The Black Fox A Novel Of The Seventies (8 page)

ticular patient's will-to-believe-he-would-be-well. The hearty, rousing challenge given, say, to an ailing squire: the careful summing-up of the points-in-favour, advisable with a sick fellow-physician—why, there were as many styles of encouragement as there were people who could sicken. The first step, and often the conclusive one, was to recognize the type you were facing and to take care to try and talk the language (yes, indeed, and employ the style and accent) that it understood and approved.

Of course you liked to be taken for a gentleman; but it was not merely the snobbery of the times that made Dr. Wilkes try to frame his sentences like Canon Throcton's. He would, he knew, help the Close's health more if he spoke their tongue (and so made them concede he might be worth their respect) than if he simply looked at theirs, shook his head and silently scrawled a prescription. But it was a nice art and a slow, exacting study this winning of confidence. He often remarked to his wife that Sugar of Sympathy incautiously administered to one who was suffering from what the Psalmist calls a "proud stomach," would often cause so violent an acid reaction that your soothing sweet would be thrown up in your face as though you had offered a bitter insult,

"Pride lives in constant fear of Patronage." He remembered the saying as now he watched. True enough, the Canon did not wish to be sympathized with. Very well, another tack must be taken. Yes, that would do, he must be informed. Even a Pope will listen with attention to a spy.

"Yes, yes, as I was saying, quite a normal reaction. And, to a medical man, interesting in one way, and clear sailing in another. Just a cutaneous reaction."

"You mean that you will have him on his feet and out on his rather larger rounds, quite soon?"

"Oh, Mr. Canon, please don't quote me as a prophet. That, again ? is your province."

"Humph: the Prophets and the priests never got on well, as far as I know. And, in the end, we seem to have put them out of business—to put you in!"

"Oh no! Non digni swmus. Besides, all science shuns forecast-ing."

"But you can foretell somewhat—after all you have to gauge probabilities, don't you?"

"Well, if I were a betting man, I'd take a modest wager that if the patient will follow the regime I have proposed hell be out and about in a week, ten days or a fortnight. You see I can't be definite, but such are, I'd put it, reasonable hopes. Things run their courses, you know, and illness and health have their cycles."

They parted with that. The Canon was therefore a little surprised and almost as much displeased when that very afternoon as he was crossing the Close he should be buttonholed again by Dr. Wilkes. A distant bow was quite sufficient. Because they had had a fairly long exchange on what was almost a matter of business there was no need for a man hardly a gentleman to try and enlarge the acquaintance.

"I feel I owe you an apology." The well-chosen words smoothed a little his not really very ruffled mood, especially when to them was added,

"I really wanted a word with you because, I own, this morning, in good faith, I made a mistake. You asked me to forecast; and, within the limits to which you permitted me to confine my views, I did feel fairly sure. But it shows how dark the future is even when one tries to be informed."

"Yes, yes!"

"In fact the Archdeacon's state puzzles me. And I'm speaking in confidence because, as the Bishop is up in London and the Dean is so largely bedridden, you are the person in control."

The appeal had gained attention. The "I trust there is nothing

grave to report?" certainly showed interest (the Doctor was glad, with his quick eye and really kind if cautious heart, to notice) and something like real concern. "That's fine" he said to himself, "Yes, Fll trust him, for he might well have shown some slight satisfaction. He must have heen quite sore about his passing over."

Aloud he continued, "You know how puzzling to us—as I said this morning—and interesting, are all mind-body relations. The queer connection between, for instance, the nerve ends just under the skin and the moods and mental states of the man as a whole. Many, how many we really can't know, are just disturbances caused by just nervousness, you recall my saying that?"

'Yes, yes." The two further assents showed rising impatience. Though the Doctor was nervous himself, for some reason, he now tried to hurry on.

"And others are infections—some again quite slight; one or two, on the other hand, quite grave—for instance erysipelas— quite. Well, Mr. Canon, I'm mentioning all this rather confidential and professional matter to you, because it seems to me just possible that the Archdeacon may have picked up some infection."

