The Black Fox

by H. F. Heard

  The old man touched his hat and then remarked, just as Archdeacon Throcton was about to pass by, “Here’s a queer thing, Sir, to find in a garden like this. It must have crawled in to die. Don’t touch it, boy. Turn it over with the rake. We’ve just found it.”

  The gardener drew aside a sweeping bough that made a wall of foliage to the path. Just underneath it, lay a large black fox. It wasn’t a pleasant sight for the hair had fallen off large parts of the body owing to very extensive mange.

  The Established Church is a complex social device to cushion the shocks of actual experience. The attraction of the sexes, reproduction, parturition, disease and death, the main successive events in the life of everyone, the hard facts which Gautama cited as manifest proofs that existence in the body is a baited trap, Anglicanism has now been able to treat as occasions for the delivery of prose and poetry recitations. That the poetry, called hymns and chants, is sometimes banal, and the prose, on the contrary, generally magnificent, is of course of purely secondary interest. The real anthropological importance of the whole process is that it has the peculiar, unperceived and perhaps inexplicable power of turning, by the magic of words, shock into boredom. Every rich arrested society, from Confucianism onwards, and probably far before, has discovered this secret of survival and has had the sense to practice it and not to preach it.

  A dead Dean—dead of alopecia-cum-herpes-cum-erysipelas-cum … every Greek word whereby, on their side, the doctors had (with the aid of the desiccated contents of the Greek lexicon) powdered over the discharging details of human decomposition—such a decent cadaver could be the occasion for quite a tasteful exhibition of Jacobean threnody. It could be pacifying, uplifting and provocative—if that were not too strong a word—of quiet thankfulness: thankfulness for the sufferer’s release to higher but unspecified realms, and also for his relinquishing a material benefice, the worth of which could be stated to a penny and which when totted up came, per annum, to some twelve hundred pounds sterling.

  But, somehow, a dead fox, dead of fox-mange, alopex, the fox coming in like some silly sinister folk-tale figure to die in its tracks right by the Archdeacon’s path as he was going to the Bishop to arrange for the Dean’s funeral …?

  The Archdeacon’s thought was interrupted and at the same time unpleasantly completed by the gardener quite unnecessarily adding, “Why, in all my life—and I’ve been thirty years man and boy round the Palace—I’ve never seen such a thing. Shy beasts and cunning they be and scarce about here—the farmers liking their hens more than the hunt, and turkey rearing coming on now and doing well on this dry soil. And to come in to die here by this very path, and see, a big black one. That’s rare in itself. For reynard they’re called, and that, our schoolmaster said, means the red or rusty one, as they nearly all are. They die by themselves, as do all the wild ones. No friends round and funerals after, for them. But this one, you’d almost fancy, he was trying to find someone, doctor or parson, so sick was he of his mange, Queer.…”

  Without waiting the Archdeacon strode off.

  The incident was slight, one of those small odd “natural history” happenings that people who have not the capacity for ordered studies and not enough necessary work to do, collect and improve into unconvincing, silly stories. Still it not only buzzed in his mind like a fly—like one of those blow-flies already settling on the suppurated fox-flesh. It attacked him at a lower emotional level. For a moment he felt almost as though he might be sick.

  A step away from the somewhat dank shrubberies; a step into the quiet, polish-smelling hall, clean and spacious under the quiet inspection of the morning sunbeams; a score of steps up the thickly carpeted stairway, flanked all the way by an unbroken succession of painted bishops; at the foot of the sweep Bishop Bendwell’s high-stocked predecessor; at the curve by the oriel a bevy of “full-bottomed” peruked Lords Spiritual; at the top Laudian ruffs, square caps and small, white, pointed beards. The whole ascending progression was an effective exercise in psychotherapy. As you rose, easily, almost effortlessly, up these broad-shallow sweeping “treads,” your eye carried you on simultaneously up the stream of time and showed you under the change of fashion the power of continuity, proved to you the calm assurance of the centuries that had raised and sustained the present.

