The Black Fox A Novel Of The Seventies (21 page)

She had approached the bed and was looking at the pillow. It was Monday. New linen had been put on the bed perhaps an hour before. She saw it was spotless.

"You can't see the state the pillow is in! Your sight must be going. I saw it the moment I came back to this room alter breakfast this morning. It must be the maid. I saw her leaving with the old sheets." Talking rapidly he had come up behind her. She could hear his shallow quick breath. Suddenly he put his hand on her shoulder, gripping it. His grasp was hard but trembling. He was pinching with all his strength. But to the startling discomfort she made no response because of what her eyes now saw. The pillow-slip had something on it, a stain, as of oil, and in the stain she could surely see a number of tangled coarse black hairs. She drew her breath sharply. He left hold of her shoulder.

"You see it!" he said. "You see it now!"

But now she only saw the smooth plump white pillow in its new cover. She bent over it, moving close to the bed so that he could not reach her, for he held back, evidently afraid to come closer. She scented, as a cat will nose over the carpet. Then she turned round.

"I think Cook has been a little careless. I always have the laundry as soon as it comes in from the wash dried in front of the kitchen range—a precautionary measure, but damp sheets are dangerous. Over-zealous she has singed this pillow-slip ever so slightly."

She picked up the pillow. He gave way to her. As she left him at his study door—for he had followed her keeping to her heels— she added quietly, "Cook is white-haired and the other two maids are light."

Whether her action checked in some way his psychosis—at least in that district where she could make response and give him replies and support—certainly the attack, when it was resumed, was from a quarter out of her province.

He told her some ten days later that he was not going to Evensong. And, on her asking what would be detaining him, he replied, almost with a smile, that this was not a matter wherein she could assist.

"The verger is too old." he complained. "Always did make mistakes in so many little details. But now he cannot get his staff to carry out even the most rudimentary cleaning. It puts my teeth on edge. The reading desk in my stall is filthy; dust, cobwebbing, wisps of hair. The fluff is always getting on my sleeves. I'm no maker of troubles, though, I don't want the poor old creature turned out. I have decided what to do. I'll wait. When others complain, as soon they must, well then it won't seem as though the new broom were tyrannously officious and determined to make the old mop feel ashamed and only fit for the bonfire."

He actually chuckled or rather gave a kind of titter—a sound she had never heard him make before—and looked at her side-longly.

The last phase of the attack was entered before he made any reference to it. The information came, in fact, from one of the maids.

"I'm sorry, Ma'am, if Fm saying what is not in my place to say, but please, the Master is not using his bed now. It seems that he sleeps, if sleep he does, in the big wing-chair drawn up near the fire-place in the bedroom."

So far no sign had better shown how far his old self-reliance had broken down than when, the evening after she had been given the above information, she suddenly said to him as they sat in her room, "Wouldn't you prefer to lie on the couch here? And then I could keep a small fire going all night."

Slowly, he replied, "Can you sleep in die day?"

She had to. None was to be gained at night under this arrangement. That did not mean that he did not. Indeed she it was who used to rouse him. He would begin to doze almost as soon as she had wrapped some covers round him, for though the evenings were still warm, once the sun set his skin was cold, and on the occasions on which she touched his hand she felt it was clammy. Soon, however, rugs and some cushions were all the covers that

he xvould permit. Sheets and pillow-cases she learned were repugnant to him, stirring some deep terror—a terror he could fight so long as he was fully conscious, but which showed itself as a panic that flung them from him as soon as he began to dream. Then as the sleep deepened his distress grew. She would go over and wake him. Once he was fully roused he could still quite quickly regain his composure.

