The Black Fox A Novel Of The Seventies (27 page)

"But time is time." He pulled himself with a shrug into business trim. "Till we go under, the captain must stay on the bridge. Come, our desk calls. Kindle our modern answer to darkness, the gas, sulphurous, explosive, burning and asphyxiating, with which Plutonic vapour—the stifling breath of Cerberus himself—we keep at bay his daylight-fearing presence.

"By the way." he went on, his vague mood of malaise relieved by the burst of half-humorous rhetoric, "the Dean does seem quite all right now?"

"Yes," Halliwell answered. "Yes, You recall I wrote you that note while you were away, just saying that he was leaving for a conference for a week in Cambridge. I thought I wouldn't bother your bigger business with misgivings but wait and see if the change would work."

"You did find him in poor shape?"

"You see I didn't find him, I failed to see him. As I was going across to the Deanery I ran into Miss Throcton seated in the Close. I know every doctor would say, Never diagnose without seeing the patient, so I had no right to an opinion. Miss Throcton clearly showed me that she felt I should not call. . , ." He paused and then went on, "But she spoke to me frankly. She made no concealment of the fact that he was under some severe strain, but not one that medicine or, or clerical assistance, could mitigate. Change, acting with a fine constitution, was her hope. It seems to have been sufficiently well grounded. .. ." Again he paused.

"He is a strange man"—the Bishop was endorsing the matter and filing it in his mind with a couple of phrases—"and she is a fine woman. Both of them go deeper than their surface appearances would suggest."

He was sorting papers for the next point on their agenda. "She up and he down. And further, I somehow can't get out of my mind that there's some element in this sequence of undulant exhaustions that has escaped diagnosis."

The last comment turned almost into a question. Indeed the Bishop, his capable hands still dealing papers as a practised whist-player deals cards, glanced up at his Chaplain standing attentive at his shoulder. The Chaplain looked down into the wide wary eyes that, he knew, saw far more questions than that firmly urbane mouth would ever verbalize.

"No," the younger counselled his own learning spirit. "No, When a man has become a really capable administrator, he plays the game that well because he never looks beyond the board."

The Bishop's fingers, one trade-marked by the episcopal ring, a purple boss like a big nodulated varicose vein, selected a half-sheet and paused. A smile came into his voice.

"You flattered me as to my extemporary if archaic rhetoric. What do you think of this as an epigram on Throcton?

Those men of scholarship who only care

For the grey polish of a suave despair.

The Glow of Faith, they call Consumption's Flush,

And, if caught Cheerful, would be put to Blush.' "

"Who wrote that, Sir?"

"Oh, a little practice piece of my own, I find it more amusing sometimes to write my own quotations than to look up and learn better ones! Mine certainly are not poetry but I can make them fit precisely as illustrations of what I'm saying!" •

"Sir, it has the real 'eighteenth century style, if a contrary sentiment. But, . . ." The two couplets had caught back Halli-welTs thought to the problem he had decided a moment before not to pursue. "But do you think the new Dean has ever felt even a twinge of despair?"

"I don't know. I know I never have. So I suspect I cannot judge. I'm no specialist in souls, scarcely to be graded as a physician. I'm an arranger of benefices."

Halliwell took the instruction. The Bishop, he surmised, saw more than he could help and now was old enough not to discuss what he couldn't aid. He therefore kept himself busy tidying up effects rather than striving to deal with and deflect their causes.

The Chaplain expressed the thought in administrative language,

"I see you have just uncovered, Sir, the correspondence about the locum tenens difficulty at Parva Salcote—again this repeated problem of whether to wait resignedly for a recovery or move to recover freedom of choice by a resignation, isn't it?"

"Maybe you're going to turn into a fashionable, epigrammatic preacher of a rich, proprietary chapel."

The Bishop smiled, his feeling-tone pleasantly altered by the slight, unexpected play of words made by his assistant. His mind turned to a practical issue.

"Yes. I think, as you put the issue squarely, we had better ourselves take action and call for a resignation."

