The Black Fox

by H. F. Heard

  As she put her hand down onto the sheet again, the jackal, which had been out of sight, leapt onto the bed. It made the small gesture that dogs do, when, uncertain of their reception, they wish to make advances. It bowed down its head and made a diffident, caressing movement with its paw. The light was now good enough that she could see the paw’s nails. They were clear because the rotting flesh had left them bare almost to their roots. She put out her hand and stroked its head. She could feel it quite firmly under her touch, every detail, the moulting skin, the tubercular lumps of the sores and the skull underneath. It twisted round and licked her hand. Then it leapt from the bed.

  She never saw it again. She never saw anything very clearly after that. The eczema spreading like a flush rapidly attacked all the face and the eye-sockets and the lids became involved.

  At last her brother, through the callousness that seemed spread over all his emotions, appeared to realize that she was gravely ill—not merely tired and, maybe owing to lassitude, apt to give way to the sloth that attacks those with too few intellectual interests. Inevitably, however, his fear could only win expression as resentment. Visiting her as she lay in bed—she had sent down a message that she must keep her room—he remarked that he hoped she now realized the wisdom of his former disregarded advice. He also felt some reassuring satisfaction in informing her that, though she might object, he had already sent for Dr. Wilkes.

  “A prophet we know is disregarded in his own country, and so the advice of a brother who is only a scholar may be denied the attention granted an outsider.”

  Her failure to protest still did not add to his reassurance. Nor did Dr. Wilkes. Not that the physician was so poor a psychologist as to trust the Dean (whom he had already diagnosed far more than he had observed the sister) with his medical misgivings. All he said, when asked, was the truth.

  “There has been strain, and, as we know, in this climatic phase which we seem to be in, there appears to be what might be called an endemic tendency to pre-eczemic nerve-ending irritability. In this house, too, there might be a co-ordinate of some environmental influence together with an associational element of what might be called suggestive force.”

  Dr. Wilkes was not unpleased in his surface loquational mind with the flow of the sentence, guarded yet ample, truthful but noncommittal. In any case it served to cover over with an apparent self-assurance—which surely must be helpful to his patients (he used the plural term to himself)—a feeling almost of dismay that was rising in him.

  The Dean’s verdict, as he watched the Doctor go—“Pretentious polysyllabic verbiage to disguise ignorance”—might have had an even uneasier rider if he could have heard the Doctor’s self-unburdening of his own anxiety.

  “Coincidence can’t cover it. What a curse it is that we physicians can’t have real colleagues of the psyche, in the clergy. Then there would be some hope of our dealing with the mind-body problem.”

  Perhaps then it was no coincidence but an answer to his “left-handed” prayer that put the Bishop’s Chaplain in his homeward path. Nor did he have to verge on unprofessionality by opening the subject himself. The intellectual excuse to do what emotionally he desired, was given by Halliwell’s unguarded concern. It came, too, with Palatial authorization.

  “I’ve just come from the Bishop. I don’t want to trouble the Dean. You’ve just come from the Deanery. I do trust that Miss Throcton is not laid low. She has looked so very poorly of late. There has been so much ill health these last months. The Bishop is puzzled, concerned. It makes him anxious.”

  “So am I; so am I.” Dr. Wilkes felt quite safe in ranging his doubts alongside mitred misgivings. Besides, this boy looked frank, sincere, kindly, concerned. “You know Miss Throcton?” he asked. After all, often an observant acquaintance can give you insights that help diagnosis.

  The younger man hesitated. “Tell the truth, I have only had one personal conversation with her.” He paused. “But perhaps I should tell you, as at the time, I must own, it did make me uneasy and now I understand she is ill and under your care?”

