The Black Fox A Novel Of The Seventies (18 page)

hesitate to call. Her excuse was, of course, that she must not yet intrude upon grief at its height; that she would have time to offer real condolence and sympathy when the time for Mrs. Simpkins to leave drew near. But she knew that she was shrinking from and shirking going to the Deanery to face the woman who was being ejected that she and her brother might take her place. And now if she delayed. . . , She was surprised, shocked to find that the alternative course to calling at once entered her mind and refused for a moment to yield. If she waited a couple of days then it would be impossible, for she was really very busy, and her going over would be misunderstood by the other woman who no doubt would attack her brother. Surely it would be wiser to wait, kinder to write a long letter when the widow had settled into her new life at Cheltenham, without the obvious painful associations that this place must rouse—and make bitter. As soon, however, as she had heard the inner voice out she recognized its source.

She went to her room, dressed and walked over to the Deanery.

"I know I ought to have come over before, but. . . ."

"But you feared being misunderstood."

For a moment, as her effort at frankness seemed over-met, she almost gave way to formality. She probably would have, had she met the other woman's eyes. But her wisdom in shrinking from that possible additional provocation was rewarded. As she looked past the defensive figure that stood watching her, she caught sight of a small pile of worn books, cheap ornaments, rubbishy scraps that this proud house seemed shaking from its stately panels and mantelpieces. And she herself was the living form of that assured, arrogant good-taste.

"Yes, I feared to be misunderstood, I'm ashamed to say. I was shrinking from coming here because I felt that you might well resent it. So many of us who like to feel we look self-assured are really cowards."

She waited. The other, however, was evidently waiting too. But brave enough to own herself a coward, Miss Throcton now had the courage to go on. It didn't matter if after all she was going to fail. All she had to do was not to run away.

"I hoped you'd let me come and have a talk with you. Those who face great sorrow always can help us who have been spared —help us, prepare us."

Her voice had become steady, detached, convincing. She was no longer talking to put the other at her ease. She was treating the bereaved woman, who had lost her meaning and place in life, as an equal, and an equal who had won a temporary elevation through loss and pain. She felt Mrs. Simpkins' hand on her shoulder. It wasn't the gesture of a woman to a woman, still less of one slightly but of distinctly lower social station toward one higher. It was one mortal signalling to another over the low fog of conventions and words.

They sat down silently and for some time. It was Mrs. Simp-kins who spoke first. Nor did she speak of herself, at least of her disaster. "At moments I almost understand." Her voice was low but definite, even more objective than Miss Throcton's had been. "And then it's all submerged under another . . . another wave." Miss Throcton did not look at her but took her hand. The grasp was returned gratefully but tonically. "So"—the voice was quite steady again—"So, you see, when I'm in the clear I can't find words for it. And when I have words they only spring from, from feelings."

They were silent again and gradually Miss Throcton found herself recognizing an inner calmness; feeling relief because of it, wonder at it, and finally conscious thankfulness for it.

"You'll understand, then," Mrs. Simpkins continued as though giving directions about finding an address, "I can only put it, as it were, backside front. I know that's clumsy but there doesn't seem any other way of saying it. Wilkins"—she spoke her hus-

band's rather ridiculous Christian name without hesitation or sentimentality—"Wilkins is safe. I see he did make a mistake, a very grave one, out of pride, ambition, the wish for us to succeed."

"I suppose we who are religious. . . ." The tone had not the slightest smugness in it; it was reflective, speculative. "I suppose we aren't allowed to make the mistakes that those who are worldly can apparently make safely. So he exposed himself to retaliation. He paid for it. That is over."

"He's safe," she repeated as though closing an episode. She turned and put her hand again on the other's shoulder. "You've been good to me and brave. But for you, I think I would have been caught. I'd have given way to hate—my wrong would have. . . ." Miss Throcton reached for the hand on her shoulder and placed her own warmly over it. "So I can tell you what I couldn't have otherwise. I didn't know I could, till you said I could help. In my feeble way I was trying to see, to test, if you could take it, when you came in. Like you, I'd decided if you didn't call—and I thought you mightn't, mightn't feel it was worth the risk—then all real attempt between us to help each other would be over. But you came and stood my clumsy questioning. . . ." She stopped again, this time for longer. "But you know what I'm going to say. I know you love your brother. You know. . . ."

