The Black Fox

by H. F. Heard

  Canon Throcton glanced sideways, touched gingerly the ranged debris, putting on one side the soiled handkerchief. While doing this his voice hardly checked in its flow of commentary:

  They take this wisp and with the aid of some aromatic gum—my informant told me that he himself had generally found them using (for which they paid highly, as they well might, considering the distance it had to be brought) the oil shipped from the city of Macassar, out of the spice island of Celebes. I say, with this gum or oil they will make out of the hair, nail-parings and such skin as they may have secured, a small object, a model, rough and miniature, of the human head. This made, they burn it, claiming that thereafter, as the moon begins to wane, so the hair of their enemy—or victim—will fall, and his scalp will become not only naked, but afflicted. Further, they assert—as above I said I would show at this point—that this, though seeming a trivial punishment, and a surface affliction, is a preliminary and essential step in their larger and implacable design. For, by destroying the hair, the vital strength of man is assaulted. And the power of the mind—which it is their ultimate intention to overthrow (and thus lead their victim to destroy himself, so flinging his own soul into hell) cannot be struck at, until the vital strength has been undermined and sapped.

  Canon Throcton ceased for a moment his recital, in order that, smiling to himself, he might whisper, “We may be thankful that our Church has retained for us so much folk-lore through its fancy that the Old Testament is a divinely inspired collection. Why, it cannot be so many days ago that our liturgy was recalling that queer sun-myth of Samson shorn of his hirsute halo. I’m sure I recall it—a pretty illustrative coincidence.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, as though already feeling more at his ease, “Yes,” he added, a rising note of content coming into his voice, “Yes, one knows enough of superstition to know that particular mistake. We are now on the firm and open ground of manifestly false analogy. At this pace we shall be well out of the wood by bedtime. This now is certainly nothing but subjective symbolic therapy: destroy the object associated with your irrational, but not wholly unhygienic disgust, and you will find the clear, male reason once again easy master of the female, vapourish emotions.”

  He turned at that. Leaving the book, he snatched up the combings and taking the candle flung it, the clot of hairs and the contents of the small bottle onto the glowing bed of coals. For a moment the red flush, chilled by the new objects, went an angrier, deeper tinge. Then, with a sudden sputter, the candle-wax melted, the oil caught fire, the hair sizzled and flamed. A dense mass of oily smoke poured up. At that moment a cold draft, perhaps set in motion by throwing the objects on the fire, came down the chimney. All the soot-charged fumes poured out into the room, an impenetrable, whirling fog.

  The smoke-pall, striking the ceiling, spread, and began to curl down over the whole room. It sank to the level of his eyes and stung them till he could hardly keep them open, stung also his nose and throat so that he began to gasp and cough. The green-shaded colza-oil reading lamp and the low red light of the fire—the only lights in the room—glowered through the murk, like the port and starboard lanterns of a ship that suddenly looms ahead, running you down in a fog. Feeling almost panic, and having to choke back the impulse to shout “Fire! Fire!” he stumbled past his desk, ran into a table, but at last made the window, tore aside the curtains and dragged up the sash. Outside the night was cold and clear. He looked across the quiet, wide Cathedral Close. The great lawn and the sheer front of the Cathedral’s West Façade were clearly enough lit. He raised his eyes to the sky. The mist of the afternoon was quite gone—there would be a frost. The moon was fairly high up and of fair size—in fact, he noticed, about three-quarters big—it would be full in a few days. Now it looked as though it were made of two convex curves. You might have fancied that it was a white visor held by an invisible hand obliquely before an invisible head. A verse, he couldn’t remember reading when or where, floated through his mind—

  That Presence which broods in the gloom of a Yew,

  Or in vacant glades at the sun-soaked noon;

  That unseen being that looks at us, through

  The Ivory Mask of the Moon.

  “Of course,” he remarked to himself in his usual whisper, “Of course, ‘gibbous’ is the late second quarter. That means that in a few days it will be full—and after that waning.”

