The Black Fox A Novel Of The Seventies (16 page)

Neither did the fact that he kept up the habit of spending with her quite a large part of every evening for the next couple of weeks by its regularity do anything to reassure her. That his evening visit should have become almost customary should have gone to prove what she so much wished to believe—that this lonely, sardonic man, at heart disappointed and tending to become embittered, was at last willing to be human, drop his pride, abandon the hope of that recognized ascendancy which is ambition's prize, and find in simple association with his oldest

of friends the quiet and lasting pleasure of elderliness, the sharing of lifelong memories and experience. Her doubts insisted on transmuting all this possible and indeed probable promise of calm happiness into misgiving. Surely if something were wrong, how deep and persistent, how watchful and "minatory it must be to keep this willful, proud solitary so persistently—she used the nursery phrase to herself—"on his good behaviour." ,

One evening, however, when he entered, his amiability had about it an additional gleam, almost a glow. She could not doubt it. It was in fact an unique reversal of a mood she had too often endured not to recognize that here it was present in counterpart. She was all too used to him when he would preserve an outward show of bantering courtesy and ironic pleasure while inwardly savage with arrogant impatience. Now he was behaving with what she could only call, in spite of the word's inappositeness to the subject—demureness. He must be pleased by something, deeply, doubly deeply pleased with an odd suppressed elation. She had never seen him in such a state and indeed would have been at a loss to diagnose it as far as she had, had she not recognized that somehow his favourite role of the disabused cynic had been reversed.

"He looks," she found herself saying under her breath, "like someone who has had a very big surprise, a shock, but one that is only startling because it's too good to be true. He might," she added with a sense that the very inappositeness made it necessary for her to think it out almost to the limit of aloudness, "he might be repressing a wish to share some sort of joke!" Again, in spite of anything she might gather from such signs to encourage her, her spirits sank. Once or twice he rallied her for falling into a "brown study" and not paying attention to what he was saying. But he kept her with no explanation of his mbod until he rose to bid her good night. Then she realized she had the truth and her distress closed on her like a trap-door.

"It's really a happy release—spared lingering. I received the intimation just after dinner." She recalled he had been handed a note and had told her he must go out but would be back before long. "The actual end came with merciful suddenness. Yes, the Dean has died."

There was no doubt he was pleased, elated. It was natural, she tried to argue to herself. There had been no friendship and he had repressed a sense of wrong. The reaction was inevitable. After all, most grief expressed by comparative strangers is, as far as true feeling goes, completely insincere—it is courtesy—and he had no need and very little capacity for courtesy in her presence. But she felt not only shocked, she recognized that she was dismayed, alarmed. The very force of her feelings warned her to say nothing and he passed out of the door telling her perfunctorily to sleep well.

He certainly was now uninclined to notice her moods or indeed those of any round him. His mind was fully taken up reviewing the prospect that now seemed clear and open. He was a trifle surprised and so amused at the happiness of the situation, "A certain simple inevitability," he said to himself as he reached his study, "I see, I see." He stood with his back to the empty grate reviewing the events before going to his bedroom. He was after all to come into his rights. A series of absurd obstacles, very varied, though pivoting round one unimportant figure, had quietly and naturally melted away.

It was he who the next morning in the Close called out a cordial "Good day" to Dr. Wilkes, who, obeying what was clearly a cheerful summons, came alongside.

"You look not too bright this fair morning?"

"You know of the Dean's death last night?"

"I am going over to the Palace now to make arrangements. Surely between ourselves, it is a relief! It was pernicious anaemia, wasn't it? And no one, with the patient's best interests at stake—

let alone those of the Cathedral—could desire a useless protracted dispute with Inevitability."

"Still I had had some hopes of prolonging the condition, I mean sustaining the remission and maybe to some extent improving it."

"Of course, of course; that's your rightful duty and interest. But you'll as naturally see our professional point of view. With the world in its present state, questioning all pure scholarship and divinity, well, sinecures are proving too expensive. The Establishment just cannot afford to carry too persistent a quota of permanent invalids."

"But there had been a distinct rally, you know. He was beginning to respond most promisingly to a rather empiric, rather unorthodox idea of mine . .. and then. . . ."

"Then?" the other encouraged him.

