The Black Fox

by H. F. Heard

  “Well, I have told you.” He spoke now with the authoritative voice of the explorer that has at least penetrated into the dark far further than he who questions. “We must give him every chance. Exhaustion must be highly dangerous for him. For the body’s total resources are now engaged on some internal front fighting for life. But, frankly, I am uneasy. Maybe what we should aim at, if we are not to raise false hopes in our hearts, is prolonging life, not.…” Then he smiled, “Well, of course, that is all any of us can have—a reprieve, not a permanent recovery. In a way, just by the process of the calendar, we are all losing ground!”

  The Canon had, however, heard enough. It was the particular news he desired—not a homily on humanity but the life-expectation of one man. He said good-bye quite graciously but definitely: he wanted at once to be by himself. He walked for some considerable time till it was fully dark and then came in pleasantly tired and not uncontent. There would be just time before changing for dinner to write that note.

  After five minutes at his desk he rang the bell. While it was being answered he read over what he had written:

  MY DEAR LORD BISHOP:

  You will, I know, forgive me if, this afternoon, I was too surprised at the generous offer you made me, to accept it instantly. Nor do I think you wished me to act with anything that might be called precipitation. I am aware—as I know you are—that I am no administrator. And, though my own desire (natural in a scholar) to avoid the feeling that he has, as the phrase goes, been “put on the shelf,” made me wish to be of use and to be tried in diocesan employ, and I was therefore left with a sense of disappointment when you, with greater wisdom, passed me over for another, time has removed all shadow of doubt of your perfect rightness. It is to that judgment that I am again trusting when you would now offer what then you had to deny. I have sought the guidance.…

  The reader paused in his delivery and said in another tone of voice as though speaking to and answering some person quite other than the Bishop, “Well, I have and certainly gained an answer.” He resumed,

  … the guidance which you had already won before you came to see me. And I realize that, as your authority is greater than mine, so has been your insight. In these circumstances I am prepared—as you justly said—to attempt to fulfill those unfamiliar duties, which so often yield with profit, to those who have the humility to accept that which has been laid upon them by no choice of their own.

  Believe me, My Lord, your obedient son in God,

  CHARLES A. THROCTON

  The knock came at the door just as he had repeated his own name. He sealed the letter and as the door opened to his “Come in,” he held out the envelope. “Mary, see that the boy takes this over to the Palace at once and asks that it be taken up to the Bishop.”

  10

  At dinner his sister was further reassured, though he granted her no information. The present was not in his view. But he was in doubt how far he should look into the future. He felt he must make an effort to settle that doubt. He could certainly add to his general information enlarging his interests as a whole. And certainly there were grounds for a hope. His sister as, clearly felt his cheerfulness. She even felt that he was sufficiently at ease with himself, sufficiently satisfied that he might have some spare interest for the misfortunes of others.

  “I had another call from Mrs. Simpkins this afternoon.” Not even his “Then, though I knew it not, I was granted the better part with the organist and no tea” discouraged her. “I own I have wished to avoid her as much as courtesy would allow.”

  “Certainly you two have nothing in common. You may not have inherited the Throcton brains, Laetitia, nor would they be much help to a woman. But you have undoubtedly been given the good taste which seems to be even more strongly a matter of heredity, of breeding. So we complement each other—if you will forgive me for what I suppose if we were not brother and sister would be called a left-handed compliment.”

  She began to answer but he ran on in that tone of irony that was the surest symptom of his spirits being “good,” “And the Simpkinses match each other too. Perhaps there is a particular place where are made those matches that can only be called happy in their odd mutual aptitude. It certainly wouldn’t be heaven but some kind of limbo where a demiurge with a prettier sense of humour than of beauty, works out his entertaining designs. The Elder Church would allow you to keep house for me even if you were not my sister because you have attained to what is called canonical age. I think that Mrs. Simpkins might be called one of those women who was born with canonical looks. From adolescence she must have been qualified by an appearance that suited her to being a housekeeper and nothing else.”

  “But she’s very unhappy, very frightened,” she broke in, his note of mockery, after this afternoon’s visit, jarring her into interruption. “She fears her husband is really ill.”

  He seemed about to say something more, but suddenly his mind must have changed. “Well, well, I suppose every hen lives in a panic for fear her chick has picked up something unhealthy. As they have no children, naturally she has nothing to do but to fuss over him.”

  Miss Throcton felt it was wise to be content that her brother allowed the poor woman some virtue and to her husband no greater health-risk than the oversolicitude of his wife. Evidently the Canon had noticed nothing in the Archdeacon except perhaps such fatigue as might be expected—and mean no harm—in one who had thrown himself perhaps too eagerly into a task made onerous by former protracted neglect. She steered the conversation then into the safer waters of the weather. Her brother followed her out onto these harmless reaches of human ignorance and speculation. For his mind was fully occupied with further particular questioning.

