The Black Fox

by H. F. Heard

  The Bishop’s mind was still running on his last interview: He was not unnaturally concerned that his sympathy should have been judicious, kind, of course, but stimulating not enervating.

  “The main aim of my policy,” he remarked to Chaplain Halliwell, “is to keep the Diocese up to average.”

  “Yes, Sir, and the average is rising all over England.”

  “It should, of course, it should. Ecclesiastical efficiency has been scandalously low. You can have little idea of the laxity in many parts when I was your age. But we must advance on a balanced front: efficient organization, sound scholarship, sane devotion—that is the triad the Church should aim at.”

  “And the order in which they should be achieved?”

  “Well ours is the great Church of the Middle Way and I’ve always held that our service and our forte is to appeal to the educated through reason. Emotion lies at either end—social reform and its fanatics—and private salvation and the fanatics of the extreme low and the extreme high. Yes, it is a nice problem of balance, of balanced advance.”

  “One of the problems, is it not, Sir, is that of the wonderful longevity of Chapters?” Young Halliwell ventured the slight pleasantry and seeing that it was well received added, “It sometimes looks, doesn’t it, Sir, as though the Church of the Via Media was rewarded by heaven for its faithfulness in avoiding extremes by being granted an uncommon extension of life in this world?”

  “Yes, I suppose that would have been the blessing that the saints of the Old Testament would have asked and as the school of thought we serve does not stress either heaven or hell, magic or mysticism, perhaps you are right. An eminent vital statistician whom I met at the Athenaeum when last up in London, was certain of it. Maybe we have the reward of longevity granted specifically to us. Beneficed Clerks in Holy Orders, he told me, had far the longest of all the expectations of life.”

  Their minds were running on the same example. “I don’t think there will be any change in the Dean’s condition, while you are away,” the Chaplain remarked.

  “His condition is just the same, isn’t it?” questioned the Bishop.

  “I have a feeling, Sir, that his family is a little more concerned for his health. Of course one has now to judge of his condition almost entirely in the mirror of their looks. I don’t know who saw him last.”

  “I confess I have not. They have not asked me to call. And you will find when you reach a station like mine that you never have time to make any casual visits. Besides, even when I last called on him, which was some time ago, it was like using that new notion, a speaking tube, you shout something down and then switch your ear round trying to catch an answer as incomprehensible to you as your shout was to the distant listener.”

  Another couple in the Close was also discussing the Dean and his scarcely measurable decline from decrepitude, through bedriddenness, to final decease. “A perfect example of suspended animation,” Canon Throcton was remarking to his sister. “He has now achieved the pace of that problematical tortoise which swift-footed Achilles himself is supposed to have striven in vain to overtake. Time himself seems now to be unable to gain for good on the Dean.”

  But in point of fact the Canon, as the Chaplain, had been equally observant of the minute “signs of the times,” though not equally communicative of what he believed was to be perceived. He was sure that the Deanery family was not as much at its ease as is the habit of those who fear no disturbance. The replies to the constant convention of inquiry as to the Dean’s health had a slight overtone of defensiveness. That tone confirmed the Canon’s suspicions, suspicions tinged like the eastern horizon of late night with the first faint hint and hope of dawn.

  The only indication that he gave to his sister (a clue which her generosity mistook for an improvement in his own condition) was to remark, “The Bishop is shrewd, as indeed many men who have no pretence to learning often are. I believe, after all, he may have been right to prefer Simpkins to the Archdeaconry.”

  To her “He certainly is working hard,” he nodded, “A plough horse takes kindly to the plough,” and left her with that.

  “How fortunate we are,” she reflected with a sigh half of relief, half of regret, “who aren’t clever. The able seem to have to feel as insults what we take for granted—the fact that we may be passed over. But surely his wound is healing?”

