The Black Fox

by H. F. Heard

  “Yes, I will tell Mrs. Binyon she must see that the door is always locked after dark—a tramp might have slipped in. From the back lane it is quite easy to approach unnoticed even during the day.”

  “I expect,” her brother resumed, “it was just a small case of mind-influence, as the benighted Arabians call it. They claim—and claim it with a persistence perhaps worthy of sounder support—that if a Sufi Sheik, one of their Mystics, a sort of abbot of a free moving flock of monks—if he tells one of this his flock to smell a rose and the object to which he points his disciple is in reality a dead dog the trained novice, even, will draw deep and appreciative breaths of the foul gas of decay, certain that not attar itself could be as fragrant. Contrariwise the disciple can be presented with a cloth dipped in attar itself but told that it is a cere cloth of a leper and reeking of corruption he cannot restrain his nausea—a pretty example of faith!”

  “How repulsive!”

  “But surely highly convenient! I hope next time I come too close a fox I shall be able, as our organist would phrase it, to modulate its ammonia into rose-water.” He chuckled. “Superstitions, if they work, we should be ready to reconsider. Then we are not dealing with a pharmacy filled with bottles empty of everything but high-sounding labels, but with drugs, perhaps of great potency. The trouble is that the labels have become mixed.”

  “I am not sure I follow you.”

  “I am not sure you should. No doubt after abstinence the essence of the tea and the tang of the wild have combined making my fancy take leaps which reason would say are impermissible.” He felt there was a certain quaintness in accusing himself of fantasy and approving her rationalism. It was a good note to close on. Any uneasiness that he had felt seemed to have evaporated in the good humour with himself that his mild joking gave. He rose, wished her good night, and leaving the room went along the wide-panelled gallery which led to his bedroom. Once or twice, as he walked with his candle, he did stop and sniff the air. Nothing came to him but the faint smell of the potpourri placed by his sister in a large Crown Derby bowl on the broad window ledge that ended the passage.

  Next morning his sister did not expect the almost-intimacy of the night before to have endured. Nor was she incorrect. But the retreat was not so far as she had prepared herself to face—there was nothing that could be called a reaction. The lightness, true enough, had gone, but when he spoke, after they had finished their formal greeting, the family prayers, the glance at the mail and the choice of food—all which procedures always were gone through before any general remarks were made—what he said was both confidential and cheering,

  “It would be most unhappy if, to this strange and possibly mistaken appointment, I should contribute the additional mistake of an ineffective and obvious disapproval. Even when there is a right to protest, it may, and I believe should, be waived, when, in order to lodge it, the protestor would have to seem to advance his own claim and urge an injured prestige. You would, then, oblige me if, even at a little inconvenience to yourself, and maybe some slight affront to your personal feelings, you would, as I purpose to do myself, attend regularly Evensong, at least every day until the new Archdeacon goes out on his visitation.”

  Miss Throcton agreed, again pleased in her intelligence but slightly disturbed intuitively. It was right: it was generous even, considering her brother. But considering him she was bound to own that it was out of character. She was aware that characters can change, and some with a sudden volte-face which may almost be called instantaneous. But that, surely, belonged to Methodists and other Nonconformists—people given to emotion and not, as her communion was rightly famed, to reason, good sense and good taste. She had never known of anyone “converted”—indeed the very phrase had about it something alien. Deeply religious herself she had, when their partnership was younger and she less learned in that “discreetness” of which their Bishop was so perfect an example, tried sometimes to question her brother on spiritual matters. Indeed she had once ventured to ask him what he would call his own religion—High, Broad or Low—the three types recognized in the Church of England. He had replied, “That wise old Banker-Poet Samuel Rogers, a true critic of good-taste, once said when asked that question, ‘What is my religion?’ ‘The religion of every sensible man.’ And, when questioned further as to what that might be, he concluded the matter with, ‘That is what every sensible man keeps to himself.’” Well, that was “mate” in their quiet game of conversation and like a cornered chess-player, she had “resigned.”