Miss Throcton stiffened her spine—not for withdrawal. It was the body responding to her summons to maintain contact, not to shrink into social stiffness. '"Yes, I see," she replied in exactly the same tone as the other's. "I wasn't honest when I told you that my brother didn't feel any bitterness. Your husband, he felt, had wronged him. I know you will agree that the amount of wrong or right doesn't concern us now. He did resent it."

"There, my dear,"—the endearment awoke no sense of patronage—"that's what I wanted, needed to say: You will take care, won't you? Because Wilkins managed to get past it; because it

was so bad; had in it such power to do harm. . . . Do you think your brother could really forgive Wilkins? Believe me, and please don't think I'm being ridiculous." Then she smiled, "Of course I fear being misunderstood far more than you. But you see I do know now how very dangerous it is to hate—perhaps even more when it's disguised as contempt."

The conversation had taken on a quality of detached intimacy that Miss Throcton never recalled having had with anyone before—as though two experts, or at least keen amateurs, not knowing each other's names, were met before an enigmatic piece of work. The subjectivity, of the personal point of view, the fact that the problem happened to be their own private concern, seemed for the time being to have disappeared.

So when Miss Throcton inquired about help, as they went to the door together, the offer was accepted as easily, as detachedly, as the question had been asked. She did, however, find herself flushing a little as, when they actually parted, she held onto her courage and owned: "Of course you know how little I can influence him. He has always taken for granted that his class—and a scholar as well—could not be petty still less base. So he can't allow he could be resentful, still less"—she insisted on the word coming out, though it did strain her tone in uttering it—"vindictive."

She looked up. The other face was now far more flushed than hers. For a moment she felt her feelings getting ready, after their period of anaesthesia, to rush back and cramp her into offence. The woman was losing her self-control, her temper. Her basic vindictiveness was coming out now that she, Miss Throcton, die true lady, had granted her confidence and completely let fall her guard!

A moment after a keener stab of self-recrimination than any she had yet felt, struck her, as Mrs. Simpkins, her hand to her side, said hastily, "Quite a catch in my breath. Do forgive me. I suddenly go all flushed like this. Dr. Wilkes says it's the strain and all. But it's nothing, nothing at all. And I'll never forget what you've done for me."

Miss Throcton walked home hurriedly. Her brother, herself and that poor, gallant woman—what a plait of three different strands, fibres of such different texture and strength, for Providence to interweave! And human judgement! How could people judge one another when all human expression must be so ambiguous. The poor human face, what a small fringe it has in which to express itself. She saw again the face of Mrs. Simpkins, as it had appeared a few moments ago, transformed with a change of feature which she, the onlooker, had completely misread. The face half turned from her, a face in middle age, what did it actually show? The forehead cross-hatched with so many lines of tension and care had become really an unreadable palimpsest. The cheek lapsed down like a half-drawn curtain hanging from the eye-socket. Only in a small series of puckers from nose to mouth and thence to chin was etched-in the signature of character. And on that edge (like the old ogham inscriptions she had seen hatched on the chamfers of ancient Irish grave-slabs) we must read what we may of the past events which have made the character and decode the present response which that character is indicating—its friendliness or unfriendliness, to our equally ambiguous signalling! So she mused as she walked.

The interview, however, though it did not seem to give her any light as to how she might help her brother to take the smallest step toward moderating his character, did help her immediately in her dealing with him and give her a certain further restraint. On coming in to tea, he remarked with a brightness that now grated on her considerably more than gloom or moroseness, "Glad you have been so prompt in seeing what would need to be done at the Deanery!"

"Really very little," she replied guardedly. "The poor things had few things!"

Then, feeling that she need not and should not be either a coward or a liar, "They had the good taste to alter things hardly at all, and, you know, they found a decor hardly altered since the house was built!"

