The Black Fox

by H. F. Heard

  Whether there might have been still another reason did not occur to either of the speakers. That was not surprising, for the disappointed man certainly did not communicate it—even to his closest relation. He asked no sympathy from his sister.… Partly because it seemed to offer one of those rare opportunities when she might dispense herself from the self-denying ordinance which was more her defence in public than her comfort at home, partly because she not unnaturally felt some clan resentment (Mrs. Simpkins would now in Cathedral society take precedence), Miss Throcton told her brother, “It was a shame!”

  “Put not your trust in princes, nor in any child of man.”

  His reply from one of the more worn liturgical antiphons did strike her as being sufficiently out of character to send her back into her silence. One of the few religious confidences which he ever reposed in her had concerned what he called the gross overuse of the Psalter. “One hundred and fifty psalms of very mixed morality and many of minor, yes even minimal poetry—why even the few which are masterpieces could not sustain the incessant, careless traffic of our tongues! Bad and good, savage dance of revengeful triumph, lashing vituperation, paean, lyric, threnody—they have been ‘cast out and trodden under foot’ until, truly ‘there is no savour in them.’ Why cannot we use some of the incomparable—I say it advisedly—poems of Rumi and Furdusi? Why Miriam and Jael when we could have Rabbia?” She had spoiled that promising philippic against the inadequacy of the Western liturgy by remarking that neither the outbursts of Moses’ sister, nor the praise of Heber’s wife because she broke the sacred law of primitive hospitality, were part of the Psalter. He had gazed at her as Balaam had regarded his ass. Miss Throcton was far from “dumb” but her brother was almost as far from knowing it. Concentration on books requisite to inform the mind up to the standards of high scholarship often leaves the finished scholar signally ignorant of minds whose information and insight are not bookish.

  The sister, remembering more clearly than the brother this former event, did not recall it to him. But for her own use noted the anomaly—the wise woman’s rule canonized in the text “She hid all these things in her heart”—not repressing them, nor assuming as yet she could understand them, but awaiting. She did not even repeat her protest of loyalty.

  When left alone her brother, however, sought his usual relief of self-whispering. He was taking up and out a strain of thought that had evidently been flowing for some time.

  “Fantasy is a relief. The fairy-tale has its place. The wise man is surely he who knowing that all ultimate truth is myth or only to be stated so, orders his mind by distracting it from the hard fact of defeat by turning it deliberately to wishful fantasy. So we by-pass our passions.”

  He had actually turned to the bookcase to take out again the volume of Ibn Barnuna, when the sound of the Evensong Cathedral bell interrupted him.

  “They shan’t think of me as an Achilles sulking in his tent.” He left his study and went toward the Cathedral pleased with his power to disguise his real feelings. Often, however, when we decide to brave things out for fear successful rivals should think us cowards, we find they test us more severely than we had assumed we should be tried. When he entered to robe in the inner clerical vestry Canon Simpkins was already there. Of course he should have recalled that Simpkins’ quarterly term as Canon-in-Residence began this week. His becoming Archdeacon would not affect that?

  His unspoken question was answered by his successful rival—always a little unsettling even with a neutral acquaintance. The suspicion that another has looked into the speaker’s mind is never pleasant. The whole thing was made worse by a mock friendliness. No doubt Simpkins was feeling three things: Guilty, sure that his guilt was unknown to his victim, and, so, to the dislike we have for those we have wronged, was added contempt. Certainly his opening would have been unhappy even if his second feeling had been sound:

  “Well, well, deserting the Arabians to join us of the narrower path.” Then having shown his desire to snub, he added, “The Bishop thinks the installation should take place on the eve of All Saints so I shall remain as plain Canon Resident till then. After that my duties being wider may limit the time I can spare for this intramural routine.”

  Had Canon Throcton not had interior knowledge of the other’s duplicity no doubt he would have been startled at least into irritability. A scratch may sting intolerably: a deep cut not even be felt for the first few minutes. But now he was in the position—provided he showed no sign—of being superior to the man who was able and quite willing to show contempt for him. The other was behaving with cockscomb vanity, proud of an office because he thought his defeated rival thought that he, the winner, had won the promotion through obvious superiority.