  Evensong in late autumn seldom mustered a quota of the Cathedral garrison. Several evenings (except for the “skeleton crew” of vergers, choristers, organist and minor canon) the new Archdeacon, his unsuccessful “runner-up” and Miss Throcton composed the entire congregation. Even the new Archdeacon’s wife, who might have been expected to attend if only to manifest her elevation, was absent, pleading the nineteenth century’s more precisionist title for the vapours—a palpitation.

  This small team of regulars, however, was bonded strangely. It had not assembled more than a couple of times before the two men became aware that they were covertly observing each other from their canopied stalls—each uneasily aware—yet not absolutely certain that he was being watched and that his counter-watch was perceived. They were even more uncertain as to which had started it—to decide that would have been as difficult as to prove which of two Powers began an armament race. All that the new Archdeacon could be sure of was that some strange surveillance had started and with an irrational intensity he realized that he disliked the sensation this surveillance aroused. He felt a rising exasperation because it was ridiculous that he should be disturbed by such a matter, even if it were true. It was his own helplessness that vexed him so sorely—that he could not help stealing a glance time and again; and how always, as he did so, he could not help feeling that the Canon had just finished taking a quick look at him. Once or twice he looked at the third member of their trio-congregation. But that only sent him back to his old covert peering. Miss Throcton, whenever he looked at her, was watching her brother. He began—as the service wore on—to feel absurdly like a cat which becoming conscious that it is being stared at, is driven to groom itself to demonstrate to itself its own unconcern. Suiting the act to the fancy, he began to smooth his hair with his palm. It seemed only to focus his nervousness; his whole scalp began to feel uneasy—creepy was the unpleasant word—yes it was a kind of crawling itch. He longed to be able to scratch the skin. Irritation of that sort, he thought, can be more exasperating than pain.

  In the vestry, even before unrobing, he went straight over to the mirror-faced cabinet, took out the brush and groomed his curls heavily. That not proving enough, he added a vigorous combing. Indeed he only stopped when, looking past his own image in the glass, his eye was caught by the sight of Canon Throcton watching him from behind. That made him swing open again even more hastily the little door to replace brush and comb. But as he put them back, his observer saw him hesitate and glance a moment. Then, hastily, he disrobed and murmuring only a “Good evening” over his shoulder, left the room.

  Canon Throcton had also reclothed himself but paused a moment. His colleague clearly had excused him from any necessity to accompany him and by attending Evensong he himself had certainly shown that on his side he was doing all that could be required to keep up appearances and avoid any show of offense. As he waited for the retreating footsteps and their sinking echoes to signal that the Archdeacon had left the vast echo-haunted building, he himself took a turn along this narrow duct of a room built in the giant carcass. Coming to the end he flicked open with his finger the mirrored cabinet and glanced inside for a moment. Then remarking to himself, “It served no purpose to clean those utensils. Thick as ever. I had better have minded my own business and been content to disregard our sanctimonious squalor.” Swinging the hinged panel shut, he turned and left.

  Such was the afternoon pattern of the next fortnight. Except that Canon Throcton wisely observed
his resolution not to add to his own inner irritation by looking at the objects that roused it so strongly, the rest of the routine repeated in curious detail that set in the first two days: The congregation of three that played throughout the thirty-minute service their silent unacknowledged game, “I’m watching you: Are you watching me?”; the steadily mounting irritability in the senior in rank and junior in age, and that tension’s conveyance to the skin and its expression in ineffective hair stroking; the whole rite ending in an ever longer and rougher brush-and-comb drill the moment the freedom of the vestry was regained.

  The last of the autumn had now yielded to manifest winter. The last gleam of incongruity had passed from the term Evensong applied to a late afternoon service. Canon Throcton noticed as he walked back from the closed Cathedral, as the second week also approached its close, that the grove of tall lime-trees on his left were now so completely defoliated that he could see the rising moon sailing clear, its disk only laced by the bare thin twigs. The round, full silver face had already on it what suggested a slight bruise on a damaged fruit.