  These obvious remarks seemed to settle his mind. He pulled down the window-sash and turned again to the room. The smoke had settled back almost as quickly as it had poured out. Evidently opening the window had sent a good draught up the chimney. Except for a smell of singeing and here and there a greasy spot of soot, the room appeared normal. He blew a couple of these smuts off the open pages of the Ibn Barnuna volume, closed the big book and put it on his writing desk. Then, turning to the fire-place, he somewhat hastily picked up the box of matches and put it back in the drawer where he kept such “ignitia” as he called them. As he shut the drawer, he glanced back at his desk. He saw that the small fire-side table still had on it the dirty bottle and the soiled handkerchief. He strode back, snatched them up and, for a moment, seemed about to throw them on the quiet glowing bed of coke that the fire had now become.

  “The bottle would break in the heat and then might cut the maid’s fingers. Besides, she would ask herself why I should be incinerating flasks? Queer gossip, especially in a place of such perfect acoustic properties as a Cathedral Close, can start up from far less significant sources.”

  While this was said above them, like a committal service, both bottle and handkerchief found themselves stowed with the match-box. Obviously, if a burnt bottle could start rumours, a fortiori an unburnt one accompanied by some one else’s overused handkerchief might be the fruitful seed-bed of enough suspicions to incriminate an archbishop. The drawer then being finally shut, was locked and the very key put behind a row of quartos standing sentry above. Then he went over to the door and with the other key which had guaranteed his privacy for all this psychological therapy and catharsis, he released the lock, turned quietly the handle, and looked out into the passage. He felt quite strongly that he did not want anyone to know that he had locked himself in. He sniffed the air, too. He wanted to test whether any of the fume had stolen out ahead to rouse olfactory enquiry and then, maybe, suspicion.

  The first inhalation seemed to signal All Clear. The second reassured him that there was no hint of burning. Thank heavens for that. “Fire is always an excuse for suspecting smoke,” he smiled to himself. He sniffed a third time. No, there wasn’t a hint of anything scorched.… But wasn’t there a smell of some sort—a tang, a whiff of … what could it be? Ammonia? The passage was only lit by a lamp on the stairs, round the corner and hidden from where he stood. He could, however, see the main objects. And, indeed, at the upper end of the passage, near the floor, he could pick out a couple of gleams given off, no doubt, by some facet of the well-polished furniture, reflecting the lamp, itself out of sight.

  “Laetitia certainly has the house kept admirably,” he remarked with sudden appreciation of his well-run home. Then the twin points of polish moved and a shadow followed after them. He chuckled, “The cat! Perhaps her keen nose suspected that I might be infringing on her tithe by incinerating a mouse!”

  5

  Canon Throcton closed the door of his study behind him, went down the passage and joined his sister in her drawing-room. He paid this last call often enough for her not to be surprised, seldom enough for her not to be unpleased. To-night, as he had absented himself from dinner, she ought to feel that this was a gracious amend. He was naturally not unpleased to see what he wished to do in the light of a courtesy to another.

  The sense of settled security which her housekeeping care gave to the whole place here, in its citadel, found its central calm. He never enquired about her views or feelings, but, though he did not even turn the matter over in his mind, he was aware in an uninterested way that she had grounds. Her peace of mind no doubt w
as an atmosphere. And atmospheres arise from grounds yielding rather than firm. It would then be not only waste of time but an irritating futility to encourage her to give her reasons for a condition which, pleasant to them both, might defy the analytic power of even a fine intelligence such as his own. So he excused himself from finding out anything more about her spirit. She was profoundly and indeed graciously convenient, as convenient as perfect health and basic conveniences such as these are better not tampered with, had best be taken for granted. He looked at her with something approaching appreciation but which he was sensibly selfish enough to stop short of admiration, for that might end in a sense of obligation. She was the picture of uncritical peace and that was enough.