  Had she asked her brother instead of herself, even had he wished, it is very doubtful whether he could have answered. His interest was swinging over from past disappointment to future hope. He hadn’t forgiven; it is doubtful whether in the whole of his far from unsuccessful life he had ever forgiven anyone. The few injuries he had suffered he either revenged, and so discharged from his mental system, by holding up the injurer to a quite effective contempt, or he used a method perhaps not less dangerous, of refusing to mention the matter again, repressing the memory by the powerful concentration of attention which as a scholar he had learnt to command.

  In his study, though his notes and index cards passed through his fingers, under his eyes and before his mind, his reverie was hardly disturbed. For now he was free to attend to the issue of his ambitions. He need no longer either repress or generate counter-spleen. It could well turn out to have been the best thing for Simpkins to have been shunted into the Archdeaconry—put out to grass. He felt he had been a little crude, even. For the Bishop may really have meant it, when he made the quite true remark that just having to do administrative work was absurd waste of a true scholar’s time.

  He owned that he had never thought of the Archdeaconry as a post in which he could stay and shine. No, not if it meant that a mitre might be added to crown the apron and gaiters; he could say honestly nolo episcopari. For him it meant a step to the Deanery—this one or one of the greater—perhaps the “Peculiar” of Westminster. Here even the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primate of All England, had, when he came within those central walls, to walk only alongside the Dean. Yes, the Archdeaconry was not a step but a shelf. And, further, it was now filled by a man who the more he suited it, the more he proved he was unsuited for the higher office of Dean.

  “Of course it is a Crown Appointment, while the Archdeaconry lies in the direct gift of the Bishop.” His reverie ran on. “But Bendwell himself was an appointee, and a staunch supporter of the Government, indeed more than once of considerable use to them in The Lords. This time he could make no slip. He must put his best—in fact, his only ranking scholar—in the scholar’s post and stall. Besides, the very thing that these oafs have brought against me—my Semitic scholarship would tell with the Prime Minister, himself an Oriental. Yes, it is all opening out into the plainest of plain sailing, ’pon my soul.”

  His voice was now quietly cheerful, “I’m amazed at my own pettiness and lack of foresight! But,” he added with that philosophic leniency that is nearly always extended to one’s own past extravagances, “after all, I’ve probably been able to make this quick and good readjustment to the shock of a very unpleasant insight into a colleague’s character—a man never a gentleman but who had been mistaken for being a Christian—by not being ashamed to take the matter seriously.”

  That was certainly a satisfactory way of putting it. His voice ran on giving him the conviction of another opinion confirming his thought. “Yes,” he summed up, and began to smile with an even more generous self-leniency, “and then there came that ridiculous coincidence which I can now see turned the whole thing into a joke, all the better for being all for myself and, indeed, I can maintain, wholly against myself and at my expense. Yes, I can own now, I haven’t an iota, not a jot of resentment against that poor fellow, whose natural ambition and ignorant prejudice thought the post he now has should be his and not mine. I wish to allow that he’s filling the job quite well and I’d add as a parting blessing that his looks are actually improved with the cleaning off of those locks far more suited to the stage than the choir.”

  It is possible that certain kinds of hope can transmute themselves into
a form of working faith. Whether that was so in this case or whether another cause was in action, there is no doubt that a result much desired by the Canon soon became known to him. He was particularly glad that he had not snubbed but even encouraged Dr. Wilkes when one March day the general practitioner came over to him on the street.

  “I am just from the Deanery, hardly more than a routine visit, and of course nothing that might cause misgiving, I agree, should be done, such as requesting prayers. So I have said nothing to the family save to advise a little more quiet and a slightly lower diet. There is a slight congestion at the base of one lung. Puts a strain on the heart. And gout is quite enough for that organ after it’s been beating almost a score more years beyond the ‘three-score-and-ten.’”

  Then cocking his head on one side as a sparrow will sometimes glance at a solemn rook, the speaker added differentially, “Of course in all big, slow-moving institutions there has to be a good deal of foresight. In this Close, as indeed in the Government itself, many eventualities have to be considered. Forewarned is, is it not, foreappointed?”