  A couple of days after a slight contretemps disturbed or relieved the office, attended by so few and by them so slightly attended to. The minor canon had a slight catarrh. To spare his voice which had to sustain the chanting and prayer-intoning, he asked Canon Throcton whether he would help by reading the Lessons. It was, of course, the duty of the head verger to find, open at and mark on the great Bible the Lesson to be read. Still wondering whether from the lectern he would be able to see if the Archdeacon were watching him, the Canon adjusted the pair of reading candles, his pair of spectacles and began to read where the marker, with its crimson red stitched arrow, pointed that he should begin.

  “And Satan said to God.…” He glanced at the top of the page. Yes, the beginning of the Book of the Patriarch Job. Was Job now being read? Late in the Sundays after Trinity? He wondered. But far wider incredulities had long ago made him doubtful of such details in ritual correctitude. In fact, his extensive doubts regarding the whole of the ancient system that gave him his ample daily bread and so few (he glanced at the gaping black stalls—like a cavernous mouth all of whose teeth are nearly gone) so few their spiritual bread, obviously helped to keep the place empty. He went on, in that echoing aloudness, so much more empty than any silence,

  “Skin for Skin! All that a man hath will he give for his life.”

  “Did anyone?” ran the unspoken commentary in his mind. “Could anyone now believe in the Devil? A Principle of active Evil that plagues man and thwarts God?”

  “And God said.…”

  “For that matter,” added the inner commentator, “did anyone now in that way believe in God? Values, no doubt. And, maybe, Plantonic ideas. Yes, just possibly the Aristotelian Theos, ‘moving all, Himself unmoved.’ But a Being you came across personally in your individual life, who confronted you, who individually tested, tried, wrought, fashioned and tempered you for Himself?”

  The sound of his voice again caught his wandering thought: “And Job cast off his garments.…”

  “Satan the cause of cutaneous sepsis! Yes, such was superstition’s unhygienic misexplanation.”

  Suddenly his attention, left unguarded by his speaking one thing and vaguely thinking another, received a twitch. His eyes seemed to be flicked up from the lit page. Faintly, in the hardly half gloom of the candle-dotted choir he could see, in a coffin-shaped panel of black, a pale disk. Of course that was the archidiaconal stall and that palish blob was the present occupant’s face. And that face, he was sure, was fixed on his with far more attention than anyone who has listened to “the Order of Evening Prayer to be said throughout the year,” for a score of years, could be expected to muster. Then, as a waking man comes to a moment when he realizes that a “glimmering square” is his bedroom window, Canon Throcton remembered that he’d been caught red-handed or at least wide-eyed. He lowered his head and fixed his eyes firmly on the page and continued gently to rouse the echoes with the superb prose in which a past magic and folk-lore have, like Oligocene ants in amber, found a translucent, jewelled, ceremented immortality.

  As he left the vestry that evening, after the other’s grooming had been perhaps a little longer and the departure more hurried, in the gloom of the transept a shuffling step came beside him:

  “Very sorry, I’m sure, Sir, very sorry indeed. I permitted the sub-verger to find the places and would you believe it, Sir, for some reason that only Heaving can say, he chose wrong! Of course, Sir, it couldn’t be Job’s beginning now, as everyone knows. One only hopes to Heaving no one noticed. Though I had I must own to you, Sir, an upsetting moment when I spied his new Venerableness a-peering across at you. And you obliging Mr. Minor Canon what with his catch in his throat—and those things must be watched at a time of year such as this, with your post depending on your voice, as one might say. And I don’t know, man and boy but I might count on the fingers of one hand when such a thing has fallen out. And I can’t say how I feel over it. What are we coming to I ask. P’raps you was too gen’rous to note but there was a like slip over Samson not so long back either.”

  The voice wheezed along beside him in the gloom, full of a vague solicitude, a wounded amour-propre at the breaking of a record of so many years, and these dismal moods floated like mists on too rich a tide of malt-aroma. By the time they reached the South-west Porch he was able to dismiss the familiar who fell behind to lock up into its millennial silence the eroded building. Before he won to the open, however, another figure slid out from the arches on his right, as in a rocky aquarium a hidden fish suddenly intercepts another.

