The Black Fox

by H. F. Heard

  She stood looking out at the great swamping Cathedral lawn. She had rung for tea and to tell the servants to light a fire, the gas chandelier, and also to bring a couple of lamps. She had caught sight of her brother under a big umbrella, making his way from the north porch as Evensong was ended. She noticed that the pallid gleam of the water running on the flat stretched dome of the umbrella, the tassels of rain that swept down from its edges as he strode through the downpour—all made his figure a confusion of greys and vague blacks.

  The full, long coat which he was wearing over his clerical frock-coat and “apron” flapped, too, around his heels as he hurried across. The lining, evidently, must have caught in his foot sometime, perhaps now, as he was almost trotting. She must look to it as soon as he came in; it might trip him. But, as he turned across the small Cathedral lane, to gain the shelter of the house, she saw that the black moving object at his heels, though so close to him as to seem part of his coat or shadow, had a life of its own and a way of its own—every now and then, with a kind of playfulness, it would frisk up. Once or twice she thought that, as a puppy will, it almost had his hand in its mouth or at least could give him a lick. Still, as he entered the room, she was able to say to his not unexpected remark, “This is the Deluge!”

  “We are fortunate in having an Ark.” And a queer, perhaps desperate sense of humor made her go on to herself, “And so must not refuse hospitality to the animals.”

  Surely it was better to joke as long as humour, that strange anaesthetic vapour, floated up through the mind. And surely there was some animal in the room. The lamps had been brought in, the chandelier spread its small bright fans of hissing gas, the fire had taken and was as radiant. Whatever had followed her brother into the room had no liking for the light. But it had not left. Through the hiss of the rain outside she could hear something panting close at hand; and, through the lapping of the flames, the sound as a creature licking.

  The drowning of the daylight and the disappearance of the dry earth under a quicksilver-like deposit of water had been similarly watched from the one other edifice in the Close that was higher in social status, though still closer to sea level, than the Deanery.

  “One feels some flavour of Lot’s relief as he entered Zoar and then was safely able to glance back at the mire-pit engulfment of his former home,” the Bishop remarked to his Chaplain as, having won to the refuge of his Palace, after a shower-bath scuttle from the Cathedral, he now went to the window.

  “This would have extinguished the Cities of the Plain!”

  Young Halliwell, like a good alter-ego, took what he judged to be his master’s mood.

  “I suppose it’s better to be drowned than burnt,” the Bishop continued. Then the meteorological mood damping his spirits, he added, “Dante enlarged the traditional high-temperature hell with the contrast of a sub-zero inferno. But eschatological invention has yet to give us a submerged satanic realm wherein the sinner will always be in utmost agony of suffocation and always sinking helplessly into a darker depth, a more awful and stygian abyss, crushed in upon and tormentingly constricted by ever more frightful pressures.”

  “Sir!” Young Halliwell smilingly shuddered at the strange little verbal exercise in redemptorist rhetoric. “May I ask, could you be an incarnation of that poetical but minatory preacher, the late Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr. John Donne? I had not suspected from your gentle sway of the pastoral staff, a very sceptre of peace in your hand, that you could turn and let fly such a neat bolt of apocalyptic thunder!”

  The Bishop took the cheering amiably and patted his lieutenant on the shoulder, “That style, my son, won’t come back as long as we are prosperous. Yet, maybe, we are more neurotic than were godly folk in my father’s time. They took their brimstone with very little treacle, kept it down and thrived on it—when our light digestions would never stomach such hot salve.”

  “But I often wonder”—he sighed, looking with unfocused eyes at the sight-dazing rain-curtains—“I often wonder whether we have been wholly right in going over so heartily, uncritically to progress, gradualism and inevitable amelioration. The weather and our lives are both of them more cataclysmic than we like to allow. Yes, I sometimes wonder whether the pathetic fallacy itself may not be less a fallacy than we allow and less pathetic than grim. These sudden meteorological breakdowns of customary balance and restraint, no one seems able to foresee them but only to be wise after the event and so we tend to overlook them or quickly forget them. And in the process of our lives—the same spastic factor. We had a lengthy summer of longevities, almost a drought of deaths. And now in the last few months, a veritable cloud-burst of casualties, carrying away not only those overdue, but invading the levels where life-expectation seemed still secure. Perhaps it has not stopped even now.”

  He looked up at the sky that seemed more black and massive than the earth, greyly shimmering in semi-inundation.

  “Perhaps this time it won’t stop and a second Deluge engulf this island. We here would certainly be first to be submerged.” The Cathedral clock chimed. “Why the very bells sound water-borne or water-logged. A charming fancy, that huge man-made rockery become the haunt of fishes; the vast tendril of the Kraken tolling at the bells and no doubt”—he could not resist a small private joke at his ritualist trouble-maker’s expense—“no doubt the sepia of some censer-like swinging octopus rising as an obfuscating incense to the seaweed shrouded roof.”

  “But time is time.” He pulled himself with a shrug into business trim. “Till we go under, the captain must stay on the bridge. Come, our desk calls. Kindle our modern answer to darkness, the gas, sulphurous, explosive, burning and asphyxiating, with which Plutonic vapour—the stifling breath of Cerberus himself—we keep at bay his daylight-fearing presence.