"Oh, complications. Of course one shouldn't be surprised at them in any case of severe debility. His general resistance never seemed properly to have recovered from that first attack of alopecia. There was a herpes condition again at the end. About two weeks ago I was sent for in the evening. There had been a sudden rise of temperature. Not to be unexpected. But it was sharp. And at the same time an eczemic inflammation was evident. That yielded to treatment, but the fever stayed. Soon he began to wander. Of course he was a devout man, of the older school, I judge. He kept on quoting fragments of Scripture, mainly from the Old Testament. Job. That would be natural enough, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, yes." the Archdeacon answered perfunctorily. Did the Doctor really think that he was interested in the last wandering words of a Fundamentalist!

"And Samson I remember came up more than once and then he quoted several times, 'The little foxes that spoil the vines.' That's in the Bible, too, isn't it?"

"Certainly, certainly. The Song of Songs."

"A strange book to quote from?"

Archdeacon Throcton cut the interview short, "Well, Doctor, I must be getting on to the Bishop."

"Of course you must. He was very kind to the Dean. Calling on him nearly every day."

"Good-bye." The Archdeacon waved a dismissing hand and turned to the Palace. The queer well-kn9wn line went, however, with him. Foxes—how they figured in all folk-lore. Foxes. He ran through Reynard's name in half-a-dozen ancient tongues. Reaching last, he repeated; "Alopex"—then paused. What was the association in his mind? Of course: What odd names the medicos did give to ailments! The physicians' name for baldness really meant Fox's Mange!

He had reached the Palace grounds—quite large with high shrubberies, almost coppices—a delightful spot on such a day. The Bishop's gardener and his boy were clearing out undergrowth and dead branches. But as he approached they had paused and were looking down at something.

The old man touched his hat and then remarked, just as Archdeacon Throcton was about to pass by, "Here's a queer thing, Sir, to find in a garden like this. It must have crawled in to die. Don't touch it, boy. Turn it over with the rake. We've just found it."

The gardener drew aside a sweeping bough that made a wall of foliage to the path. Just underneath it, lay a large black fox. It wasn't a pleasant sight for the hair had fallen off large parts of the body owing to very extensive mange.

The Established Church is a complex social device to cushion the shocks of actual experience. The attraction of the sexes, reproduction, parturition, disease and death, the main successive events in the life of everyone, the hard facts which Gautama cited as manifest proofs that existence in the body is a baited trap, Anglicanism has now been able to treat as occasions for the delivery of prose and poetry recitations. That the poetry, called hymns and chants, is sometimes banal, and the prose, on the contrary, generally magnificent, is of course of purely secondary interest. The real anthropological importance of the whole process is that it has the peculiar, unperceived and perhaps inexplicable power of turning, by the magic of words, shock into boredom. Every rich arrested society, from Confucianism onwards, and probably far before, has discovered this secret of survival and has had the sense to practice it and not to preach it.

A dead Dean—dead of alope-cum-herpes-cum-erysifelas-cum . . . every Greek word whereby, on their side, the doctors had (with the aid of the desiccated contents of the Greek lexicon) powdered over the discharging details of human decomposition—such a decent cadaver could be the occasion for quite a tasteful exhibition of Jacobean threnody. It could be pacifying, uplifting and provocative—if that were not too strong a word—of quiet thankfulness: thankfulness for the sufferer's release to higher but unspecified realms, and also for his relinquishing a material benefice, the worth of which could be stated to a penny and which when totted up came, per annum, to some twelve hundred pounds sterling.

But, somehow, a dead fox, dead of fox-mange, alopex, the fox coming in like some silly sinister folk-tale figure to die in its tracks right by the Archdeacon's path as he was going to the Bishop to arrange for the Dean's funeral . . . ?

The Archdeacon's thought was interrupted and at the same time unpleasantly completed by the gardener quite unnecessarily adding, 'Why, in all my life—and I've been thirty years man and boy round the Palace—I've never seen such a thing. Shy beasts and cunning they be and scarce about here—the farmers

liking their hens more than the hunt, and turkey rearing coming on now and doing well on this dry soil. And to come in to die here by this very path, and see, a big black one. That's rare in itself. For reynard they're called, and that, our schoolmaster said, means the red or rusty one, as they nearly all are. They die by themselves, as do all the wild ones. No friends round and funerals after, for them. But this one, you'd almost fancy, he was trying to find someone, doctor or parson, so sick was he of his mange. Queer. . . ."