  The slight flavour of general compliment and deference, referring to the Church as part of the ruling of the realm, made the really quite delicate sugar-coating for the otherwise possibly resented assumption of inner confidence almost amounting to intimacy. The Canon was therefore able to take the tip, as his informant might have put it, had he been calling on one of his hunting or racing patients.

  The two parted with something approaching friendliness based upon private confidence. For the Canon, no less than the Doctor, wished to keep the information of a change for the worse-better, or better-worse, in the Deanery to himself. There should be nothing precipitate this time if he could prevent it; everything as far as he could manage it should be put in the most favourable posture before the final bolt be drawn back and the moribund obstacle be slid out of view and its stall left vacant. As far as inconvenient rumour was concerned he felt safe in regard to the Dean’s family itself. They would keep as quiet as he and the Doctor.

  The weather was doing its part by proving exacting, at least to lungs whose reactions were getting slow. Looking out of his window at the racing dark clouds Canon Throcton quoted, “He blew with His winds and they were scattered.” West and east kept up a shuttlecock game across the heavens. For three days the west would send in roaring rain-gales, and then, as “February Fill-Dyke’s” excess must be balanced by March’s “Peck of dust, worth a King’s Ransom,” the east, with what seemed staunchless breath, would hiss cold dry gritty air—no doubt necessary for the water-logged land but “neither good for man or beast.”

  Miss Throcton, with her feet on the fender and her fingers grooming Tissaphernes’ fur (that stood electrically on end in the dry wind and became tangled and matted in the wet), thought she should enquire about the most vulnerable of the Cathedral healths. She had heard nothing through the distaff side of Close communications. Her brother, however, seemed without concern or interest. “It would take more than a whirlwind straight from the mouth of Boreas to budge our leading limpet from his carved rock.”

  Then sitting back in his chair he smiled easily, “For that matter for all we know his Very Reverence may have already breathed his last but by his imperceptible dying have cheated decay and turned into a fossil, not a cadaver. Is a funeral necessary for a fossil? A nice point for Cathedral casuists to follow up, when they have settled the moot question When is a stall vacant? When the actual stall has been unoccupied for a number of years, when the occupant has lost two and a half out of the five senses (or to be generous, three), or when the sanitary authorities demand that his residence shall not be used as a sarcophagus?”

  Her “My dear should we mock at their grief?” only brought the reply-raillery, “Why, I’m congratulating the family on their possible luck! The Arabians say of some of their Sufi Sheiks that they don’t decay or indeed die when they stop breathing. They pass into a potent state of what I suppose our lively little leach would call catalepsy perpetualis. And they are treasured, in the diadems of sanctity, as gems of the first water, though dry, of course, as the dust. What a jest if our Church of England, with its most malleable motto, ‘All things to all men,’ should here produce on its own an imperishable Dean—to be shown on pilgrimage days like the head of Siena’s Catherine. I wonder how our Anglo-Catholic wing would take such a queer answer from heaven to their wish for miracles and relics!”

  Again Miss Throcton attempted to check his exuberance. She found the subject macabre and even more disquieting the jauntiness of his humour. A word taught her by her Scotch nurse came back into her mind, “Fey,” those irrational and unsteady high spirits which attack the mind when it is approaching a crisis in its fate.

  He was checked by the slight offence he felt at her mild censure, and retired to his study.

  When they met again he was his normal self, neither friendly nor unfriendly but aloof, treating her as another species which shares one’s house but not one’s thought. They were, it appeared, back at their normally distantly tepid relationship. It seemed, the more she thought of it, that her disquietude had been as groundless as the other extravagance had been any hopes of a growing intimacy and confidence.