  “Come in.” The Bishop’s voice summoned him, set final assurance on his rapidly re-established sense of complete security. He was sure, in its ring of welcome, he could hear as an overtone, “Friend, come up higher.” Nor was he mistaken.

  They agreed about each detail of the funeral: they went on and agreed about the death being “a merciful release”: further they agreed that all that had been done and all that had befallen, had been done and had befallen rightly.

  “Have a cigar, Throcton.” The Bishop reached out his box—as clear a sign of friendly intimacy as the offer of snuff by an eighteenth century gentleman to one he wished to indicate as his almost-equal. And the use of the unprefixed vocative, the intimacy of the plain surname. That, too, argued well. He refused the weed, but waited without impatience as the Bishop persuaded the roll of leaves to smoulder and then, the little bonfire drawing well, sat back enjoying the first pulls. As he looked at the big aproned body, cradled in its big easy chair, the round face raised to the ceiling and with the succulent wad plugging its pursed lips, the ridiculous pseudo-classical line floated through his mind: “Hera, All-Mothering Air, feeding with vapourous nectar her favourite child.”

  The joke, with the sense of superiority that it gave him to this sucking overseer, made him, because of his pleasant expectations, feel a real liking for the old boy. “At heart,” he thought, “he’s as broad of mind as I, though of course his poorer brain doesn’t let him see it. Well, no harm.” He began again to lecture himself—an unfailingly appreciative audience, “Do not despise what you call our duller dupes. It is profoundly, anaesthetically soothing to the lingering and still painful remnants of an ecclesiastical conscience that there should be those who can yet subscribe to thirty-nine impertinently inquisitive Articles with neither a smile nor a sigh.”

  That was really quite a neat sentence. What a pity he could never use it over his own name. Perhaps it could be brought in, in some posthumous memoirs. His mind threw back to the present. Those Thirty-nine Articles—yes, he’d have to swear to them and his belief in them again when he took the next step up.

  He turned again and looked at the chief shepherd who could bar or open the next and larger pen in the fold. The Bishop was looking at him through a comforting coil of smoke, and after letting a cloud rise upward, which it did in the most auspicious way, floating right on into the lap of a painted angel on the ceiling, he volunteered that he could now say that he had foreseen this eventuality. This reopening was too promising for Throcton even in his mind to question the Bishop’s claim to the gift of even deductive prophecy. Finally the Lord of the Diocese spoke to the Close point. He went so far as to convey that the Prime Minister would, he believed, prove “gracious to his supplication”—he used the liturgically flavoured phrase almost with a smile. And that now he felt the issue might be left with that exalted quarter with some assurance as to the outcome. The thought under the mitre—he passed a hand over his forehead—he was prepared to foretell, would be found to agree with that under the Crown. Consideration had been shown for their last temporary exigency. All the more would the present appeal be regarded as apposite.

  When Throcton went back through the shrubbery, the laurels had once more become ornamental foliage. All suggestion of the dank and the sepulchral had gone from them. They were the proper background for dignified buildings and for the dignitaries that dwell in them, suggesting, too, a classical overtone or flavour of that literary recognition which laurel and bay naturally propose. The Bishop, his cigar finished, had strolled to his big bay window. His eye was caught by the retreating figure down below.

  “He’s not an easy man—proud as the devil. But a good scholar. And considering his pride, he showe
d some strength in swallowing it. Yes, for him, he took his disappointment well. Of course he thinks I’m a fool. That’s the weakness of the scholar—no power to recognize knowledge unless it comes out of a book. He thinks we ‘prelatic preachers’ are simply big tongues that have free play because pivoted upon narrow brains. But there’s more in good administration—yes and in a good sermon—than can be put in a book or a series of text-book propositions. What did ‘Anglican’s big loss’ say?”

  He strolled over and found the volume of J. H. Newman that was lying on his desk. “Yes, that’s it: ‘We are not saved by a smart syllogism.’ Still less by an impeccable style.” He shut the book and drew his chair to his work-table. “Yes, I’m glad the P. M. will pretty certainly give it him. He was never cut out to be a reporter on country church structural repairs. Well, I must find someone who is.”

