to be got out of them. But Anne was my niece and I tried once more, turning to Geoffrey. ‘But aren’t you being rather impatient? And are there not other ways of arranging things? Surely your father, who has such solid expectations…’
    Geoffrey jerked his head backwards. ‘Look at my father now.’
    I looked. Hubert Roper was standing a little removed from the shooting, staring back at the house. He was in a brown study; about his whole attitude there was something extraordinary sombre.
    ‘And look,’ continued Geoffrey as if continuing an argument, ‘at Horace Cudbird.’
    I turned round. Advancing across the frosted grass was a small stout smiling man in a new, very cheap suit. Between the banging pistols one could hear the loud creak of his boots. This was indeed Horace Cudbird, the wealthiest man in the town.
    ‘Ferryman?’ Cudbird said to me when we were introduced. ‘You’re one of the family though. I can tell that.’ And he glanced first at Basil and then back at myself with brisk appraisement. I got the impression that my cousin and I might be two tubs of malt or loads of hops. ‘Canaries are wonderful for sharpening the eye that way.’
    The shooting had been interrupted and a little circle had formed for the purpose of introduction. Cudbird looked round it in the most friendly fashion and continued to talk. ‘For following out a strain of blood there’s nothing like practice on canaries. And I’ve kept them, Sir Basil, for as long as I can remember now. And kept notes on the breeding of them. And a funny thing happened about that.’
    We made polite murmurs.
    ‘It came of my lad’s wanting an electric train. He was saving up for that and he thought: “Why not get hold of Dad’s notes on the canaries and send them to the Fancier ?” It won’t be known to you, but you can guess that’s a paper for those that keep birds.’
    Cudbird paused. I realized that in the trivial anecdote which was going forward we were all oddly prepared to be interested.
    ‘And send them the nipper did. A few weeks later they were printed, and there was a couple of guineas more towards the train.’
    Cudbird had produced a very old pipe. He stopped to begin a cleaning operation – obviously a simple rhetorical wile to achieve suspense.
    ‘And the next thing was a professor from Cambridge, with the Fancier in his pocket, ringing the door-bell and chasing me from home to the office. We got in one of the stenographers and spent a morning putting down everything about canaries I ever knew.’
    There was a genuinely impressed silence. I think we were chiefly struck by the