  The problem as to how far he must look into the future he tried to settle next morning. To some extent he was able to do so by a visit to the Cathedral library. He recalled from visits made when he was first appointed to a stall, that this strange lodgment of folio and quarto flotsam contained the books of one of his predecessors, books which might aid his inquiry—an inquiry which he would prefer to make without having to mention it to any—as he would have to did he apply to any more official library. This predecessor had been—before he took Holy Orders and his Doctorship of Divinity—a Doctor of Medicine. His care for the soul had not lessened his interest in the body and the cure granted him had brought with it both an amount of leisure and of stipend that permitted him to pursue as a student what he had ceased to practice as a profession. This association resulted in a fine private library of pharmacy and pathology. So when death forbade him any longer so to study and to accumulate he left to the Cathedral the fruits of the income it had granted him. It was to this collection that Canon Throcton went. And in the quiet of the unfrequented room, into which he had to let himself with a rusted key, he did find the oracle for which he was seeking. There was quite a good deal of information here about diseases of the blood, of the anaemias and of course of the pernicious form or forms. Yes, it struck usually between forty and sixty: there was no known cure, at least to date: it was multiform in its attack: the mind became comatose: the digestion was certainly affected: indeed some fault in assimilation might be one of the causes of the entire condition: the spinal cord might gradually go out of action—creeping paralysis, “scissor walk,” and of course the blood itself showed degenerative changes, etc. Yes, yes, all very interesting.… But.… Ah, here it was—the attack could be mitigated and brief ameliorations often achieved by giving arsenic. But the patient, once the condition had become unmistakably evident to his medical adviser, generally died within the year.

  He closed the large quarto, already itself smelling of decay, and put it back in its place with some little caution to see it fitted to its exact dust-marked frontiers. As he left the library and crossed the Close lawn, he thought, One year? Not enough time for me to lose the thread of my own work; not to get into too much boredom-cum-confusion over my archidiaconal duties. I shall have sown my good will and have gained for good that of
the powers that be. Yes, Fabius Maximus must be my master of strategy. I will wait. Maybe all these delays and apparent thwartings have only been, as it were, traverses to make my approach to the quiet citadel more securely inevitable.

  As he intended so he did. Nor had the Bishop been wrong. As an able man the Canon could turn his attention to the not too difficult routine of the country-side administrative duties, provided that a twelve-month was the length of the sentence, and the reward a return on a higher level to the precentorial amenities.

  Neither did the first few months go badly. He did not even have to meet the new Dean, who almost as soon as he was installed followed his predecessor’s example, taking to his bed. With a not uncheerful malice he remarked to Dr. Wilkes, “We might call the Dean’s stall not a stall but a bed!”

  He forgot that he had said that suspended animation brooded over the Deanery—not death. He had also overlooked the fact that the Doctor might take his Hippocratic oath more seriously than a scholar felt that he must take his to the Thirty-nine Articles. Dr. Wilkes was certainly not less interested in this particular case. There had been much that had puzzled him in it. And now that pernicious anaemia seemed to be the enemy who was to give the coup de grâce, the Doctor was determined to fight the battle out to a finish. He was a bit of an original, too; enjoying his liberty as a general practitioner to attack his enemies, the diseases on any part of their lines.

  “Discipline, diet, drugs,” he remarked to his wife. “Those are the three sectors of our front. Why confine ourselves, as it were, to the last ditch!”

  “Yes,” she replied, for she was well above the average of the Cathedral wives, let alone those of the small settlement that called itself a city because of the monster church that sat on it, “you’re certainly not that every third doctor who’s said to be an atheist.”

  “Well, I take the man as a whole—have to. And what a piece of work is man. And who but a Creator could ever have made him.… That’s plumb, physiological sense to my mind. When they can make one cell, then I’ll begin to attend to their quack that the body is a machine and the brain secretes thought as the liver bile!”

  “What’s on your mind?” she asked shrewdly. For when one day he told her that if a woman made a generality she always had some one person in her mind’s eye, she had replied smilingly that any human being was like that, unless one had abstracted himself from living by too much theory and too little observation.

  She was a companion of his head as well as of his board and bed. So he replied without hesitation, “The new Dean, lately Archdeacon, and, as an accompaniment, the new Archdeacon, lately Canon. The first ought never have become ill.” He paused a moment then added, “The second is not ill but maybe will be—or perhaps I’d be more cautious if I said, maybe he ought to be. But of course that’s not my business, only my diagnostic curiosity practising itself for the love of the thing. Throcton hasn’t called me in—seems to have what we used to call an iron constitution.…”

  “Built upon the base of an iron heart, do you mean?” she questioned.

  “Let’s go back to my duty. What I have to do is to fight for my patient. He certainly seems to have fallen into what hereabouts we might name decanal decay.”

  “No, tell me what he’s really contracted?”