  As it happened everything was favouring the secrecy the Canon desired: Even to the point that the Bishop came back into Residence and the Archdeacon was away again on his widespread diocesan duties: Even to the point that the Bishop asked the Canon over to tea at the Palace to discuss the Easter services. And these ever finer points came to the needle-fineness of perfect opportunity—of an opening as natural as it was inviting.

  When they had closed their business session and decided what should be yielded to the demands of the Ritualists in way of new vestments and what retained for the Evangelical Lows in regard to postures and attitudes, the Bishop relaxed to a cigar. While drawing on it quietly he remarked with that easy geniality and apparent frankness that his critics allowed was his chief asset,

  “I’d like to say, Canon, that you took that disappointment very well.” He looked through a fine wreath of blue smoke at his visitor as an intelligent octopus might view, through the skein of sepia, a diver rather uncertain of his ground. “No, don’t try to deny it: I felt it in my way as much as you—that disappointment about the Archdeaconry, well, very well. I am a Father-in-God as well, thank God, as just the rather weary administrator of too much patronage. And I did for a moment fear that the—the postponement of preferment might cast a cloud of embitterment over the bright quiet field of pure scholarship. But it didn’t, and I’m grateful to God that your natural resilience, your pure interest in learning and your religious exercises have stood you in good stead.”

  To this statement both bland and wary, for under its assumptions there was surely a question which he was meant to answer with reassurance, the Canon presented a mien of dutiful acquiescence. He was ready to make his submission. But his mind had ceased following the sermonic flow when it had turned into its peroration. For it had been arrested by the Bishop’s hesitation over one word in the easy run of the practised verbiage, the word “postponement.” All this talk, yes without a doubt it was to sound out its hearer as to whether he was suitable to be put forward for the Deanery. If he was still sulking, why then no doubt he would be passed over just to teach him not to flout authority. It was clear that the Bishop would not place closer to himself any man that would not second that geniality and general adaptability which had brought him his preferment and might raise him still higher. Clearly everything now turned on his making exactly the right impression at this moment.

  He looked up with quite a convincing assumption of frankness. “Thank you, My Lord, for your counselling. I see that your eye is over your sub-shepherds just as much as over the more general and larger flock. I’ll confess—and you have shown that denial would be of no use confronted with your diagnosis—that I was disappointed, wrongly disappointed. I see now that you were not only wise to the diocese but kind to me—a g
racious and statesmanlike blend, if I may say so. I would not have been suited to the duties of maintenance of structure and inspection of parochial administration: that work would have suffered and my own work, which is my vocation, that would have lost too. May I then, as a dutiful son, thank you for your wisdom and kindliness not only to all of us in this our big family of the diocese, but to me in particular.”

  He looked up. The large kindly face of the Bishop (who like the aging Caesar liked to have men about him “that are fat, sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights”—and sometimes even to take a nap after lunch), that handsome round of wide brow and large smooth jowl, beamed like a mild September sun. It was a real relief to his soul, which remained honest enough because of its limited objectives and moderate dreams, a real relief that once more he might feel the Precincts were free of malice and envy. Maybe not a high ideal, but alas, as he very well knew, harder to achieve than could be imagined by those who lived far from what seemed the easy sleep of Cathedral closes.

  Indeed he was so pleased that he actually went further than he intended. He, too, had been aware that he hesitated over the word “postponement.” He could have said “passing over” or simply “loss.” But those words had about them a flavor of finality that might depress his hearer. He was truly a kind if adroit man. And now that his wishes had been fallen in with by the man who had undoubtedly suffered, now that the matter was closed and at last taken well, surely would it not be safe to give him a little encouragement—in a most general way? Throcton knew as well as himself that the actual gift of the Deanery was in the hands of the Crown. Yes, it was a position where something was to be gained and nothing lost by good wishes that higher authorities in the end could overrule. And now that the quiet, proud man opposite him seems to have been relaxed by the hope, it might be wise to take the opportunity to learn something of his outlook and work. After all, for all one knew, he might very well be the next Dean, the political situation being what it was.