He smiled, and a moment after was dictating a letter, kind, discreet, firm, and because it had to get a sick man out of a cure of souls he could no longer serve and yet not hurt the patient's feelings—a nice and not uninteresting task—the construction of the instrument cleared comfortably all other vaguer thoughts out of the dictating diocesan mind.

The rain lasted three days. The little river, on which the tiny city stood, flooded, and the Close became not a sink but a brimming reservoir. It was impossible to keep a house, even such a defended one as the Deanery, moderately clean. Muddy footprints came in everywhere. Miss Throcton sent for her defend-

ing staff so often that, though well drilled, they became defensive and indeed began to murmur. Nor did Cook's counsel, that the poor lady was none too well, though it was meant to be soothing counsel, succeed in rousing their sympathy.

"There's no cat now." they protested. "So why should she send for us today—and not the first time—to wipe up paw-marlcs! Why can't she tell the Master not to trail his dirty umbrella and that torn hem of his long coat after him when he comes in? Just making work, it is these days, when sense would know that nothing could be kept clean. She shouldn't do it! And we willing as willing for anything that's in our duty, and with right weather and not a judgment like this and all that! She shouldn't do it!"

Miss Throcton knew that as well as they. But it was one of the retreat points in the desperate rear-action she was fighting. She could not resist seeing whether they could see. It was so painfully, foully, filthily—she used the strong words with care so as to be sure she was not shirking or stinting her rational, clearly defined estimate—so grossly plain to her, those footsteps. Big game hunters called them "spoor" didn't they? And in the slimy pounce of mud were, she felt sure, black hairs, and round the hair bases clots of flaked skin.

She had done her share of that sick nursing that falls to every kindly and efficient woman. She wasn't a molly-coddle that went white and into the vapours at blood or vomit. But she felt a nausea that almost gave her vertigo when, forcing herself to bend down and certify these clots of mud that almost ran into the broad stain of her brother's shoes, she found she could not doubt the evidence of her eyes.

She did not dare touch; or even be found—like a witch peering for omens. Nor could she ask anyone else. Didn't they see, what she saw, in the mud stains?

She remembered her old Scotch nurse seeing the oddest things

in the leaves at the bottom of her tea-cup. No one else could see them, but time and again the queer old Highland body did seem, in this homely, ridiculous way, to get some hint of oncoming events—generally uncanny.

The only possible way was to provoke the maids to question. They were certainly provoked but only to question her consider-ateness of them. Even telling them to use carefully a mop with disinfectant, and to wash it in boiling water after, aroused no curiosity. But only conviction that she had become cantankerous and was taking out her pains at their expense.

The vain hope that one of them would turn to her and ask Why? Why? was behind her last attempt at reprimand. Yes, it was the only way left open to bring along with her a contingent of humanity, the sane, kindly, grumbling-at-trifles, mercifully blind humanity whom she was leaving; to urge them a little farther along with her on the dark way she must now go.

Naturally she left till the last her brother.

Then one evening—it was dark, still, foggy, the air supersaturated—he had come in and remarked, "All Saints tomorrow —that is a feast in which all can join, Arabians and Christians. For it is the feast of those who have gone beyond controversy."

She waited, and then asked, "Do you recall the last Dean's installation? I mean as Archdeacon? It was on All Saints, I remember."

He looked at her oddly and then with a smile in which question overlaid irritation, 'Well, are you raising that because tonight it is All-hallows Eve?"

She could see the slight twist of sarcasm that spoiled the smile at the corners of his mouth and the finer narrowed lines round the eye that revealed a deeper uneasiness. And, with the same clearness, she could see the small, dark, sorely-diseased animal— that no longer seemed to fear the light so much, so long as it might keep close in his shadow. It lay close by his respectably gaitered foot and at this moment as she watched it, it lifted its bloodshot eyes to watch him, then settled down slowly to lick its running ulcers.