  “By the way,” he went on, his vague mood of malaise relieved by the burst of half-humorous rhetoric, “the Dean does seem quite all right now?”

  “Yes,” Halliwell answered. “Yes. You recall I wrote you that note while you were away, just saying that he was leaving for a conference for a week in Cambridge. I thought I wouldn’t bother your bigger business with misgivings but wait and see if the change would work.”

  “You did find him in poor shape?”

  “You see I didn’t find him, I failed to see him. As I was going across to the Deanery I ran into Miss Throcton seated in the Close. I know every doctor would say, Never diagnose without seeing the patient, so I had no right to an opinion. Miss Throcton clearly showed me that she felt I should not call.…” He paused and then went on, “But she spoke to me frankly. She made no concealment of the fact that he was under some severe strain, but not one that medicine or, or clerical assistance, could mitigate. Change, acting with a fine constitution, was her hope. It seems to have been sufficiently well grounded.…” Again he paused.

  “He is a strange man”—the Bishop was endorsing the matter and filing it in his mind with a couple of phrases—“and she is a fine woman. Both of them go deeper than their surface appearances would suggest.”

  He was sorting papers for the next point on their agenda. “She up and he down. And further, I somehow can’t get out of my mind that there’s some element in this sequence of undulant exhaustions that has escaped diagnosis.”

  The last comment turned almost into a question. Indeed the Bishop, his capable hands still dealing papers as a practised whist-player deals cards, glanced up at his Chaplain standing attentive at his shoulder. The Chaplain looked down into the wide wary eyes that, he knew, saw far more questions than that firmly urbane mouth would ever verbalize.

  “No,” the younger counselled his own learning spirit. “No. When a man has become a really capable administrator, he plays the game that well because he never looks beyond the board.”

  The Bishop’s fingers, one trade-marked by the episcopal ring, a purple boss like a big nodulated varicose vein, selected a half-sheet and paused. A smile came into his voice.

  “You flattered me as to my extemporary
if archaic rhetoric. What do you think of this as an epigram on Throcton?

  ‘Those men of scholarship who only care

  For the grey polish of a suave despair.

  The Glow of Faith, they call Consumption’s Flush,

  And, if caught Cheerful, would be put to Blush.’”

  “Who wrote that, Sir?”

  “Oh, a little practice piece of my own. I find it more amusing sometimes to write my own quotations than to look up and learn better ones! Mine certainly are not poetry but I can make them fit precisely as illustrations of what I’m saying!”

  “Sir, it has the real eighteenth century style, if a contrary sentiment. But.…” The two couplets had caught back Halliwell’s thought to the problem he had decided a moment before not to pursue. “But do you think the new Dean has ever felt even a twinge of despair?”

  “I don’t know. I know I never have. So I suspect I cannot judge. I’m no specialist in souls, scarcely to be graded as a physician. I’m an arranger of benefices.”

  Halliwell took the instruction. The Bishop, he surmised, saw more than he could help and now was old enough not to discuss what he couldn’t aid. He therefore kept himself busy tidying up effects rather than striving to deal with and deflect their causes.

  The Chaplain expressed the thought in administrative language,

  “I see you have just uncovered, Sir, the correspondence about the locum tenens’ difficulty at Parva Salcote—again this repeated problem of whether to wait resignedly for a recovery or move to recover freedom of choice by a resignation, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe you’re going to turn into a fashionable, epigrammatic preacher of a rich, proprietary chapel.”

  The Bishop smiled, his feeling-tone pleasantly altered by the slight, unexpected play of words made by his assistant. His mind turned to a practical issue.

  “Yes. I think, as you put the issue squarely, we had better ourselves take action and call for a resignation.”

  He smiled, and a moment after was dictating a letter, kind, discreet, firm, and because it had to get a sick man out of a cure of souls he could no longer serve and yet not hurt the patient’s feelings—a nice and not uninteresting task—the construction of the instrument cleared comfortably all other vaguer thoughts out of the dictating diocesan mind.

  The rain lasted three days. The little river, on which the tiny city stood, flooded, and the Close became not a sink but a brimming reservoir. It was impossible to keep a house, even such a defended one as the Deanery, moderately clean. Muddy footprints came in everywhere. Miss Throcton sent for her defending staff so often that, though well drilled, they became defensive and indeed began to murmur. Nor did Cook’s counsel, that the poor lady was none too well, though it was meant to be soothing counsel, succeed in rousing their sympathy.

  “There’s no cat now,” they protested. “So why should she send for us today—and not the first time—to wipe up paw-marks! Why can’t she tell the Master not to trail his dirty umbrella and that torn hem of his long coat after him when he comes in? Just making work, it is these days, when sense would know that nothing could be kept clean. She shouldn’t do it! And we willing as willing for anything that’s in our duty, and with right weather and not a judgment like this and all that! She shouldn’t do it!”

