Silence Observed
Silence Observed
First published in 1961
© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1961-2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 0755121147 EAN: 9780755121144
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.
After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of
Florio's
translation of
Montaigne's Essays
and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.
By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel,
Death at the President's Lodging
. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.
After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen's University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the
Oxford History of English Literature
.
Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.
“I’ve got something uncommonly interesting here,” Charles Gribble said.
Gribble, with a small bundle of papers in his hand, was standing directly in front of the fireplace. Just above his head, therefore, hung a notice which read:
SILENCE IS OBSERVED.
The committee was rather fond of notices. Some members said that the club was plastered with them in a thoroughly irritating way. They were couched in various grammatical forms, with perhaps a preponderant inclination towards passive or impersonal constructions.
It is earnestly
desired by the committee
…was a favourite opening. The only taboo seemed to be on positive commands and injunctions. Hence the simple statement:
Silence is observed
.
“Something really uncommonly interesting,” Gribble said in a rather louder voice.
There were only two other men in the room. One was Sir John Appleby. The other, unidentifiable behind a newspaper, was clearly a man of resource. For, as Gribble spoke for the second time, the newspaper sank gently down upon its owner’s face and stomach, and from beneath it came the first of a regular succession of gentle snores.
“That so?” Appleby said half-heartedly, and put down his coffee cup. It was time he was getting back to his desk at Scotland Yard.
“And quite up your street, in a way,” Gribble continued. “Just listen to this.”
Appleby’s heart sank. It was extraordinary what many people judged to be quite up the street of an elderly man absorbed in the administration of the Metropolitan Police. But he couldn’t positively refuse to listen to Gribble, who wasn’t a bad sort. He was a contemporary of Appleby’s, and understood to hold some position of modest hereditary power in the City. Whether because of this or otherwise, he clearly owned considerable wealth – quite enough to indulge in the various literary and dilettante pursuits which were what drew him to this particular club. He came in almost every day and talked Christie’s or Sotheby’s with cronies. With Appleby he had a common interest in mediaeval English pottery, which had been a reasonable poor man’s field thirty years ago. It wasn’t that now. But Appleby still picked up a piece from time to time – and occasionally after consultation with Charles Gribble. It obviously wasn’t pottery that Gribble had in his head now. But it was only civil to listen to him, all the same.
And Gribble glanced, not at the sheaf of papers he was holding, but at the ceiling of the little reading-room. It was rather as if he was about to make a speech.
“Many swarms of wild bees,” Gribble said, “descended on our fields.”
For a moment Appleby didn’t make much of this. Then he understood.
“Is this to be a poem?” he asked.
Gribble nodded a shade impatiently.
“Of course it’s a poem,” he said. “It scans, doesn’t it? I’ll begin again.
Many swarms of wild bees descended on our fields:
Stately stood the wheatstalk with head bent high:
Big of heart we labour’d at storing mighty yields,
Wool and corn, and clusters to make men cry!”
Gribble took his glance from the ceiling and looked at Appleby. “What do you remember about that?” he asked.
Appleby shook his head – with the odd result that something floated into it.
“God!” Appleby said.
Gribble beamed.
“That’s it, my dear fellow. You’re right on the spot. Just go ahead.”
And, with another second for thought, Appleby went ahead:
God! of whom music
And song and blood are pure,
The day is never darken’d
That had thee here obscure.”
He glanced at Gribble. “That right? Meredith, isn’t it?”
“Precisely, Appleby, precisely! George Meredith’s ‘Phoebus with Admetus’. Every stanza ends with the four short lines that you’ve quoted. Rather a lovely effect, to my mind. There’s great charm in a really cunningly contrived refrain.”
“No doubt,” Appleby said. “But I don’t quite see–”
“And
now
listen!” This time, Gribble applied himself, not to the ceiling, but to his papers:
Purple glowed the clusters ripened on our vines,
Golden was our honey in the cool dark combs,
Golden gleamed the metal wrested from our mines,
Purple were the hangings in our high proud homes.”
Gribble paused from his reading and looked up. He was evidently in a mood of modest triumph.
“Do you remember
that
?” he asked.
“I can’t say that I do.” Appleby frowned. “And I have a very fair memory for verse, as it happens – although declaiming it isn’t much in my line. And I’m blessed if I recall that bit about our vines and mines and combs and homes. Or all that about purple and gold. Not quite up to the rest of the poem, is it?”
“Um,” Gribble said. He didn’t look too pleased.
“‘High proud homes’, was it?” Appleby went on. He felt like mildly teasing Gribble. “Of course Meredith could be terribly vulgar. But homes like that sound to me a bit too much like Gracious Living and all that – even for Meredith.”
Gribble chuckled. Or rather, it wasn’t quite a chuckle, which is essentially a plebeian sort of thing. The sound emitted by Charles Gribble was conditioned by the existence of three or four generations of Gribbles flourishing on banking or whatever. And it seemed to hold a suggestion of – so to speak – wheels quite enchantingly within wheels. There was, it appeared, some quite enormous joke that Appleby wasn’t yet within a mile of.
“Well, yes,” Gribble said. “Meredith could strike uncertain notes. And perhaps ‘high proud homes’ would be one – eh?” Gribble momentarily put down his papers in order to rub his hands together. “Meredith never quite got clear of his grandfather’s tailor’s shop. But he tried. He tried damned hard. Perhaps that’s what he’s doing here. Would that be it, Appleby? I mean to say, that’s how your mind would work, isn’t it, if I told you that Meredith had scrapped this ‘proud homes’ stanza? Struck it out, you know, before the poem was published. That would be why you don’t remember these particular lines. Eh – my dear Appleby? Lines existing” – Gribble was clutching his papers again, and now he flourished them – “only in manuscript.”
“Now I understand you.” Appleby had no difficulty in showing decent interest. “You’ve secured a batch of Meredith’s manuscripts?”
Gribble again produced his gilt-edged chuckle.
“That’s the inference,” he said. “That’s the inference, certainly. Holograph, you know. Are you acquainted with Meredith’s fist? Highly idiosyncratic. Spot it anywhere.”
“Most satisfactory,” Appleby said – having glanced at the sheet thrust at him. And he could understand Gribble’s sense of triumph. His bundle of papers was a substantial one. He must have come by this unpublished material of Meredith’s in quite a big way, and he was losing no time in crowing over it.