  Miss Throcton resembled her brother in that strange modulation of features wherein family likeness is unmistakable while distinction of character is emphatic. His features, transposed from male to female, might easily have produced a forbidding face. But the long nose, which in him expressed curiosity always narrowing into contempt, in her only appeared to indicate an over-sensitive aloofness. So, too, with her eyes. The same grey that in his was cold, in hers suggested a quaker quiet. Her mouth, where his became sardonic, showed no more than a restraint that could set in habitual repression, or, possibly, might come to express a completely peaceful resignation. There certainly was no prettiness—nor ever had been—in her long oval face. She was polar to that Rubens-ampleness of cheek, chin and figure which the many-childrened Sovereign made the popular outline.

  “You are a born sister,” her brother several times had remarked to her when he wished to be pleasant. And she was not unpleased with her station. Hers were the looks and outlooks that improve with age. Marriage without very considerable restraint, she had lived long enough to see, could prove more exacting on a woman than all the denials of spinsterhood. And socially she was proud of her family position. No man had ever offered her a station comparable to that she enjoyed as hostess of her distinguished brother. Her sense of family made her feel the learned world’s appreciation of his scholarship as a tribute to her clan—a tribute in which she would share far less had she taken another name.

  As he now paused before her he noted that her naturally pale face was touched by the fire-glow to the very temperate warmth of tinted ivory. She sat, he thought, with that graceful relaxation which expresses a quiet mind and with which (as the Greek sculptors knew) a woman, though over-tall when standing, can give a sense of composed beauty. He waited for a moment until a phrase could come, a phrase to appreciate her yet emphasize his superiority.

  “Women don’t have views: they have attitudes,” he smiled to himself. She turned her head, glancing up, content with the evident half of the truth that he was pleased to be with her. She was knitting, a volume—pretty certainly of sermons—on her lap. Before her a bright copper kettle, seated on an equally bright brass trivet, attached to a polished steel grate that held the bright well-kept fire, made flashes of warm but not garish colour. Sound confirmed sight. The fire lapped peacefully as a small lake in summer. The kettle hummed its simmering tune. Its sub-piping, he thought, was no more meaningless and far more restful than the intoning of a minor canon. Her feet were on half a large hassock. The other half of this little mesa was made even more comfortable for her toes by being occupied by a large cat just not too sleepy to purr an accompaniment to the kettle and the fire.

  “You look a classic monument put up to the Spirit of Domestic Peace. Eirene Pallas!”

  “Will you not then sit with us over a last cup of tea? Tissaphernes”—she pointed to the cat who had been given in honour of the head of the house, a classical Persian name—“Tissaphernes will take his with us; but without the suffusion of the China leaves that for him spoil the cream!” The miniature tiger seemed to understand. For it stretched, extending formidable claws.

  “The cat is a savage at heart,” the Canon remarked, sitting down and taking the ball of soft fur on his lap. “A moment ago I glanced him a-prowl round the upper wainscots for any unlucky mouse.”

  “Oh, you couldn’t …! No, I don’t mean that Tiss would not rather have meat than milk and fresh meat to the richest cream. But, as it happens, she’s been with me all the evening.”

  “But I saw her, I’m sure.…”

  At that moment there broke out muffled but distinct what could only be called a hubbub. It came from the direction of the servants’ quarters.

  “Laetitia! What are they …?”

  But the Canon’s inquiry was answered by one of them.

  “Ma’m, Oh, Ma’m,” cried a domestic face, pushed round the edge of the door before the knock of requested-entry could be answered.

  “Oh, Ma’m … Oh, excuse me, Sir … But Cook’s had quite a turn and Carlo is just beside himself.”

  This was clear from such wild barkings that even Tissaphernes felt that a back should be raised and a premonitory hiss of censure be given.