"How?" The question had an edge of sharpness on it.

"Oh, in a dozen different ways—using someone else's toilet articles, leaning on a cushion in a railway carriage compartment. Once there is a strong strain of infection, well anyone might pick up such a thing anywhere. For example, one of the choir might, by touching the same towel or something of that sort, pass on the germ. It would probably fail to make a lesion on the hand. But who can avoid for long touching their head with their hand. An infection of that sort, of very little virulence in its liost' (if I may use our technical term) invading a system in a state of some strain—well, we don't know anything about resistance, really—

once such a toxin gets hold it may suddenly flare up and the condition become, well, baffling."

He felt he was talking too much, but evidently his listener was not impatient yet. He hurried on hastily—apologetically. "You see I thought I ought to ask—and you are the proper person—that all towels and such things be carefully washed. Of course, if there is no further trouble in a week or so, we shall know that, whatever the danger was, it has at least spared everyone else."

He was getting ready to take his leave on the bright note, the well-known exit line of successful doctors, so much more important even than the bright entry. But the Canon actually held him with, "I shall certainly give orders that what you have suggested shall be done—a very right request and I share your hope that we shall all escape the contagion. But I would like you, as we are acting in this matter now in something of a joint capacity, to tell me something of the actual condition of the Archdeacon?"

"I'm hopeful, yes, I'm hopeful ... for the face is still clear— it is certainly not the usual erysipeloid syndrome. But, but the top of the head is severely attacked. Of course.. .," Now that he was speaking freely he had begun really to speak to himself; the censored confidence is of all human communications the hardest to achieve for we are either secretive or quite unguarded. "Of course, you will say, why not suspect herpes? But there again, has one ever known a herpetic case which brought about such swift and complete alopecia?"

Had he not, by then, been looking at the ground, as men do when they are turning over their thoughts, had he thought that the Canon could really help him in his diagnostic doubt, he certainly would not have been helped. On the contrary, he would have been considerably distracted. For his really quite considerable psychological knowledge would have found itself faced with quite another question.in the face he would have seen.

'Well, well" He roused himself and raised his eyes looking across the lawn to the house of his patient. "We are now doing all we can and must wait, wait on the vis -medicatrix naturae, always by far the greatest of our allies, the organism's basic will to live."

He bowed and left. But the Canon himself did not move for a few moments. Then he said to himself in clearer tones each time, three times and slowly with summary earnestness, "Pure coincidence, absolutely pure coincidence." Then he turned and began to walk toward his house. But he still found it necessary to say a fourth time, as he had reached the door and was putting the latch-key into the lock, "Really one of those absurd coincidences. It is the kind of contingency which makes the ignorant and credulous mind,—the uneducated that has never had a grounding in mathematics, still less in the calculus of probabilities—imagine that there is evidence for such fancies as thought transference. My poor old Sufis, it is true"—he was now in the hall taking off his great-coat—"thought such things could happen. But we must defend them so far that even they confined such action to great wizards and great saints. Besides, they had the transmitting or refracting medium in the thickly opalescent atmosphere of faith."

As he washed his hands—and with something more than his usual careful cleansing—he looked at himself in the mirror that hung over the basin. He scanned the features carefully and then smiled deliberately at the rather grim grey face that was looking out at him.

"You really must polish up your sense of humour," he remarked to the reflection. "This is one of those events on which all humour is based. Luck, or as we who have had the advantage of an education at Cambridge know to call it, contingency, working at its great loom of probabilities, spinning its great wheels of causality, brings opposite to each other two completely unrelated

events: We are amused, not surprised, still less dismayed. Dermatitis appears in Case A shortly after, or really in point of fact quite a number of days after, a purely private and personal psychotherapy is worked by B to humour his own emotional sense of fun. Post hoc, fropter hoc, the commonest diagnostic mistake of half-trained minds. How my medico consultant would laugh at the superstition of the Church, still lurking behind a front of scholarship. I should lose all status in his eyes."