He passed one fine scholarly hand over another. Then smoothed from his face the slight pucker of fretfulness and, feeling that he had shown an irrational irritation, added, "The Feast is archaeologically very interesting—far more ancient, of course, than the Christian Church." But, to himself he reflected, "Women need anniversaries. Their minds live—at least when they are mature—so much in the past. Religion is their necessity, and our profession. A professional's attitude is confessedly better than the best amateur's. Though amateur means lover, obviously the good sense of mankind has seen that understanding is superior to devotion." Then, feeling that so much educative insight should not be denied where it was clearly needed, he completed his reverie aloud.

"The Christian Church's strength lay in its emotional appeal to slaves and barbarians. As soon as it would win the educated, it had to ally itself with Platonism. Further, it is now clear that we owe the incorporation of Aristotelianism into our theological thinking precisely because the Arabians, possessing themselves of 'The Philosopher' whom we had lost, compelled us in the eighteenth century to arm ourselves with the same intellectual equipment. No: Religion cannot live on emotionalism. Indeed is there anything so tedious, even disquieting—than the devotion of others! If calm it appears as perfunctory; if fervent, histrionic."

He was enjoying himself at two levels of consciousness. There was die almost self-conscious pleasure of practising periods. Since he had been Dean, his preaching schedule being increased, he had found to his surprise that he enjoyed seeing whether he could transpose his writer's style into telling speech. Just below this level, that was using his sister as a sounding-board, was concealed a secondary, less recognized, more satisfying feeling, that he was demonstrating the superiority of his intellectual Laodi-ceanism to her uninformed faith, the ascendancy of ability over character.

He did notice that she did not, as he had expected, reply. She surely should have? When had he last failed, when he tried, to make her retort? He liked her to, for lately he had begun to be entertained by her defences. They showed that irrelevance, that lack of real insight that must be present in a mind unschooled in logic but which had its quaint humour and gave him further opening for his wit. The misgivings, however, were deep enough only to reach the surface as irritability.

"And, remember, our emotional faith found, as an administrative fact, that the fire of love was far below the temperature required to make men's wills and minds plastic. Resolution and intelligence were bent into orthodoxy not by a metaphorical but a very real flame."

With a pulpit gesture he pointed his hand at the blazing hearth, then let open palm and fingers fall, to show that the issue was settled and might be let drop. She might be silent now. There was no answer to that. It was a telling close. He felt, therefore, actually a twinge of surprised irritability when he heard his sister check an exclamation and then say, "Your fingers nearly touched the floor!"

'Well, you have always, if not boasted, been prepared to prove that, as we used to say, 'you could eat off that lady's floors.' "

Again he had tried to be nice but he could not help feeling that she was oddly on edge.

"At her age," he sub-whispered to himself, "natural, natural."

"Charles!"

Her voice, there was no doubt of it, was not normal. Besides, she never called him by his name unless there was something, something that she was steeling herself to tell him. That was the

tone in which she had spoken when she came with the telegram in her hand to say that their mother was dead.

"Charles, are you sure that everything is all right? I mean, are you certain that your improvement has been complete, complete recovery? That you shouldn't, couldn't, do something more?"

It was, of necessity, a desperate cast, to reach out and make contact with him. But she was amazed at the completeness of his reaction.

"Laetitia, what are you talking about?"

"I mean ... I mean . . ." she stumbled on the wretched little word that always signals the breakdown of understanding between two minds, two spirits who have nothing but words with which to touch each other. "I only mean that just before we went away and indeed for some time previous you had been terribly run-down, and I was just a little anxious. . . ."

"Of course I naturally, fully, remember that I was overtired after all the changes which we had to effect here. That I haven't referred to the matter is, you must know, natural to me. It is wholly out of character for a nature such as mine to complain. Minor ills are only aggravated by speaking of them. He was a weak character or a poor observer, probably both, who gave us the feeble and inaccurate counsel that a sorrow shared—still less a nervous vexation—is by sharing halved!"

He shifted complacently but did not trouble to look at her.

"And I think I may say that it argues well for my natural resilience that a brief week of active other-interest—the intellectual's real re-creation—brought me back to complete tone."

He half turned toward her and his voice did show concern of a sort, the sort that very little analysis is needed to find its root in self-love's fear of losing a servant hard to replace.