  “So kind of you, so considerate. This slight catarrh.…” The tenor voice half cleared itself.

  “Very pleased to oblige.” Canon Throcton’s tone was clear, though it more clearly indicated dismissal than pleasure. “Good night, Mr. Harvre.”

  “So he didn’t notice,” Throcton’s mind went over the exchange as he turned again to the doorway. “Well, naturally, he’s only thinking of his health and his daily bread. Words, to a salaried cantor, what can they mean! ‘So kind of you, so considerate’.” Throcton’s mind shifted into a closer gear. “Am I ever kind? Well, if ‘Foresight is the kindness of kings’ Truth is the kindness of scholars. I can’t be kind with my unequals in any other way. We only have facts in common, not taste. I can tell them the truth they can’t or won’t perceive.”

  The small thick postern door pumped into place behind him. He breathed with relief the damp cold air smelling only of wet grass and fallen leaves. The latter were now so thick on this path that ran under the lime-tree grove that the old Close gardener had not been able to keep up with their descent and the walker’s feet threshed through their drifts.

  “As is the race of leaves, so is the race of men,” he quoted. “Yes,” he self-commented, “perhaps, after all, when the Hebrew Canon will have shrunk to the inner shelves of the depositories of dead languages and the files of archeologists, and these great crumbling arches, that the worship of that odd assortment of books helped erect, shall have fallen in ruin, and canons and archdeacons been long gone, Homer and his story of man, budding and falling incessantly from the dark Tree of Life, will remain. And Homer’s deeper, darker faith, of a Blind Fate? I wonder,” said the Canon.

  He hesitated for a moment in his hall—for as far as that had his habit-trained steps taken him while his mind floated back along the dark river of Time. “I wonder!” Then with that sigh which is released as life turns away from thought, he went in to tea with his sister.

  6

  The Archdeacon was to have gone for his first visitation round the diocese when the two weeks were up. It was important that he should. The diocese was a small one and so one archdeacon was enough, but he needed to keep busy to complete his rounds. But he did not go. Neither, however, had the Canon to keep up his courtesy choir attendance. Archdeacon Simpkins went neither on visitation nor to choir but to bed and on doctor’s orders.

  Laetitia
Throcton gave her brother his tea and this information, when he came in after Evensong on the thirteenth day and before he could ask her, as he was meaning to do so, whether the Archdeacon’s absence from the afternoon service meant that he had been called away to start his new rounds a day before that appointed. Laetitia, of course, heard Close news earlier than he. His inaccessibility warned gossip-loaded minds that this was no nest for their egg of information. His sister was no more anxious to be kept up to date: but the mere fact that she was reserved in her case meant that the silence exposed her to such deposits when the gusto of her brother’s egotism blew way the alighting rumour.

  “The Doctor,” she began in the conventionally cheering tone with which medical information is generally dispensed, “declared that it was nothing serious.… A stitch in time.… prevention the truest therapy.… Just one of those little troubles that yield best to care and rational foresight.… Quite likely the symptom of a general condition.… Indeed quite possibly the end-process of some all-over.…”

  “That surely wasn’t his word, my dear, if you wish to employ oratio recta.” “Could it have been syndrome?”

  “No. Oh I do now remember—some disturbance of the circulatory system provoked, just possibly, by fatigue, nervous in nature. Rest indicated. Travel contra-indicated.”

  The Canon showed his sister that comment, too, was contra-indicated. Indeed in silence he took his tea and then himself off to his study. His sister listened to his retreating steps. Then bent and took Tissaphernes on her lap. The cat responded with obvious pleasure.

  “I suppose that’s why we old maids keep pets.” She counter-pointed the purring. “If you try to please them they are nearly always pleased and when so don’t mind showing it. How complex are our refractions. If Charles were a wild animal he’d be pleased that the score is being adjusted now. If he was a tamed animal he’d be sorry now that one of his group is lamed. As it is? Perhaps he’s sorry that he’s sorry or even pleased that he’s displeased. And they call women baffling! Oh, why are we so complex and always tangling and matting everything!”