  “Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. Of course it’s not the senility of his predecessor. I’m pretty certain, indeed haven’t a doubt in my own mind, it’s pernicious anaemia.”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “Oh, pretty obvious when it’s got you, skin like parchment, teeth like old glass, walk like a centenarian, mind like a mist.…”

  “You didn’t see Mr. Longman, the greengrocer’s, child, did you? Of course you didn’t. He doesn’t hold with doctors, he’s often volunteered to me. He says greenstuff is the food for everyone and that Genesis declares it. I was sorry that the joke seemed against him at the expense of his child. For she became a complete shadow. I did what I could. But good advice—well, you are always giving it without bringing down the death-rate. I was certain she was going. Then one day—it can’t be more than a month ago—I saw her wonderfully better, actually gay and bright and with colour. The recovery seemed to have been far more rapid than the decline. I congratulated the mother. She seemed ashamed. At last, though (her husband was out), she evidently felt she must tell someone and that I might prove sympathetic. The child had been in at a neighbour’s. She liked to crawl in there for she was let sit in a sunny window. There happened to be a large dish of broiled liver on the table. The child asked for some; the people gave it. The next day she came back asking for more. They didn’t like the father. And to defy him, as much as to humour the child, they kept on giving what she asked and they knew he’d detest. They would order liver for her. Within a week neither they nor the mother could doubt it was having an effect—they told the mother then and.…”

  Dr. Wilkes cut his wife short. “Well I must be setting out on my rounds again.” She looked up at the clock; yes it was time.

  But the Doctor’s first visit was not to one of his patients. He went down a small street that opened into the market square. Looking rather more like an inquiring and cautious bird he glanced ahead of him and then went on with more assurance. Yes, Longman the greengrocer was out, his wife and a boy keeping the shop. The afternoon was a slack period after people had done their morning shopping and the proprietor had gone out to see his market gardens for tomorrow’s supplies. Fortune favoured him further for as he passed the front of cabbages, potatoes and other ranked vegetables, a small girl ran out. Adroitly patting her and turning to Mrs. Longman who stood guardian over the greenstuffs, he remarked how well she looked and without pause asked for a bunch of water-cress and two bundles of radishes. As this small traffic was being negotiated Mrs. Longman out of a certain nervousness that always has to pass the time of day with a customer, naturally seized on the conversational bait he had offered her.

  “Yes, Minnie really looks a wonder now, doesn’t she! And it is a wonder and no mistake. And a bit of a mystery, too, if one might so put it. For there she’d been so that you’d have thought—even if you didn’t see much of doctors—that she was straight set for a decline. And here she is now really a positive tomboy as you might put it.”

  Half a dozen exchanges and Dr. Wilkes had the story in all the detail and with some cross-checkings that he needed. A sixpence to the daughter, a smile to the mother and he left with far more than a handful of tea-time vegetables. With the sudden dart of a true diagnostician he was sure he had now something which he might use.

  “Through the greengrocer I glance and find my real instrument at the butcher’s,” he smiled to himself. “Well it’s certainly simple to try and no harm done if it’s no more than coincidence. Post hoc, propter hoc? Well who really knows about causality? The germ or the general resistance? The bottle or the bedside manner? Thank heaven I am a G.P. and don’t have to explain how things work—or take too much blame when they don’t.”

  The liver treatment of course worked. Dr. Wilkes was wise enough not to draw attention to what he was doing, still less to talk about making a remarkable cure. After all, the condition was hot acute, and many conditions, even cancer itself, do, on occasion, remedy themselves. All that the Cathedral public knew, was that the Dean had rallied. And rallied he remained as the year went on upon its course. The Bishop was pleased and attributed the improvement to his sagacious swapping of the posts. The Archdeacon tried to disguise his impatience. On meeting the Doctor he could not, however, prevent himself asking for a forecast: was the improvement due to temporary alleviating measures? He had heard that sometimes such conditions, when there was present some anaemia, were benefited, for a time, by arsenic? He trusted the Dean was finding some relief through such alleviants?

  Dr. Wilkes, though a far more tolerant man than Archdeacon Throcton, shared the ecclesiastic’s objection to trespass on his own ground. Besides, his natural prejudice was amply su
pported by a quite rightful wish not to share any more confidences with one of whose goodwill he felt less and less sure. He therefore replied with perfect honesty and equal discretion that he now had considerable hopes and would venture to think that grave worsening of the condition might long be postponed. The reaction this almost non-committal statement awoke in his listener’s mind was, however, so strong that even the Doctor, who sensed that this general good news might here be a little less than welcome, would have been surprised. Though not surprised he was nevertheless quite a little shocked when the rather grim face that he was looking at suddenly showed something like a sneer, “Are we to endure another living corpse at the centre of our corporate life here!”

  That rhetorical question he had met with the rightly discreet answer that his task was to preserve life; to the Church belonged to say what were its uses. “Besides,” he added, “with a little caution there is no reason not to hope that the recovery might prove so extensive and sustained that the patient might well undertake all the specific Cathedral duties.”

  Faced with that possible prospect the face opposite him began to show an even grimmer aspect. But the anger that was becoming evident to the onlooker had evidently risen to such internal force and with such speed that the cautious brain overlooking the undisciplined will, threw its considerable weight against any further expression. Here then, too, a respite was gained. Archdeacon Throcton realized now that he had shocked the Doctor—that he had let his impatience render him unguarded—and for no purpose. But the sheer force of the thing that had twisted within him, almost unseating his power of judgment! As he found his heart beating rapidly and his breathing shallow he was almost more shocked at himself. The spasm of frustrated violent anger gave him real alarm. He loathed all passion, as the coldly selfish do. He had never thought that he was capable of such black rage, any more than of lechery.