  To the man with interior knowledge there was offered in consequence the more dangerously satisfying rôle. He might now feel, in return for the other’s raillery, a contempt so deep that it could afford to be silent. The defeated could actually relish the feeling of being so alien to this fool—clumsy even in his deceitfulness—that even if it were possible and wise he would not stoop to expose him. For exposed he might be driven to the grace of shame. The bitter delight rose from the thought of, year by year, being able to watch this ape in his hypocritical exhibition of piety and all the while naked to his foe. Without, of course, being aware of his condition, Canon Throcton was beginning to feel that cold hate which is of all passions the most soothing, that sedative which offers its opiate as the one escape from a condition of frustrated insult, which otherwise renders the proud man in danger of madness—the ultimate disgrace in his own eyes—nervous breakdown. The relief given by such hate is so great that recovery from the addiction to it is rare; when a high fever suddenly drops, though the patient is going to die, he feels better, and so with a severe haemorrhage, there is a sense of refreshing rest.

  Throcton felt suddenly and surprisingly calm as he turned to take his surplice. When he had pulled it over his head and arranged its folds he saw that Simpkins, who already had donned his, was now standing before a small glass rebrushing his hair which was thick, wavy, black and worn rather long. His attention was evidently wholly engaged by this and the watcher found his own unanalysed peace of mind was growing as he looked on at the grooming. He was faintly aware that he had never felt anything quite like this, some subverse of the joy that is felt by the scholar at a singular felicity of phrase. He caught a hardly focused glimpse of himself, year after year collecting ever-accumulating evidence of this creature’s copious invariable disgustingness. Why think of trying to get some post at one of the big universities, the great laboratories of understanding, when here, in this quiet nook, the true field-naturalist of that odd insect, man, could find species so fascinatingly repulsive. He had always felt his fellow clergy to be invariably dull—now he had found a colleague who might be worth the most devoted attention. The more he permitted this stream of unreflected thought to flow deep down, the more the vague impression quieted him. He saw, with something like tranquil relief, that he need never—indeed must never—do anything about it. That would spoil all. The attempt to push the creature into some further absurd ineptitude might rouse it from its instinctive trance of grotesque exhibitionism. His rôle was that of the fully appreciative scientist, too content with his superiority even to laugh. Further at the penumbra of his thought was the realization that this new pleasure was to be essentially personal. He might—if he kept his secret really to himself, letting no one suspect it—go even further; rise to a higher point of contemptuous detachment than that of the lonely naturalist who has chosen as his study dung-beetles. He might become the master of this object as no naturalist can control the species he studies. He might, he felt sure with an unanalysed certainty, come, if he was patient, to control this creature’s destiny as an hypnotist controls the after-behaviour of his trance-patient.

  Throcton did not feel that he was thinking these thoughts, putting them together. Rather they flowed out quietly as from some dark source, as ripple
s on a pool at dusk spread out, welling up from a palely lit centre and then spreading till lost in the sedge limits of its shore. Though quiet these thoughts must, however, have been moving fast. The thinker felt that he had surveyed years but he saw with his eyes that the hairbrush had only been wielded for a few deft strokes and was now put down smartly. Hardly troubling to face his listener, Canon Simpkins remarked over his shoulder, “I must see that the choir is ready,” and disappeared into the outer vestry.

  The clock showed two fifty-seven. Canon Throcton walked slowly down to the end of the narrow room alongside of which were the wardrobes, at the end of which was a small table with a carafe and two glasses on an electroplated dish. Above that was a small cupboard and on its door hung the mirror. Canon Throcton, however, did not approach it to inspect his face, nor, had he done so in his present mood, would he have noticed a change in it. He swung open the door. On the shelf inside lay the hairbrush with its attendant comb. He took the brush out. Its dark stiff bristles were fringed and festooned with hairs as dark, but curly like suckers from a hedge too long unpruned. He turned the brush in his hand. “Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa”—the worn line was not apt, but the falling leaf theme evidently pleased him. Then he raised the brush nearer his face and wincing smiled—the smell of Macassar oil was as coarse as the hairs. He put the thing away, wiped his hands on a small towel and going out into the main vestry joined his colleague who was already presiding over the choir and the vergers drawn up to process. He and Simpkins walked together, dividing when they reached the stalls, each entering his own on opposite sides.