  As he turned over his files his mind still, however; lingered on the metaphysical problem. “I wonder what he believes? Well, we are in a state of transition and after all Anglicanism has always been more a transit than a stasis—perhaps that is why it lasts, because it can always compromise with the present and at the same time is never quite happy in it. The perfectly successful is the perfectly finished, isn’t it?”

  Then seeing that his private speculations were tending to sound deep enough to be in danger of fouling with submerged theological rocks, the Bishop coiled up the line of his unravelled thought and turned his mind to its real business—finding and fitting men that were fit, good middle men, into posts that required a double duty, spiritual and temporal.

  11

  He was always called the P. S. by all the other Secretaries, that rose above him to the towering Secretaries of State. The P. S., they said, deserved his name because everyone in the know knew one of the P.M.’s ways of ending certain of his political letters—“P.S. the following piece of Church Preferment is now available: suggest someone sound.” For the P.S. was, of course, the Patronage Secretary. But the P.S. did not share the contempt for his office nearly all his colleagues showed. Nor for that matter did the P.M. Both of them had a sense of humour and also a sense of romance, an uncommon blend that made a common bond.

  This was the P.S.’s morning. Once a fortnight—if the political sky was not too lowering—he had his hour, or at least thirty minutes, alone with the Magician. And today the Wizard, as he did when in high expansive humour, dressed for the part. The Patronage Secretary in the Whitehall uniform of black frock-coat, rose, as there entered a flowered silk dressing gown and a scarlet fez. Between these two splashes of Oriental colour, looked out the half mummified features of the most powerful face in Europe. But it looked no more formidable than the fez that crowned it. Besides, even the eyes, that could not hide their penetration, were now wrinkled round with humour.

  “Her Majesty’s Chief Minister”—he swept a bow to the standing Secretary and the fez nearly fell off—“soon may be saluted as Grand Vizier by far more subjects than have ever hailed him under the dubious title of First Lord of the Treasury. The Royal Titles Bill is now assured of its passage into Law, when, May the Queen Live Forever!”—the fez bobbed its tassel again—“the long, thin line seen by Macbeth extending down the centuries will suddenly ‘conglobulate’ (as the Great Lexicographer has phrased it) and produce—if I may be forgiven, under the stress of emotion for mixing my metaphors—and produce, as a crowning pendant, an Oriental empress!” The fez was whipped off, revealing for a moment a skull so bare and wrinkled that it seemed more like a fossilized brain than an ordinary head. Then the scarlet cone resumed its uneasy seat at an even jauntier angle.

  “That, my young friend, is neither rhetoric nor irrelevance but a very pertinent introduction to our business. Let us be seated. What fare have you for me today?”

  Before, however, the P.S. could settle on the chair he drew up beside the couch on which the tired garish figure had sunk, the voice crowed again, “‘The Imponderables’—as my ‘opposite number,’ the Kurfurst Kanzler calls them—they decide, he knows, not arms nor battles but, as he’s finding, Kulturkampfs. So, young sir, to the Church, to the Church. ‘No Bishop, No King’ as the ‘British Solomon’ so wisely remarked. But, as he and his son didn’t know, if the monarch should become an Oriental empress, then the episcopus must become equally spacious, equally latitudinarian to embrace East as well as West, now that a mightier Venice once again holds ‘the Gorgeous East in Fee!’ Now to business!”

  “The See of … um … a bishopric, though a small one. What peer, who could give us trouble in the Lords, might want a minimal mitre for one of his wife’s poorer but scholarly relatives? Yes, that must wait. Give us something simpler to start on.”

  “The Deanery of Norminster?”

  “Yes, that will do. Yes, surely I recall Norminster. Surely it was vacant only a matter of months ago?”

  “Yes, Sir, after a generation of quiescence now the turn-over in that small ‘negotium’ seems to have become brisk.”