  The Doctor nodded to the half-question. And a few moments later when Halliwell concluded his account of the session under the limes Dr. Wilkes again encouraged him, seconding him with, “You are right. Evidently the condition was in an initial, undifferentiated stage then. And, as I have had to note so often, once the strain was lifted, once her brother threw off what I would almost venture to call the vaccination reaction—a reaction which taking office in this Close would now seem to exact—her own repressed anxiety that he might fail, like his predecessor, takes toll of her. As in so many families she pays his forfeit. I know it sounds strange, but it is really only a legitimate extension of the basic idea of infection. One of my colleagues knew a surgeon in Manchester—a surgeon, mark you—called Braid, who used mesmerism, or as he rechristened it, hypnotism to produce sustained and deep anaesthesia. But the interesting point to me, to us, is that, I understand, this surgeon held he had proof that states of mental strain did often transfer themselves into physical diseases. If only we could be called in before the disturbed function has deranged the organ.”

  “Would then …?” Halliwell decided on the question, “Could then mental methods affect bodily condition?”

  “Of course, in a way.” The Doctor spoke with a slight touch of defensive superiority. “Even the most conservative of our profession would allow as much. The trouble is our old friend, l’idée fixe. Ideas are necessary but dangerous things. They tend to capture the mind that would use them. That’s the trouble with mesmerism as far as I can see. We medicos, engrossed with the body, incline to materialism; therefore when we are forced to consider the mind we tend to fall into magic. The mind, the spirit, is your province, really.…”

  Then finding himself for once with an intelligent cleric who was his junior he added, “And may I venture to add prophecy to my prescription? If the Church neglects the deep mind, then some materialistically-minded doctor will take over and start ‘ministering to minds diseased.’”

  To Dr. Wilkes’ surprise young Halliwell showed not a trace of counter-defensiveness to this challenge. On the contrary, he seemed eager to contribute to their conference.

  “I’m sure,” he said, “indeed it is quite clear from what you have told me, that it must have been some sort of hypnosis, as you call it, that my father witnessed and was so impressed by in Persia!”

  “In Persia?” Dr. Wilkes questioned. As do all defensive moods, his fear of being considered too credulous by the conservative had as its converse the apprehension that he might concede the credulous too much. Dr. Esdaile, he recalled, had been disqualified from practice about the same time as Dr. Elliotson, because of his employment of mesmerism, and Dr. Esdaile had picked up his questionable and censurable methods in the East. He had practised in Calcutta, hadn’t he?

  “I am afraid”—and the courtesy apprehension that stiffened his open good will into caution, though it used the word “fear” condescendingly, was really inspired by misgiving—“I am afraid that my outlook is limited by the Greeks and their clarity of thought. Our source master is Hippocrates, you know.”

  He smiled but young Halliwell was not so young as not to be able to recognize a rapidly closed door. The two parted. Two almost open minds had failed in their mutual invitation to explore each other’s findings. Miss Throcton was to have no help from any around her.

  17

  Dr. Wilkes had prescribed that the face should be bandaged. Warm boric acid dressings covering the eyelids would, he believed, give relief. The patient accepted them and certainly did not say they were unhelpful. The world came to her now through hearing. She waited, as someone caught in a cave that has collapsed waits in the dark, sometimes trying to construe the sounds without, sometimes wondering what must befall if help cannot get through. Sometimes her calm was that of complete shock. She remembered once in their earlier garden finding a fledgling on the lawn. She snatched it up in her hand, just as Tissaphernes had caugh
t sight of it. It was quite still, making no effort to get away from the hold of her fingers. You might have thought it indifferent or even content if you had not felt the frantic heartbeat and seen the feeble little gasping of its mouth.

  At other times she was let sink beyond this contact with the utter physical dismay. Then she listened to and construed sounds with the patient indifference with which a reporter takes down in extenso a speech the meaning of which is of little or no personal interest to him. She found she could judge the state of mind of her few visitors by their step, their tempo of movement. The two maids, yes they were concerned and sympathetic—she could judge that by their diffident tread. The Doctor, too, was increasingly cautious, tentative, yes, and sympathetic too in his more guarded way. Her brother was becoming increasingly nervous. He spoke to her little. The Doctor had anyhow advised that she should not speak. But as he paced up and down she could hear him say, perhaps to himself as much as to her, “Make an effort, it all depends on making an effort—a good constitution always can respond to the moral will to recovery.”