It was clear, however, that this could not go on. In spite of all she could do, he was losing ground. The shadow life was advancing to engulf his day-time consciousness, as at sunset the livid mist of oncoming night mounts up from the east to take over the empty sky. And her own strength would not stand it. Alone with him in the small hours as he struggled with his phantoms, it was now taking all her strength to keep clear her own conviction: that the atmosphere in the still room was subjective not objective: that it was only sympathy, yes and a relic of her old admiration for him, that made her feel that a positive presence had invaded the place. Yet to whom could she go? To the Doctor, and have him wish to commit her brother to an asylum! The thought of the Bishop and his advice was if anything less helpful, for his recommendation would be even less practical, rest. Rest? "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?"

The dawn, with the cold alien look it has for all those who have passed through a night of wakeful misery, showed the vast fretted mass of the Cathedral emerging from the low lying mist. The mouldered Gothic design looked like some splintered reef left by a retreating tide. "Once it was a fortress of faith," she whispered to herself as she glanced through the curtains. "The poor Bishop." she mused, "always haunted, always dogged by senility or premature breakdown, like one who struggles to keep a lamp trimmed but the wicks are either too old or the oil has water in it."

She pulled herself together, went over silently and stood looking down at her brother, who, with the returning light, was gain-

ing the few minutes of sleep without nightmare that he could snatch at such an hour* After all, he looked so cairn now, so much master of his situation and his mind, that surely Nature itself would work a cure. Even should she question the Doctor, what could she ask. As yet she had no real clue, no adequate set of symptoms that she could describe and he deduce from.

A few nights after she had begun to wish that even this knowledge might be granted her, it was given. He had been awake while she was beside him, and she had only turned to attend to the fire when she heard him breathing heavily and muttering to himself. She paused, listening. He was saying over one phrase, a name surely, yes, "Ibn Barnuna, Ibn Barnuna." She knew enough of his books to recall that name printed in gold letters on the back of one, perhaps more than one, of his big handsomely bound quartos—those massive volumes, more like furniture than books. She remembered calling forth his humourous contempt when once remarking that they made the handsomest wall-paper that any man's study could have.

The voice had grown urgent. She went back to the couch and touched him on the shoulder. He woke but his eyes did not turn to hers. They looked across the room. She followed them, her hand still on his arm. For a moment she heard nothing but the quiet lapping of the flame in the grate, lapping and licking the new small log she had put on. Then the sound seemed no longer to be coming from the grate but from a dark corner of the room. Her brother put his hand over hers. Before he said "You see!" she had caught sight of a dark body, a darker shadow in the corner's dusk. It looked like a black animal lying on its side. Every now and then the wavering light of the fire—for she had turned the gas to a pin-point—made it seem that the creature twisted round and licked its flank. Her brother started up, pulling himself out of her touch. She saw that the corner had only shadow in it The sound, it was clear, came from die flames.

When the sunrise came—for the days were yet long—she left him for a moment. He was awake but did not mind being left, it seemed, if it was light. She did not, however, go to her bedroom. Instead she entered his study. Yes, there stood the volumes as she recalled them. She could read from the door the fine gilt lettering on their backs. His book treasures, his bound "letters-patent" of the nobility of learning, of the high sanity of scholarship, stood ranged in the fine mahogany bookcases he had had made specially for them. " 'Embalmed minds' as Milton calls them," he had remarked (it was a comfort now to recall an intellectual assurance that then sounded arrogant), "have surely as much right to their carved stalls as our present Minster minds, most of whom have waited too long for their embalming."

She went across and took out one marked The Travels of Ibn Barnuna. Her long years as forewoman of a staff of cleaners made her, in spite of the few weeks they had been in this their new residence, glance automatically at the gap and into the fissure left by the heavy volume she had lifted away. With her free hand she then reached into the gap. She had noticed something that must have been left there by mistake. Her fingers brought out a key. She looked at it for a moment with doubt; then recognized, with her orderly memory, where it belonged. She slipped it into the lock of the drawer just below the shelf on which the big volumes stood. Yes, that was it, it fitted; it was the key, for it turned freely in the lock and the drawer opened. There was nothing in the drawer; but a strange smell seemed to float out—strange because incongruous to rise here—a smell of stale linen, familiar enough, but not in such a place. And what could be exhaling it? And with it, surely, now she could detect a cheap scent—that, too, was a very unlikely odour. And further, this too had, it seemed, no source. Of course it was a little thing, but, though small, it seemed to her completely incomprehensible. She stood for a moment, therefore, looking into the empty drawer and recognizing how offensive the smell, though weak, appeared to her. Then she shut the drawer, putting the key in her pocket.