  The Anglican Evensong—“To be said daily throughout the year”—centuries of use has smoothed from a stately decorum, in which a style of perfect urbanity had from the beginning made vivid conviction somewhat unlikely, to a routine that now rendered fully conscious attention improbable. Certainly, to a mind as profoundly concerned as Canon Throcton’s had now become, the counter-appeal of the service was insignificant. Indeed not till they all sat down to listen to the First Lesson was he aware of any words. The Lessons change (and so offer occasions for mis-readings) more than any other part of this strictly confined liturgy: the Old Testament is at its strongest—and indeed almost unsurpassed in its strength—when it deals with dramatic narrative. The folk-story being retailed that afternoon—as an illustration of the epoch of Law as contrasted with that of Grace—was the curious and brutal tale of the Hebrew Hercules—a tale of magic and violence, lust and trickery, truly as suited for melodrama and opera as it is incongruous with ritual and worship. Liturgy can, however, render the human ear and mind wholly impervious to the most obvious and shocking sense. And no doubt Canon Throcton with many years of inurement and an immediate and rapidly growing obsession, would have caught nothing of the story had not, in one verse, the sing-song voice of the lector informed the quietly wool-gathering congregation, “If my head be shaven then my strength will go from me.” Hardly knowing why he did so, Canon Throcton glanced over to the opposite stall, only to find that its occupant was glancing away, glancing away with that hurried appearance of unconcern which tells us how near we had been to surprising their inspection of us.

  3

  A Cathedral close is in itself no protection from the atmospheric effects of autumn—quite the contrary. The climate on its part, adjusting the balance after the intense early August heat, had become dank, and the small gothic-girt world of the four canonical residences, the Deanery and the Palace, illustrated the Bishop’s quotation about the whole site being a sink. Spring might waken the inhabitants to a certain lively asperity and expectations of summering in the Alps; autumn could only sink them in reminiscence at best, recrimination at worst and rheumatism as a constant middle and provocative term. Canon Throeton’s short-cut hair was greying and in the darkening mornings as he shaved he saw a stubble bleaching toward hoar-frost whiteness reaped from his chin. When shaving—especially with that weapon which in his time was de rigeur—a Krupp hollow-ground razor—the skill of hand and steadiness of outward attention, let free, he had often noticed, a clear thaw of reverie. The deepest emotional layer would rise at that time and almost, one could imagine, would stand, like the uncanny “Red Cap Sly” of the sinister Ring Stone Ballad, at one’s shoulder and almost in the corner of one’s vision. Of course one could not look it straight in the eye, and so make it vanish. For to do that he would have to take his eye off the sweeping stroke of the flat-laid blade and that would be penalized by a neat but free bleeding line. “Satire should, like a polished razor keen, Wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt or seen.” He could not resist ever so slightly yielding to the habit to mouth the line and, sure enough, a moment after a fine line of crimson showed where the razor’s last stroke had swept away the white foam and the almost as white stubble. The faint sting of the fine wound a moment after confirmed his eye. Vexation spread like a small haemorrhage over his mood. It might take a week to heal and for a day or two he’d have to wear a silly little dab of cotton-wool on it. “I care for my appearance,” he muttered to himself as he dabbed the spot very uninclined to be staunched, “as though I were that greasy, ignorant crooked fop.…”

  He checked himself and swivelled his eye round the mirror’s field. It was physically safe now to do that and indeed almost a mental necessity, so external had seemed the malignancy of the hatred. Simpkins was a fool, yes and a knave too. But one’s privilege and pleasure was not to rage at such a creature—his role was to watch the jackanapes while it was blindly unaware that it was eyed and known by the one person it would be most anxious should never know. Really it was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter all over again. Then reflecting, as he went on dabbing, that that story hardly showed the wronged man, who took his revenge by being an onlooker, in a pleasant light, Canon Throcton shifted quickly to self-pity. He was getting old—the quick scarring and slow healing of his skin proved that. And he had nothing to look forward to, because his rightful advance had been barred by a mean, greasy little rat.… Again he was so shaken by the overboiling of his rage that he could hardly believe that the scalding jet of it was not striking him from an external source. “I mustn’t live so much in reverie,” he counselled himself as he adjusted a final patch of cotton. “I’m a lonely man,” self-commiseration again turning his major anger into a minor key. “Well, all the more need for objectivity,” he summed up.