  “Cook says that she was just going to the pantry down by the back door. When suddenly she saw it was ajar and that at that very moment, as you might say as she had her hand on the latch, something pushed past her and ran quick into the yard and then Carlo suddenly dashed out of the kitchen and as good as took her off her feet and did take the door out of her hand and he giving tongue (if you will forgive the expression, for Cook was with hunting people before she, if I may say so, came up in the world) as though he were on a breast-high scent (another phrase from Cook’s past and again I ask your pardon) and Cook avers as she was with hunting people (and of that there’s never a doubt) there was an, an aroma as nothing but—it’s her word not mine—but a dog-fox could give.”

  The reflect narrative and its actual image began to subside together. Angry dog and loquacious maid were abating. Laetitia Throcton closed the subject and so, too, the door by making the head withdraw, dismissing it with,

  “The incident might well have waited till my visit to your quarters tomorrow morning. Good night Kate. Remember, put Carlo on the chain.”

  Tissaphernes’ fur tippet sank to its proper proportions. The Canon said nothing until his sister handed him his cup. Before tasting it, he paid the tea the compliment of breathing its bouquet. “Almost too fragrant.” He bent his head to catch again the vapour. Then smiled almost apologetically.

  “I didn’t think,” his sister forestalled him, “it could be the tea. When last in London I told Hawkins that we cared only for a little Orange Pekoe and not to put any Jasmine with the black Ichang.”

  “Yes, yes,” he agreed, “Hawkins might almost be called an artist in his blending trade. He knows how to give personal service for individual palates.”

  He sniffed again, this time raising his head, as animals will when questing, and his smile became more agreeable even to the borders—usually far away even from his amiability—of confidentialness.

  “Of course it wasn’t the tea! How odd our sense of smell is? Do you know the despised and hardly civilized Arabians—denied spiritous liquors and such palate-destroying drink—actually made an art of scent—as our tea-tasters on a lower level have of course made a trade and a lucrative one—an applied science. I recall when in my studies I first came across this Moslem refinement I began to notice my own ignorance—the first step to any knowledge.”

  His sister, delighted at this double sign, of ease in himself and with her, ventured,

  “Yes, I’ve often been amusedly surprised by something like that. Once I thought that my ever so precious rubber hot water bottle must be scorching through the housemaid leaving it too close the kitchen range, and hastening out to save my treasure I found that Cook was preparing a delicious veal Milanese! The frying red peppers did, as it happens, smell just like burning rubber. Yet the moment I saw the succulent dish in a flash I liked the smell which till then I’d thought disgusting!”

  “Very interesting: very apt.” He took her domestic illustration not only well but generously and added, “And have you found that a weak, bad scent may actually be pleas
ant and vice versa?” Not waiting for her confirmation he concluded, “I thought it was the tea that was too scented. But now I perceive that the smell did not come from the cup and was not a too strong spice of tea but a mercifully weak aroma of fox!”

  “I didn’t catch a whiff, I’m glad to say. I’m the door side of the fire-place, you see.”

  The amiability flowed on, each playing each easy card as it was offered—both, behind their placid pleasure, a little surprised, questioning, almost uneasy. “Why,” he wondered, “am I almost courting company?” “Why is he being so intimate?” Her question remained merely an undefined doubt for she could not in any way confirm her misgiving with a reply. To the best of her knowledge, and she certainly had not been unobservant, the service of installation had gone off without exacerbating her brother’s sense of humiliation. The whole atmosphere of the moment, the feeling of irrational intimacy, seemed in its way as odd and meaningless as a fox managing to get into the back premises of the house.

  His question disturbed him more because he was not sure there was not an answer. Could he be chatting away in this aimless manner because he really felt some need for her company, because he didn’t want to leave, because he didn’t want to be alone? He had only to raise the question where it could be cross-questioned and it was promptly dismissed as absurd.

  “Perhaps you’re right.” He broke the silence in which they had both been searching their minds so as almost to have forgotten each other. “Perhaps you are right; I don’t really see how I could have caught the ‘odour vulp.’ The brute could only have poked his nose round the unlatched back-door, trying to have a look at the larder.”