His "H'm! That's a ladylike damn of faint praise!" nettled her present mood, but under her vigilance, only-drew her into a sudden neatness of speech. "I don't know why," she smiled, "that painstaking product of charitable honesty should be christened with the clumsy name of a left-handed compliment!"

He laughed, surprised and indeed slighdy startled at her almost-epigrammatic repartee. He even felt that it was, perhaps, due for him to make some conventional dismissal of those who were now going out of his life for good, fate having at last made them make room for him. "Many women, I have noticed"—and he felt he would have her on his side in his judgement—"are happiest in widowhood. They then have secured to them an assured past and a fossilized romance. Only characters of initiative prefer even congratulation to condolence. Holy matrimony, in actuality, is an attempt at intimacy that must prove a race between exasperation and inurement. Marriage"—he felt he was showing he could outmatch her phrase-making—"if it is not to fray should be woven of three strands, Romance, Finance and Prestige. The first could never have been present; the second only the Church supplied. And as for prestige. . . ." He waved his hand dismissorily.

They were back again on dangerous ground.

"I think we can be moved in fairly soon," appeared as a safe way out.

"Good," he said and was gone.

Miss Throcton's efficiency foresaw that if she was to move at the pace which her brother had designated as wise she would

have to begin without delay. Well, it might permit her to speed two voyages with one breeze. She would go over and see if Mrs. Simpkins would let her help her move. She felt now fairly sure her offer would not only be accepted but appreciated and so looked forward to this opportunity for a last kindness.

The following morning, therefore, as soon as her household duties permitted, she left to call a second time on Mrs. Simpkins. She had nearly arrived at her future residence when she heard, "Excuse me, Miss Throcton. I was just about to call on the, the Dean."

"I have just left him, Dr. Wilkes, at home. I'm going now over to the Deanery."

"You have heard then?"

"What?"

"I am just coming from the Deanery. I feared there was cardiac strain. She had been through a great deal, of course. They were a devoted couple. Mrs. Simpkins died early this morning. Yes, I have called in a nurse."

"May I . . . ?"

"Of course, allow me to accompany you?"

She thanked him. They did not break their silence until they were out again in the Close.

"I have telegraphed her brother," Dr. Wilkes paused. "He has replied that he wishes the burial to be at Cheltenham, and gave me instructions which I have handed on to the undertaker who will arrange everything very nicely."

Miss Throcton thanked him for his company. As she went to the florist to order a wreath, the face of the dead woman stayed in her mind. Yes, she like her husband was now, as she had put it, safe. The serenity of the dead should make us at least less hurried.

At lunch her brother asked her how her plans had shaped and when given reason for a few days' delay only remarked, "Her brother's behavior shows some sense of the situation. It will certainly save much more time being wasted." His tone showed that he felt he was behaving, seemlily, generously with a final, finical hesitation on the part of Providence, or Fate.

Miss Throcton worked with a will that he might have no further frustration, though she often felt that his urgency, far from deserving the word "wise," showed that rush which marks the fool's pace rather than the angel's. But she comforted herself by remembering what she had once heard the Bishop say— and surely he should know—that he had often found men who had been quite difficult as long as they were denied recognition, become open and generous once their capacity had been honoured.

Thus the days passed. Her brother seemed to be responding to kindly treatment. That he had greatly desired to be "in"— as movers say—was very clear. The jar that had shaken the growing intimacy of their relations before his "elevation" (as he once or twice referred to the change of status) that strain now seemed removed and forgotten. And she herself was, she felt, free to accept this new offer of a closer relationship at its face value. Before she had feared—all the more because she repressed the fear as baseless and irrational—that he could have no positive reason for pleasure in her company—there must therefore be some latent negative cause. But now—the sequence was not in strict logic but served her wishful purpose—now that he was safe, was arrived, surely it was safe for her to enjoy their present assured state without further irrational misgivings. As she glanced at his face, listened to his voice's timbre, watched his carriage, no shadow of further suspicion rose behind her. "Of course," she concluded to herself, "he was always hypersensitive, and so hardened himself to save himself pain. The persistent