  She felt her face begin to hurt not merely dully but sharply. She recognized she was smiling. Oh, of course, her brother was repeating Dr. Dombey’s recipe for his wife, when her labour had been too much for her and though she had met his primary demand by giving him a son, in regard to herself she had failed to respond to his wise advice.

  He came in for a spell, morning and evening. One evening, she thought that he must have changed his small routine and after leaving with a murmured “Good night”—which certainly could not be expected to effect what it wished—had come back again. But after a moment she realized that it could not be he—he always walked up and down, quietly but with the incessant restlessness of an animal in too small a cage. Could it be the Doctor? He would ask after her condition, quietly to himself, she was not meant to answer, but he would stand by her bed and question. She could hear his mind, she found. And now she could not hear its doubts. The nurse he had sent in—she had asked that this attendant might stay outside the door, only coming in when summoned by the bedside bell.

  Someone, however, was there. It was only when she had become quite interested as to why her listening could not construe who was present that she suddenly remembered. Why had she forgotten? Of course that would happen. It was as natural, as inevitable as the going of the jackal. She kept her mind, after that in an even deeper quietness, deeper than that which she had found would let her hear the thoughts of the few people who alone attended on her now. After quite a little while she found she could hear clearly.

  “Daughter, I have served you as far as I might. I have not sent myself to you to say that. I have sent it, it can reach you, because you have sent strength to me, not I to you. I have only to confirm to you what already your spirit knows with sure hope. Tetelestai.”

  It was one of the few Greek words she knew. It had been used, she remembered, when she was a girl by a fine Greek scholar who was said to be one of the dangerously High Church mystics. He had preached on the Seven Last Words at a Good Friday service. She had been deeply moved. He had used that long word of finality with deep effect, saying that some had thought it might actually be the very word—the very Greek word—that was used at the moment when redemption became forever an accomplished fact. Now she could hear that word again, Tetelestai.

  “It is finished,” she said as quietly as someone who has completed a long and difficult piece of work, tells him who set it. Then, rousing herself from her tired content that was too complete to have either memory or expectation in it, she asked, “But have I turned it from him?”

  “It has no power now but what he may give it. That is all that any may do for another.”

  She realized that was the truth. She was too finished, too completed to wish for anything else. The content increased until it took up, as the sun takes water from a dark lake and leaves it empty, all the flux of memories and fears, all the flow of time. She felt completely present at last, for she did not know where or when or who she was. All she had to do was to stay still, to wait, to continue present always.

  Dean Throcton had knocked quietly at the door once, then waited. But the Bishop himself having come over at once in haste should not be kept waiting. He opened the door. Bishop Bendwell had brought with him a book of prayers. He had it always on his table. Meditation did not come easily to him—administrative problems would recur. He kept them more or less at bay with the double-ditch of good thoughts and holy requests, set and faced with the Elizabethan English which had now almost the patina of good Latin. He was, first and foremost, an administrator but knew that the concept of an Episcopus, the overseership of a Father-in-God, covers more than what the Church advisedly calls the ecclesiastical “temporalities,” and he had no fear of incompetence though he felt no particular inspiration when called on to death-beds. He had said not long before—as the intimacy between himself and his Chaplain grew—and said it with a modesty that had in it so much real humility that the saying carried conviction, “I know I am not high in the Church Invisible—perhaps Bishops seldom can be, if the first here are to be last there. But I am striving to be a faithful doorkeeper in the House of my God. And as I am kind to, like and indeed not only value but admire my butler’s competence in his station, so I dare to believe the Master of all masters, the infinite Overseer will feel and act toward me.” But neither was this sane, responsible man in any wise a sentimentalist. So he felt no need with this cold Dean of his to show emotion, still less any alarm, when looking at the bed his not unpractised eye saw that the sheet was perfectly still.

  He turned and, putting his hand on the other man’s shoulder, he remarked in the tone that one admirer of their county cricket team would say to another when a sound member of the eleven has just been bowled after netting a creditable number of runs:

  “We have all been proud of her and shall be. She will not be forgotten.” Whether the latter part of the sentence was kindly rhetoric or no, certainly the first part was more of an understatement than the Bishop could have known or, had he known, his taste for truth desired. It would have been highly improbable, however, if anyone could have made him grasp what in particular had been admirable in a life that seemed more quiet than most and maybe even more comfortable than quiet.