  “The Law of Averages. One long reign and human optimism cries, ‘Longevity has come at long last. But wait and see. It’s just wishful thinking, indeed hardly that! Why, do you know the best opening you can employ when you meet anyone you want to please? I always use it. ‘How well you look’? Not a bit of it! I ask invariably, ‘And how is that little trouble?’ Of course I don’t know what the poor fellow is fussing over. But I do know that, because he’s a man, he’s fussing over something. And I know he’ll like me better for my condolences than for my congratulations! But back to Norminster. Yes, I have it—surely an Arabic scholar there …? That’s it, one of the Canons?”

  “Yes, he’s ‘in the line of succession,’ too, Sir. I mean he’s conservative and people would expect it. Indeed I thought he would have been suggested to you last time. But, you may recall, the Bishop of Norminster was particularly anxious that his Archdeacon should have it.”

  “Well, it didn’t delay things much. But this scholar—he isn’t a Ritualist is he? I and the Empress Designate, ‘Ego et Regina Mea,’ won’t stand for that ‘man millinery,’ church costuming! Naturally a Lady doesn’t like men competing in the choir with flounces and trains. Sunday bonnets and shawls put out of countenance by mitres, albs and copes! And, mark my words, neither do I, young man! The British like theatricals, but they like them in their proper place—Parliament, not in the pulpit or at the altar. ‘Mr. G.,’ Cotton-and-Phrase-spinning Bright and your humble servant, we give them their variety show. They go to church, as I do, for peace, seemliness, to hear and see what their fathers have always heard and seen. There’s more than a little in the Poet Laureate’s summing up of a proper service,

  The Parson said what he oughta said

  And then I coomed awa’.

  These posturing young papalists will break up the Establishment, and I won’t have it!”

  “Oh, Archdeacon Throcton is certainly a weight on the other side.”

  “Anything against him?”

  “Innocence itself, Sir. You know the Epitaph (I understand he may himself earn a repetition of it):

  “‘Sacred to the Memory of the Very Reverend Dean …

  of this Cathedral, who, in this Place, pursued

  the Cure of Souls, for Forty Years, without the

  least suspicion of Enthusiasm.’”

  A loud, appreciative cackle came from the horizontal master of the Empire.

  “You’ve read your Talleyrand, my boy—‘pas de zèle, pas de zèle.’ No danger of this Arabian flirting with Mr. G.’s penchant, ‘Greek Orthodox,’ or finding affinities and ‘union of hearts’ with the Balkan Bishoprics and Archimandrites?”

  “None, Sir, I’ll wager.”

  “He’s our man. Let him have it.”

  A small clock tingled discretely but peremptorily from the mantelpiece.

  “Allah be merciful! Why cannot The Eternal extend Time when it is pleasant. Here, give me a hand.”

  As he was raised to his tottering feet he snatched the fez from his head.
“In that wardrobe, there, get me out my frock-coat. Here, take this dressing gown. Help me into my prison garb.”

  He turned to a large mirror and touched carefully a strand of hair, dead black and coiled, like a withered root over a rock, that snaked along his skull till it just reached his forehead. He pulled at the black coat as he trod stiffly to the door. His squire had it opened.

  “The disguise is convincing?” he asked, as he passed through. “I look the part, do I?” The P.S. felt all the enthusiasm that his loyal “dresser” feels for the grand old master of “the boards” about to face one of his last performances.

  “You’re grand,” he dared smile. The old mask, already facing the stairs, was fixed; only the eye that his attendant was watching, drooped for a moment. “You can write that Deanery note,” was the final instruction.

  The P.S. went back into the room. In five minutes the little letter—a life warrant—was written and put out for dispatch.

  12

  Miss Throcton always distributed the mail. Every morning she was down first; winnowed the weighty letters from the chaff—bills, advertisements, et cetera; then gave to the cook for the servant’s hall any missives they might have received. The grain she placed on the left-hand side of her brother’s plate.

  The morning came when she found among the usual deposits in the mail-box, a neat envelope, unstamped, but having across the top of it four letters, then, and for a further couple of generations, more powerful, and over a wider field than even the other famous four—A.D.M.G. To its initial assertion of an almost world-wide right-of-way—through its superscription O.H.M.S.—this particular envelope had added to its top left-hand corner a couple of words as to its origin—“Patronage Office.”