Without waiting the Archdeacon strode off.

The incident was slight, one of those small odd "natural history" happenings that people who have not the capacity for ordered studies and not enough necessary work to do, collect and improve into unconvincing, silly stories. Still it not only buzzed in his mind like a fly—like one of those blow-flies already settling on the suppurated fox-flesh. It attacked him at a lower emotional level. For a moment he felt almost as though he might be sick.

A step away from the somewhat dank shrubberies; a step into the quiet, polish-smelling hall, clean and spacious under the quiet inspection of the morning sunbeams; a score of steps up the thickly carpeted stairway, flanked all the way by an unbroken succession of painted bishops; at the foot of the sweep Bishop BendwelTs high-stocked predecessor; at the curve by the oriel a bevy of "full-bottomed" peruked Lords Spiritual; at the top Laudian ruffs, square caps and small, white, pointed beards. The whole ascending progression was an effective exercise in psychotherapy. As you rose, easily, almost effortlessly, up these broad-shallow sweeping "treads," your eye carried you on simultaneously up the stream of time and showed you under the change of fashion the power of continuity, proved to you the calm assurance of the centuries that had raised and sustained the present.

"Come in." The Bishop's voice summoned him, set final assurance on his rapidly re-established sense of complete security. He was sure, in its ring of welcome, he could hear as an overtone, "Friend, come up higher." Nor was he mistaken.

They agreed about each detail of the funeral: they went on and agreed about the death being "a merciful release": further they agreed that all that had been done and all that had befallen, had been done and had befallen rightly.

"Have a cigar, Throcton." The Bishop reached out his box— as clear a sign of friendly intimacy as the offer of snuff by an eighteenth century gentleman to one he wished to indicate as his almost-equal. And the use of the unprefixed vocative, the intimacy of the plain surname. That, too, argued well. He refused the weed, but waited without impatience as the Bishop persuaded the roll of leaves to smoulder and then, the little bonfire drawing well, sat back enjoying the first pulls. As he looked at the big aproned body, cradled in its big easy chair, the round face raised to the ceiling and with the succulent wad plugging its pursed lips, the ridiculous pseudo-classical line floated through his mind: "Hera, All-Mothering Air, feeding with vapourous nectar her favourite child."

The joke, with the sense of superiority that it gave him to this sucking overseer, made him, because of his pleasant expectations, feel a real liking for the old boy. "At heart," he thought, "He's as broad of mind as I, though of course his poorer brain doesn't let him see it. Well, no harm." He began again to lecture himself —an unfailingly appreciative audience, "Do not despise what you call our duller dupes. It is profoundly, anaesthetically soothing to the lingering and still painful remnants of an ecclesiastical conscience that there should be those who can yet subscribe to thirty-nine impertinently inquisitive Articles with neither a smile nor a sigh."

That was really quite a neat sentence. What a pity he could never use it over his own name. Perhaps it could be brought in, in some posthumous memoirs. His mind threw back to the present. Those Thirty-nine Articles—yes, he'd have to swear to them and his belief in them again when he took the next step up.

He turned again and looked at the chief shepherd who could bar or open the next and larger pen in the fold. The Bishop was looking at him through a comforting coil of smoke, and after letting a cloud rise upward, which it did in the most auspicious way, floating right on into the lap of a painted angel on the ceiling, he volunteered that he could now say that he had foreseen this eventuality. This reopening was too promising for Throcton even in his mind to question the Bishop's claim to the gift of even deductive prophecy. Finally the Lord of the Diocese spoke to the Close point. He went so far as to convey that the Prime Minister would, he believed, prove "gracious to his supplication"—he used the liturgically flavoured phrase almost with a smile. And that now he felt the issue might be left with that exalted quarter with some assurance as to the outcome. The thought under the mitre—he passed a hand over his forehead— he was prepared to foretell, would be found to agree with that under the Crown. Consideration had been shown for their last temporary exigency. All the more would the present appeal be regarded as apposite.