She turned her attention to the big volume cradled on her left forearm. With her fingers she began to turn the pages until, with what seemed a movement of its own, the volume spread itself open. It had been strained at this page—it was clear that the binding had been partly broken. She read for a while in the passage that had been presented to her eyes. Then she closed the book, put it in its place and left the room.

She went to the Cathedral that morning before Matins and stayed there till lunch. Returning she brought a tray to her brother who was lying on the couch in her room. He ate hardly anything. She had eaten nothing, but he did not enquire. All the afternoon she sat with him. Then as the sun's beams had spread across the floor till they touched the wainscot he suddenly said,

"I can't face another night: I can't."

She knew now that the time had come. And she knew so clearly also what she had to do, that she found herself quite calm. Laetitia Throcton was to her for the moment a character in a novel she was writing. She saw what her heroine—far too well known by her authoress to be seen as heroic—must now perform. But she found she had no idea as to what the performance would effect. She could hear her voice, low, gentle, definite.

"If you were well you would laugh it away. But you are more right now than you would be then. There is something now present with you; something which is highly dangerous to you and which you cannot drive away. . . ." She paused and looked at him. He was watching her with something almost like relief. She continued, "But which you called on yourself."

"It's a lie," he shouted. 'You're a fool, a scheming wretch; you have a plot to drive me out of my mind; you're a witch; it's all a filthy, hellish lie!"

She looked at him quietly. He had become very small now, she was four years his senior. She remembered him like that— one of her first reflective memories—when their nurse had frightened him with ghost stories. Then she had been able to be his friend. And, though she herself had been considerably frightened, she remembered, the fear had gone when she felt how helpless he was. The same mood had now returned to her. She did not know if she could win. But she knew she could refuse to yield an inch to that which had him so largely in its power. She was aware of much pain. But not of the slightest fear—that was gone for good, transmuted into the pain through her profound understanding. She knew, too, what further she must say; though she noted, as the words came, how odd they sounded addressed to the learned Dean of a great Cathedral.

"You drove Simpkins out. I took your side at first. I was keenly disappointed for you. And he must have made some grave slip so as to fall into the power of your rage. But it is clear that he was in no way a bad man. So you could not get rid of him, through his mind. That fate is now yours. What you sent out could only strike at his body. But, returning to you, and armed with your intention, it is striking at your mind."

He looked at her, his mouth fallen open, the lower lids of the eyes sagging. His head swung slowly from side to side as if he were trying to see her in a difficult light. She knew now she must wait. His mind was being slowly percolated by what she had said. It was trying to keep the knowledge out. But his will was being worn down, as a man is, step by step, forced back by one stronger. It took about a couple of minutes before he collapsed. He tumbled forward on the couch, burying his face. She heard him, as she took him in her arms, whining.

"There's no hope, none. That's my doom. I mocked at senility, I with my first-rate brain. A slobbering cringing idiot. I'll be degraded to the lunatic asylum to live there in hell while still in the body and then. . . ." He began in a thin childish voice to howl.

She held him for some five minutes, then began slowly to repeat a collect. It began, inevitably, "Almighty God. . . ."

"Don't." he whimpered. "Don't. There's no hope. For He exists, He's just."

She completed the prayer silently.

That night he slept—somewhat to her surprise, though a deeper level of her mind felt it was natural, all part of the process. She remembered reading in some grim Protestant church history, that did not spare you "telling" facts about the other side, that those given their first racking nearly always slept deeply after it. She was tired too, very tired. Her anxiety had nearly drugged her. Time and again she dozed only to drag herself awake to find him still fast asleep, his face as blank as though made of wax.