  The Calendar caught his eye, as he turned round to finish his dressing. It hung on the wall to mark the terms in which he was specifically “in Residence” and so responsible for presiding over the Cathedral duodiurnal services and any other days—such as preaching dates—which were “of obligation.” He had had none of the latter lately: the former would not start till the new year. Since the last unhappy attempt not to be accused of “sulking in his tent” he had not felt equal to facing Simpkins’ smug superciliousness, however much he had thought he was certain of his own superiority. “I might,” he sanctioned his withdrawal, “be startled into telling him the truth.” As both his judgment as an obvious gentleman and his passion as a repressed hater confirmed this advice it was naturally taken. So the days had gone as they do: slowly each to each because of their monotony, but, for the same reason, when looked back upon with uncanny speed.

  He gazed at the Calendar, that oblong of numbers headed by the seven pagan names, and then realized where temporally he was. The Installation would be at Evensong today. As he settled down to breakfast, his sister, breaking the silence with the same words, showed that she too felt that further avoidance was impossible. She was relieved, if the relief had in it a cast of surprise, when he replied. Though a quotation it was both apt and objective—indeed almost humorous.

  “‘And the days of mourning being accomplished then shall the mourner anoint and tyre himself and go forth again among men.’ You see I have complied to the date and the letter,” and he pointed to his cotton-dabbed cheek, adding, “The usual accompanying smile is pretermitted in the hope
of discouraging further cutaneous haemorrhage.” Miss Throcton felt the surface relief spread at the obvious gaiety, while being aware of an almost disquieting doubt as to its cause. There was something in her brother’s tone of voice that did seem to say that not smiling was not at all difficult.

  Throughout the service, however, Canon Throcton felt a certain gladness due to a feeling that was odd but curiously pleasant—he felt quietly numb. True enough the dark end of the cold last day of the wettest month of the year was chilling enough in all conscience in the vast dank gloom of the huge weatherworn archaeological fossil in which these few survivors kept on their minimal service. But the numb that the Canon felt was not physical though it had about it the relief with which we feel a nerve anaesthetized by an injection. To say that he didn’t seem to be wholly present would itself have been only half the odd truth. He felt himself, he realized, present in space, in the Cathedral. It was about Time that he found he had doubts, coldly pleasant ones—the date, that seemed quite irrelevant. Yet he did not seem to be present in any other alternative date. Time itself did not seem properly important. The ordinary unquestioned importance and supremacy of the present—and Canon Throcton was proud of his punctuality—was somehow reduced to a commonalty with past and future.

  In fact, he had found in the dusk of the vestry, prior to the service, that he could amuse himself, by perceiving a moment or two before it became actual, what was about to happen. He felt as if the Bishop had always and would always be saying, “Just like a small family …” Indeed before the sentence rolled out in its slow boom he had completed it in his own mind, “… met together for a birthday party of their youngest,” and the throat episcopal followed the prescient dictate of his foreseeing mind. So he was equally prepared for Simpkins’ smirk and small spatter of sub-sarcasms. Even the happy sally that his cotton-wool whisker was a budding if premature tribute to St. Nicholas did not stir the slightest resentment, for he was already waiting to hear the moderately nasal snigger continue, “Of course you have been away from our dull routine, lost amid the Arabian alembics and astrolabes, studying another calendar and alien feasts.” He even took the conclusion of the sentence out of his satirist’s lips by replying, “So you would repeat that as you are now to be out and about our Father-in-God’s wider business, I should now aid properly in the domestic duties.”