Then he put the smile a whole wrinkle wider until it was almost a grin. "And you must confess," as he turned from his leering reflection, "that as a joke it is really an uncommonly good one, in that perfect ill-taste that makes retailing forever impossible and private consumption all the more to be relished. Humour to be good can never be too extravagant and this gets its flavour because it is about an absolute impossibility, pure fantasy, pure farce."

The last words were said with an emphasis that made the slam of the door come as a fitting close.

7

THE SUBJECT, HOWEVER, FOLLOWED HIM IN TO TEA. HE OUGHT to have suspected that the news of the Archdeacon's involuntary tonsure would already have circled the Close, at least on that inner circuit of the Cathedral ladies. But his sister's rather quickly sympathetic comment and sigh, "Poor Archdeacon." roused, like a cat's-paw gust on a lake, a sudden resentment.

"A good verbal inspirationist such as he ought to see some fulfillment of prophecy or a return of the plagues of Egypt because of our infidelity." He added a chuckle as an alibi'against charges of uncharitableness.

"Oh don't say that!" Instead of warning him that he had not succeeded in disguising some malice, her rejoinder only made his ill will break out on her.

"Oh don't be a fool, Laetitia! Can you really be taking my jest seriously! 'Oh don't say that.'" he parodied her tone. "You would think that this wasn't nineteenth century England. How thin is the layer of culture. How few set minds compose the rock of reason covering the lava flow of superstition. And then women venture to say they should be given the vote!"

His sister sighed again. Though this time it was more silently it was certainly not less sincerely. She was sorry for the Simp-kinses. Her conscience upbraided her for not having understood that the Archdeacon's wife had been gauche that day she called because she was already anxious. She, as hostess, should have put her guest at her ease—all the more if she felt herself to be her visitor's social superior. But in any case her brother would not have been likely to maintain the intimacy they had been enjoying. After all, she reflected, the fair weather was too good to last, like their summer climate described with some wit by a French scholar who had visited them the year before—"Three lovely days and then a thunderstorm." Well, she had had, during this spell of mental weather, rather more than that and she could be thankful. Her admiration of her brother was as deep as it was wisely silent and her sympathy was not less. She still suspected that his disappointment over the Archdeaconry had been all the more severe because suppressed and she was sure that both his past amiability and present outburst were successive symptoms, though there was something in the whole matter that puzzled her to the verge of constant uneasiness.

He had left the room after his outburst, leaving tea and toast untouched. As he strode along to his study he muttered, "J ust a small experiment that was really negative—though it would seem to the uneducated to be positive. The therapeutic value failed to emerge, through one of those one in a decillion chances. Well the thing was first to last really a joke. And there's certainly not the slightest need for a sane man to draw false conclusions and see utterly unreal connections. Exceptions prove the rule and disprove and discredit the fool."

He had reached his room. The curtains were drawn, the fire well settled, the quiet green glass shade of his reading lamp set on his desk inviting him to come into port He could berth himself securely between these two reassuring lights. Here he might enjoy undisturbed that pleasant play with words which the literary are allowed instead of the tedious limitations of "Patience" with which the unliterary lonely must pass their empty time. The scene was both tempting and soothing. True, he hesitated a moment by the big bookcase with the built-in drawers under it, but only for a moment. Then he drew up his chair and began his game with the ever-growing index-cards—so much richer than the weary limitations of the playing-card pack.

Dr. Wilkes' faith worked, or his prophecy was sound. It is unlikely that his physic had much to do with it. An astrologer could quite as well have said that the amelioration was due to the change in the moon. Certainly as soon as the sickle, cold and thin as a curved icicle, was seen low in the sky, where the west was still red from a frosty sunset, the Archdeacon was up and about. His hair, however, did not return. Bishop Bendwell who had been away throughout the little crisis, now back at the Palace, tried the joke about the tonsure. It was wise that a Father-in-God chose to be the laughing comforter. His advances were received so stonily that his second card, about God tempering the wind to tie shorn lamb and hence we might expect a mild Christmas, was wisely left unplayed.