The Black Fox

by H. F. Heard

  “You are right. Of course quite right. We must hope for the best.” The voice was gruff but the words were conventionally suitable and with them discharged—a dust of decency over the larva-leakage—he turned on his heel.

  The other stood looking after him. “If only we knew the connection between anger, greed and fear and the organs of the body we’d know more about illness than the chemists will ever be able to tell us.”

  He repeated the remark to his wife when he got home, giving her the occasion that had made the generalization form in his mind. But Archdeacon Throcton had no confidant. He would not have trusted himself with his sister had not years of domineering distance made any real intimacy, any freedom of communication, as difficult as the movement of an arthritic finger. He knew that she watched him and, though lacking the definite and sharp lines of information to draw round the vague intuitions of misgivings, she was aware of his moods and in general knew their sources. It made no difference that she had a deep affection for him. What he dreaded was that she should—however sympathetic—see that he was not the man he had masked himself to appear. Her very loyalty, the fact that he knew she would endure seeing him as he now himself sometimes feared he might be becoming, only added to his sense of frustration and inner fear.

  That evening he sat in his study before the empty fireplace. He could neither work at his routine duties—there were plenty of letters to be written: for a “faculty” to be granted to put up a hideous, painted glass window with mendacious inscription in the church of Pugton Regis, for an inquiry whether the incumbent of Melcombe Porcorum should or should not be let have a reredos with a Nativity in high relief, et cetera ad nauseam. Nor could he turn to his Arabian studies. He turned over the increasingly irritating letters, which, as letters do, grew the more exasperating the more he neglected them.

  “So now he won’t die and here am I caught again,” he muttered to himself. “You’d think I was being played with … by what, whom? I’m getting the feeling of being trapped. Those attacks of anger, too. I usen’t to have them. A bad sign. They can’t be good for the heart. They must come, I suppose, from the digestion. Perhaps I ought to see a doctor—and turn myself into a hypochondriac and join the choir of croaking incurables that this place seems to produce as its sour vintage. And give a clue to that shrewd-eyed little leech. No, that would put the fat in the fire. But I don’t feel rational when that bile rises in me. I suppose old Hippocrates was right. We are creatures whose moods are the fume given off by our organs’ secretions. What a fool I was to show my impatience in front of a suspicious physician. Of course he dislikes me and the Dean hates me and the Bishop despises me. What a fool I was to fall into seeing omens in the burning of that nauseous garbage and thinking that such a piece of foolery might help get the gall out of my system. The fact that the silly thing, even on its own ridiculous level, failed to work, obviously affected my mind. I suppose if you take omens and they go wrong you have to pay the silly forfeit. If you appeal to the witch doctor you will find yourself bound to pay if the fool decides against you. Perhaps I’ve appealed to a Caesar of the underworld and unto Caesar I must go.”

  He got up and began to pace the floor. Finally he came to a halt not at his chair but at the bookcase. After a moment he reached behind a big row of volumes on the last shelf that, breast-high, stood on the base made of built-in drawers. He groped for a moment. When he straightened up he had between thumb and finger a key. He fitted it into the keyhole of the top drawer, turned it, drew on the knob and looked in. After a pause he remarked, “I expect it’s acting like a red rag to a bull. If I’m not rational then it’s only rational to act as though I weren’t!” He smiled wryly. “But I must get rid of those rage attacks. Perhaps hoarding this rubbish somehow inflames the back of my mind. If we are really chemical machines, well, chemical mixtures outside the body may affect it, just as much as those within. Dr. Pasteur certainly seems to have proved that invisible microbes can attack and kill us over very considerable distances. Perhaps our medical science will find that there’s something in the fairy-tale view of things. So I’d better follow that sort of logic, at least with myself.”

  Once he had decided to act he was again methodical and deft. What was to be destroyed was to be given swift and proper dispatch. He lifted out the old, soiled handkerchief, now discoloured and musty, and the little glass bottle become opaquely iridescent with the dried scum of the hair oil. The mixed odour of mould and stale scent made him wince. “Smells like a tomb,” he muttered, taking the noisome handful and depositing it by the fender. Recrossing the room, he locked the door. The weather now was held to be too mild for fires and so a fan of blue-fluted paper attempted to relieve the gaping blackness of the hearth. “Our social magic,” he sneered looking at it. “We put azure decorations in the place of winter warmth, to encourage summer skies and so gain heat from heaven.”

  He flicked out the fan and, picking up the refuse, threw it into the empty grate. The contents of his waste-paper basket and a packet of squills he added, remarking, “I can say that I had to burn a few confidential papers, matters of administrative discretion.” He added, to aid combustibility, some pieces of sealing-wax from his desk and the contents of a sticking-gum bottle. He lit the little pyre cautiously perhaps afraid that there might be the sudden outburst that had followed his first auto-da-fé.