  Miss Throcton knew that as well as they. But it was one of the retreat points in the desperate rear-action she was fighting. She could not resist seeing whether they could see. It was so painfully, foully, filthily—she used the strong words with care so as to be sure she was not shirking or stinting her rational, clearly defined estimate—so grossly plain to her, those footsteps. Big game hunters called them “spoor” didn’t they? And in the slimy pounce of mud were, she felt sure, black hairs, and round the hair bases clots of flaked skin.

  She had done her share of that sick nursing that falls to every kindly and efficient woman. She wasn’t a molly-coddle that went white and into the vapours at blood or vomit. But she felt a nausea that almost gave her vertigo when, forcing herself to bend down and certify these clots of mud that almost ran into the broad stain of her brother’s shoes, she found she could not doubt the evidence of her eyes.

  She did not dare touch; or even be found—like a witch peering for omens. Nor could she ask anyone else. Didn’t they see, what she saw, in the mud stains?

  She remembered her old Scotch nurse seeing the oddest things in the leaves at the bottom of her tea-cup. No one else could see them, but time and again the queer old Highland body did seem, in this homely, ridiculous way, to get some hint of on-coming events—generally uncanny.

  The only possible way was to provoke the maids to question. They were certainly provoked but only to question her considerateness of them. Even telling them to use carefully a mop with disinfectant, and to wash it in boiling water after, aroused no curiosity. But only conviction that she had become cantankerous and was taking out her pains at their expense.

  The vain hope that one of them would turn to her and ask Why? Why? was behind her last attempt at reprimand. Yes, it was the only way left open to bring along with her a contingent of humanity, the sane, kindly, grumbling-at-trifles, mercifully blind humanity whom she was leaving; to urge them a little farther along with her on the dark way she must now go.

  Naturally she left till the last her brother.

  Then one evening—it was dark, still, foggy, the air super-saturated—he had come in and remarked, “All Saints tomorrow—that is a feast in which all can join, Arabians and Christians. For it is the feast of those who have gone beyond controversy.”

  She waited, and then asked, “Do you recall the last Dean’s installation? I mean as Archdeacon? It was on All Saints, I remember.”

  He looked at her oddly and then with a smile in which question overlaid irritation, “Well, are you raising that because tonight it is All-hallows Eve?”

  She could see the slight twist of sarcasm that spoiled the smile at the corners of his mouth and the finer narrowed lines round the eye that revealed a deeper uneasiness. And, with the same clearness, she could see the small, dark, sorely-diseased animal—that no longer seemed to fear the light so much, so long as it might keep close in his shadow. It lay close by his respectably gaitered foot and at this moment as she watched it, it lifted its bloodshot eyes to watch him, then settled down slowly to lick its running ulcers.

  He passed one fine scholarly hand over another. Then smoothed from his face the slight pucker of fretfulness and, feeling that he had shown an irrational irritation, added, “The Feast is archaeologically very interesting—far more ancient, of course, than the Christian Church.” But, to himself he reflected, “Women need anniversaries. Their minds live—at least when they are mature—so much in the past. Religion is their necessity, and our profession. A professional’s attitude is confessedly better than the best amateur’s. Though amateur means lover, obviously the good sense of mankind has seen that understanding is superior to devotion.” Then, feeling that so much educative insight should not be denied where it was clearly needed, he completed his reverie aloud.

  “The Christian Church’s strength lay in its emotional appeal to slaves and barbarians. As soon as it would win the educated, it had to ally itself with Platonism. Further, it is now clear that we owe the incorporation of Aristotelianism into our theological thinking precisely because the Arabians, possessing themselves of ‘The Philosopher’ whom we had lost, compelled us in the eighteenth century to arm ourselves with the same intellectual equipment. No: Religion cannot live on emotionalism. Indeed is there anything so tedious, even disquieting—than the devotion of others! If calm it appears as perfunctory; if fervent, histrionic.”

  He was enjoying himself at two levels of consciousness. There was the almost self-conscious pleasure of practising periods. Since he had been Dean, his preaching schedule being increased, he had found to his surprise that he enjoyed seeing whether he could transpose his writer’s style into telling speech. Just below this level, that was using hi
s sister as a sounding-board, was concealed a secondary, less recognized, more satisfying feeling, that he was demonstrating the superiority of his intellectual Laodiceanism to her uninformed faith, the ascendancy of ability over character.

  He did notice that she did not, as he had expected, reply. She surely should have? When had he last failed, when he tried, to make her retort? He liked her to, for lately he had begun to be entertained by her defences. They showed that irrelevance, that lack of real insight that must be present in a mind unschooled in logic but which had its quaint humour and gave him further opening for his wit. The misgivings, however, were deep enough only to reach the surface as irritability.

  “And, remember, our emotional faith found, as an administrative fact, that the fire of love was far below the temperature required to make men’s wills and minds plastic. Resolution and intelligence were bent into orthodoxy not by a metaphorical but a very real flame.”

  With a pulpit gesture he pointed his hand at the blazing hearth, then let open palm and fingers fall, to show that the issue was settled and might be let drop. She might be silent now. There was no answer to that. It was a telling close. He felt, therefore, actually a twinge of surprised irritability when he heard his sister check an exclamation and then say, “Your fingers nearly touched the floor!”