The Secret Vanguard
The Secret Vanguard
First published in 1940
© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1940-2010
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 2010 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: 0755121120 EAN: 9780755121120
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.
Peaceful is the first word which a house agent would have chosen in describing the home of Philip Ploss. Ancient and unpretentious, with its modern conveniences tucked unobtrusively away and even its excellent state of repair modestly dissimulated, Lark Manor nestled in the heart of the English countryside. The railway station was five minutes’ walk from the house and quite concealed; from it the fastest trains – and the fastest were so very fast that it was wonderful how very smooth they were, too – took just half an hour to reach London.
The distance was right. In half an hour, and while hurtling towards the pleasures of his club and a matinée and dinner with a female friend, Philip Ploss could comfortably write fifteen to twenty lines of verse. These verses, which sometimes concerned the delight of travelling in a smooth train from the squalor of the city to the pleasures of a rural retreat, he would leave at his club for one or another of his acquaintance who ran a literary magazine. And two or three weeks later they would be printed and there would be a cheque which paid for the matinée and the dinner, with maybe a little over for other things. And then every three or four years all these verses would be collected in a slim volume by another acquaintance, a publisher. Philip Ploss incurred no expense whatever and there was a deferred royalty which had several times come to over five pounds. This, together with the couple of thousand or so a year which Ploss had inherited from a father in tea, helped to maintain the notable peacefulness of Lark.
For peacefulness must continually be paid for – Fate letting it out only on simple hire, so that there is never a final instalment. Philip Ploss understood this and paid on the nail. He liked to walk through the new-mown grass; he liked to discern a great inwardness in buttercups and daisies; he liked to sit on a stile and retort upon the cattle their own ruminative technique. But even for this unassuming way of life he realized that he had to pay. He paid his doctor and his wine merchant and his stockbroker and the man who came about the drains. They in their turn did their best to preserve both Philip Ploss and his chosen environment, to keep the stile in repair and the buttercups pushing up towards the sun.
Of such tranquillity as the world allows Philip Ploss seemed assured. It was not merely that as a well-informed, moneyed, and wary person he had a better statistical chance of avoiding trouble than most – though this it was possible to feel of him. Nor was it merely his retired way of life. Ploss straying voluptuously through fields and rural ways was a figure secure enough – free from the hazards of passion and ambition, protected at need by great financial organizations, by military skill, by willing and waiting surgeons and psychiatrists. But Ploss in his living-room at Lark held – one was obscurely but massively persuaded – even stronger cards. The place was full of books and gramophone discs and pictures, and in these – in their essence so evidently scatheless and imperishable – Ploss was soaked. Each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent persons and things, and – as in an insect filled with chlorophyll – one could not confidently say where Ploss himself left off and these in their own identity began. It was possible to feel that in a first-class crisis Ploss could simply seep away into the books and discs and pictures, hibernating in their assured immortality until a more genial season, and leaving behind nothing more vulnerable than did Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat.
But the Cheshire cat was a magical cat, and that is perhaps a magical view. Reason tells us that we cannot seep into or shelter behind the monuments of art; that Philip Ploss was in no way specially inviolable; and that he threw up all this culture around himself simply in a vain attempt to burrow out of an increasingly terrifying universe.
Ploss would have admitted this. He would have advanced the plea that nature had framed him a burrower; that he burrowed in obedience to the great law of kind. He observed himself, for instance, to be of the type that takes refuge in quotations; when faced by any predicament it was his instinct to burrow hastily into other minds. He realized that to discern a great inwardness in buttercups and daisies was for one of his generation itself a form of taking refuge in quotations. And when emancipated schoolboys made loud discovery of this in noticing his verse for progressive reviews he felt justifiably annoyed. For an artist has a right to work with quotations if they are his medium, and daisies and buttercups which were not these flowers purely but these flowers plus a little Cowper and a little Crabbe happened to be the genuine region of Philip Ploss’ song. From nature in its minor and placid aspects, exploited as a refuge and sophisticated by obsolete literary minds, he received a genuine if tenuous inspiration. The issue of this in careful, low-keyed verse was his serious concern.
It was perhaps because this serious concern was habitually with an area of sensation narrowly confined that Philip Ploss liked a vista with which to relax. To indulge himself in this he had constructed at the highest point of his garden the sort of skeletal wooden tower which is known as a gazebo. It was more elaborate than most. The final platform had been roofed and in part glassed in; and here Ploss kept a few books, a few discs, and a gramophone which was twin to the one in the house. The place offered retirement beyond retirement, a retreat within a retreat – and at the same time it offered a whole countryside spread out for inspection like a map. To the northwest, it is true, the prospect was closed by the final swell of the Chilterns. But in the opposite quarter, and where the view took in the vale of St Albans and a shimmer of lower Thames valley beyond, there was a sense of almost continental vista. Here, too, and by a trick of the ground, there was a strikingly sharp transition from the local to the remote. The landscape, as if it were the work of a discreet and skilful painter, showed no middle distance. Immediately below lay the familiar territory of the poet: Lark and its garden, a lane, a spinney, a big field and two little ones, livestock as individually familiar as the vicar or the doctor and in receipt of considerably more of Philip Ploss’ regard. Beyond this – and articulated with it as abruptly as in a composite photograph – appeared to lie the shadowy field full of folk that is England. In point of topographical fact the area surveyed was not after all perhaps remarkably extensive; yet it had a composition, an atmosphere, a various suggestiveness which made it appear to be so. Philip Ploss liked to contemplate it under its various accidents of light and shade. A spare middle-aged figure, with friendly, slightly puzzled eyes under long, pleasantly untidy hair, he would sit for hours on his gazebo in vague contemplation of the horizons it offered.
He was a man of authentic imagination and he must have seen in this soft country – or just over the edge of it – symbols and enigmas as well as familiar cattle and favourite walks. Around him was an agriculture which, for all its appearance of tidy prosperity, was a lingering and vestigial thing. Far to the south, invisible on the fields of Eton, a ruling class was getting its eye in to play for another century of power: enigmatical, surely, if its luck would hold or not. Just beyond, and from the battlements of Windsor, the ghosts of Harrys and Edwards watched the process with anxious eyes. Turn the head eastward into the breeze that was blowing from Heligoland and Sylt and one was looking at London, a London which declared itself at night in a great smear of light across the sky. And London, which reached by train was a comprehensible place of theatres and concert halls and clubs, revealed itself from this distance as an enigma, too. Immensely strong, immensely vulnerable, at once complex and unplanned, its gigantic sprawl was like the agony of a creature that strives to cast out its own evil and realize some distant hope. Perhaps it was succeeding, Philip Ploss used to reflect – and then some smothered uneasiness in himself would make him look away. He would look further – his inward eye overleaping London to skirt the North Downs and hover over those Kentish creeks and inlets where England was fought for in desperate little battles long ago. Nearby was Dover: Philip Ploss’ mind would burrow into
King Lear
…and then he might reflect that a line drawn from where he sat to Shakespeare’s Cliff and thence prolonged a further twenty-two miles would very likely touch Calais…