  On the contrary, however, the ignition was slow: but once started was persistent. Hardly any flame showed—only masses of smoke poured out. The hearth was cold, there was little or no updraught. The opaque fumes, therefore, instead of going up the chimney, crawled down out over the hearth toward the fender and hearth-rug. One heavy skein slowly rose toward the ceiling. A whiff of it touched his face. It felt like a greasy feather smeared across the nostrils and the smell and taste were nauseous. It was the smell of carrion being slowly charred. He raised himself, for he had been half crouched watching his experiment. On the table by his desk stood a carafe of water. He snatched it and poured it over the smouldering heap. There was a hiss and steam mixing with the smoke began to fill the room. Once again he was driven to the window. As he opened it, the fumes poured up past him, into the still, clear air. As before, he noticed the calm outside—a quiet evening sky and, on its lapis background, like a cameo, a moon that might be taken for a mask held before the face of an invisible watcher.

  He turned back to the room—his seemly study as squalid as a pot-house. The smoke, however, continued to pour out past him: the reading lamp on his desk shone with its tranquilizing green glow. He went over to the hearth and taking the poker rummaged in the charred paper. The fire had done its work better than he had thought. The handkerchief was gone and what paper as was left untouched showed clearly it was merely routine correspondence. He changed weapons, taking the tongs. With these he recovered the small bottle, black but unbroken. After cooling it a moment by the fender he bent down and took it in his hand, went over to the window again and then, bending sideways, he flung it out with all his strength. The curve of its fall carried it till it bounded and rolled on the Cathedral lawn.

  “The Close gardener will put it in his basket tomorrow morning,” he remarked. Then, half-way turned from the window, he stopped. A large slinking cat had come out of the shadow of the low Close wall and was approaching the bottle. He could just see the faint gleam of it lying on the grass. When the beast reached the object it sniffed at it for a moment, then turned and looked up at the house. Archdeacon Throcton was sure of that, because the light in the room behind him caught the animal’s eyes and made them gleam bright green. Somehow the creature seemed considerably bigger than Tissaphernes or any of his tribe. But, of course, dusk always makes objects larger when we add to their actual bulk their shadow. He was just waiting to see whether, when it made off—on discovering the inedibility of the bottle—he would be able to observe it better, when he was startled by a knock on the door behind him.

  He wheeled round, “Who’s there!”

  “Oh, Sir,”
piped a mahogany-muted voice, “oh, Sir, you’re there. I thought, Sir, you just mightn’t be and it might be your fire was smoking bad—p’raps a coal’d jumped and caught the carpet?”

  “Everything is all right!” he boomed a dismissal.

  “Certainly, Sir, sorry to disturb you … only thought.…” The voice died away carrying its thought beyond earshot.

  Archdeacon Throcton listened, however, carefully, till far away he heard a dull but specific bump. That was given by the spring-hinged baize door that, like the veil in the Jewish Temple, kept the profane from the reverend side of the house. Cautiously even then, he unlocked the door and let a draught blow through, the room. Fortunately the wind was now from the back of the house. Yet after ten minutes the room still had not lost its unpleasant smell while it had been stripped of its pleasant warmth. Leaving the door open he went down to visit his sister. On her lap dozed Tissaphernes.

  “Not much use for mice,” he remarked taking a chair. “Has he been drowsing like that for long?”

  “Well, as his working ‘day’ is polar to ours, it is only beginning. He’s taking his last nap before going on watch.”

  Gradually their conversation became easy, almost unguarded, and as earlier she felt her feeling-tone of hopefulness spread over her mind—the quiet, though long-postponed day-dreams that someday they would be intimate, with full confidence in each other. But again, as low clouds skirt the far horizon shown by a clear evening, she felt as though, from a greater distance (while she watched the spread of hope) there rose a vaster, vaguer misgiving. Why should she be so queerly pessimistic, always trying to find justifying fears to explain surely not too irrational hopes? She knew that her nature was neither cowardly nor gloomy. Was it wrong to hope that though she had had great blessings things might turn out a little better, especially as the improvement would be for the sake of one who she knew was not happy? Why must she suspect that he was showing and indeed feeling such pleasure in her company because … because, well, not because of any enjoyable element in that, but because he who so often had shown he preferred his own company to any others’, now did not, now disliked, feared even, being alone? She felt an additional overtone of uneasiness that she should be entertaining such thoughts—entertainment, what an unhappy word for this involuntary harbourage, almost invasion—while keeping up the appearance of being at ease, in the complete calm that this room and this company seemed outwardly to guarantee. Surely, she reflected, as she looked round and listened to the purr of cat and kettle, the sound seeming the very echo of the visible peace, surely it was absurd to suspect her brother of uneasiness, still more of nervousness. Even had he been a nervous type, this place, these sounds would soon allay such a state of tension. Her mind then began to wonder whether he suspected her divided attention, next felt he must. And then a further flash of uneasiness shot into her mind as she reflected that surely, if he did not, his mind must be obsessed with some secret concern or be suspiciously determined not to disturb the appearance of peace.

  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 mood 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.
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br />   “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-known 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.