The Open House Read Online Free PDF Page A

had remained ignorant of the existence of their poetically-disposed Dickensian namesake.
    The fourth wall was given over – and perhaps it might be informatively – to family portraits of the minor order: oil sketches, pastels, miniatures, pencil drawings, and photographs both ancient and modern. There was a handsome Victorian gentleman drawn by Richmond – a distinguished performance contrasting oddly with the stiffly posed, although technically accomplished, ‘studies’ by Victorian and Edwardian cameras. In these, generously bosomed but decently swathed ladies inclined their noses demonstratively over vases of flowers; gentlemen eased the unwonted process of absorbing themselves in a book by leaning a thoughtful brow on a supporting hand; children strangled kittens, clasped hoops, or with outstretched battledore unconvincingly simulated the expectation of a shuttlecock’s arriving thereupon. One small boy attracted Appleby’s notice. He had ‘dressed up’ in military uniform – not the unassuming cardboard ‘outfit’ Appleby remembered from his own childhood, but in well-tailored garments suggestive of some foreign, rather than a British, regiment. The boy had been firmly positioned four-square before the camera – his left arm stiffly at attention; his right hand also at his side, resting in an officer-like fashion on the hilt of his miniature sword; his eyes steadily fixed upon the threatening lens. Thus dragooned, the small boy nevertheless contrived to intimate in some indefinable way the possession of an unruly spirit. Appleby wondered whether a real army had eventually claimed him; and, if so, what it had made of him. Perhaps a battlefield had claimed him – in Burma, the Western Desert, Normandy. At a guess, he had been of about the right age for that.
    The little portrait gallery – the unassuming domestic note of which struck Appleby as rather pleasing in the middle of this grand house – was disappointing as a source of information. Nothing exhibited either a name or a date, so he was no further forward in discovering whether Snodgrasses still inhabited (or ought to be inhabiting) Ledward Park. He fell back on his former plan, and hunted around for Who’s Who . It proved not difficult to run to earth, and in its pages several Snodgrasses revealed themselves at once. The very first entry, moreover, appeared to be the one he sought. Adrian Snodgrass, described in the opening line of the notice as ‘soldier and traveller’, had been born in 1915, the second and now eldest surviving son of a brigadier. He was unmarried. His schooling had been partly in Azuera, South America, and partly at Harrow. He had gone to Oxford, entered a good regiment, resigned his commission within a couple of years, turned up in another South American country as a military attaché in the British Embassy, quitted this apparently in the interest of ‘exploration’, been later ‘associated with various governmental agencies’ in Azuera, and then shifted his activities to Africa. He had published a book unendearingly entitled My Niger Niggers , after – and perhaps because of – which he had returned to Azuera and been ‘prominent in securing measures of political reform’. With this activity, ascribed to 1961, the record ended. Adrian Snodgrass’ address was given as care of Professor Beddoes Snodgrass, Ledward Park.
    This further Snodgrass appeared – several Snodgrasses on – on the opposite page. Beddoes, who was a widower in his seventies and apparently a younger brother of the brigadier, was also a soldier, and indeed the son of a soldier. He had seen active service, taught at the Staff College, left the army to lecture on military history at universities in South America, and eventually become Professor of the History of Warfare at Cambridge. His publications had not been numerous; what seemed to be the most important of them was called Terrain and Tactics : Three Campaigns in Brazil . His address was The