  When the Dean was left alone his expression was stronger, in the end. At first he seemed quiet. Then, evidently thinking that he ought to kneel down, the attitude, as attitudes often will, seemed to release a current of feeling. He felt his throat. It seemed as though it must split, as though a wedge were being forced into his larynx. He gasped.

  “Laetitia,” was all he could whisper.

  Then a spasm of grief twisted him like a cramp. The pain was so sudden and intense that part of him seemed to be split off, to wander off as though it were seeking down the ranges of his quiet past to find if it could pick out another stretch of emotion among the long lengths of easy enjoyment and hardly memorable routines, another span or band to match the present acuteness of feeling. He found it. Yes, there was another, but it wasn’t grief. He hadn’t had much grief, very little, really, in his life. But this other buried pain that was as sharp as this present cut? It was hatred. But when had he felt any real hatred?

  Slowly, like a person coming gradually to wakefulness in a strange room, after thinking he was in his own bedroom, he remembered. That one bright patch of feeling, bright as a very hot sunbeam, seemed to thaw the landscape of his memory. Fact after fact emerged from the white snow-cover of amnesia, and the ugly things which the blizzard of forgetfulness had made into one broad, unfactual sheet, came staring through. He forgot that he was with the dead. He forgot where he was or when he was. He had now been swept by the thaw-stream down to the spot from which he had escaped.

  How long this clear restored memory lasted he couldn’t say. For he was not recalling the past to himself in the present. The past had called him away from the present. As soon, then, as he became aware of where he was, his memory
sank under. To remember and at the same time live was still impossible. After a while his rigid position began to relax; he shifted and fidgeted a little, feeling stiff. He looked up and around him. He raised himself clumsily from his knees.

  “‘My words’—why they haven’t even flown up! ‘My thoughts remain below’? Where? Pure woolgathering, can’t even recall what I was thinking of, and here and now! Worrying over some worthless small matter of my own concern!”

  He stood close beside the bed. He raised the bandage that lay across the face. Death, as it so often does, had not only removed age and expression, it had taken away the physical damage. The skin had again become smooth with the congested blood gone from beneath it and had the texture of alabaster. As he continued to look at it, this face that he had known best in all his life and which now already was no longer the lifelong friend but the likeness of some unnamed woman, the cold quietness in it seemed to surround him. He felt something in his heart as cold, incapable of movement as the body on the bed. Moment after moment as he stood still looking down at the white figure his whole memory was sinking deeper under the renewed snow fall of forgetfulness. He noticed faintly that everything seemed as quiet as it was still. Though he heard now and then a distant sound from the outside world, it awoke no echo of meaning, no significance in his consciousness. Only once was his mind roused to question-point by his ear. Suddenly, from the direction of the garden below, came a small sharp, querulous bark.

  “We have no dog?” he questioned himself perfunctorily.

  He listened a moment more. The silence was not again challenged. He found a new handkerchief and spread it over the face. Then he went to the door. Outside the nurse was waiting.

  “I will see to everything,” she said moving past him into the room. He nodded and went downstairs.

  He slept well that night, only waking a few times and then not because of any restlessness of mind; it was a dog’s barking that each time roused him. And each time, as soon as it stopped its quarrelsome little protest, he fell to sleep again. In the morning, after writing the necessary notes to announce his bereavement and sending them out, he rang the bell for Cook to come to him. Cook, a glance made clear, had had a worse night; and indeed clearly eyed his composure and lack of any apparent exhaustion with the disapproving surprise with which those who belong to an earlier and more expressive social pattern view the apparently heartless stoicism of their employers. She had taken the admonitory precaution of coming to the interview equipped with a large, fresh, fully-unfurled handkerchief, held at half-mast across her bosom, in instant readiness for the moment when the tide of her feelings would swamp her controls and she would be, as she told the head-housemaid, when that comforter was patting her heaving shoulders, “awash with tears.”