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

fiction – were disgorged by Cecil with all the appearance of being the fruits of his own laborious thought. It was charitable to feel that he grossly overdid it; that he was without artistic sense. But I wondered if this was indeed the explanation, or if it was simply that Cecil had grown like that. I have sometimes suspected that the classically trained mind is for some reason peculiarly prone to just such an appalling atrophy. And as I rejected the duck I found myself wondering whether Cudbird was not engaged in formulating to himself very much the same suspicion. The feeling was growing on me – perhaps on a good many of us – that Cudbird was a very clever man.
    Sabine fare. Cecil was for giving boys this in abundance. An abundantly spare diet, the argument seemed to run. Cecil paused to sum it up. He slightly frowned, clearly striving to quarry from the virgin rock of speech the finally pregnant phrase. He succeeded. ‘Plain living and high thinking, Mr Cudbird,’ he said, ‘is what expresses the ideal best.’
    My attention wandered. When it returned Cecil was addressing himself to the delicate theme of the Emotional Life. ‘At the beginning of the spring term,’ he was saying; ‘–for it seems particularly necessary then – I gave them a little talk on what I call Control.’ He paused. ‘And we stop sausages or anything of that sort for breakfast.’
    Anne Grainger, sitting on the other side of Cecil, was not at all disposed to let this opportunity for outrageous commentary pass. ‘Don’t Cecil and his house-masters,’ she asked the table in her clear voice, ‘just sit pretty? Every pound of sausages knocked off the butcher’s order is one more stroke in the cause of virginity.’
    I was malicious enough to feel that Cecil had asked for it; I was old enough to feel that young women should not talk in quite that way. What Cudbird thought I didn’t know; he looked uncomfortable for the first time within my observation. But Anne was pleased with the little silence she had produced. She turned to Wale. ‘Don’t you think so, Sir Mervyn? Don’t you think that Cecil has a mastery of physiological fact?’
    ‘I think that in pedagogy,’ said Wale, ‘there is much bad thinking about ends, and much worse information about means.’
    The unkindness of this was scarcely concealed by its being framed as a general proposition, and the words in themselves would have been enough to set me meditating anew on the problematical relationship between Cecil and Wale. But the words, spoken with the level of severity of cultivated argument, had been winged with something quite other. Hate is almost the rarest of the passions to appear on the surface of civilized life. Scorn, indignation, disgust, anger, malice – all common enough – are none of them the same thing. I was at a loss for any reason why Wale should let, of all things, simple hate slip into his comment on his apparent crony Cecil. Hate it had been – and I found myself glancing at Lucy. It was so much her pigeon; so like one of those sudden eruptions of improbable uncharitableness in which characters who are all presently to be suspected of homicide are prone to indulge. But Lucy, characteristically, was not listening; she sat in an abstraction hearkening to ditties of no tone; to voices speaking within her that were not the voices of human kind. I turned back to my problem. Had Wale and Cecil quarrelled over a mistress, a sum of money – or any of the prizes for which men fight? It seemed excessively improbable. And I remembered a poem of Yeats in which it is remarked with penetration that an intellectual hatred is the worst. Likely enough Cecil’s woolly, moralistic, and rag-bag mind offended Wale’s scientific temper. Likely enough it was that. But it remained puzzling all the same.
    I turned to Cecil. Civilized man, I reflected, retains dangerously little of the sense of danger. But perhaps it was a matter of ear. I should have been scared if