The Black Fox A Novel Of The Seventies (22 page)

The next morning she took his mail. For some days he had refused to deal with it. So she had answered those letters which she could, leaving the others until she could have some idea as to what was to happen. This morning there was one in an unfamiliar hand from Cambridge. She opened it. It was from a colleague in Arabic, of whom she was pretty sure she had heard him speak, a Dr. McPhail. He was inviting her brother to a small conference which he and some fellow scholars found that they could bring together at Cambridge.

"It is quite informal," the letter ran. "That accounts for my giving such brief notice. Indeed it may well be impossible for you to be present at so short indication. I hope, however, that you may be able to make an effort to attend for I am sure that you would find it worth your while. It was because I did not wish our few outstanding Arabianists to miss an unusual opportunity that I am writing to you. The presence of some foreign scholars in this country is an occasion which I was loath that you should miss. And I am sure their visit here would be enriched if they could have a few days of discussion with you. Indeed our small group \vill feel incomplete without your presence."

She looked in at her brother. He was still sunk in a sleep of such stillness that she was sure to disturb it would only harm. When he woke she was certain he would—as happens when the mind has so long been unaware and perhaps absent from the body—need some time to recollect himself. After her small breakfast she found he was still sleeping. Then, finding the house breathless, she took a few turns up and down the pavement outside. She was just thinking of going in again when she heard "Good morning" and Dr. Wilkes was beside her. He looked at her with kindly shrewdness. Then, without hesitation, he remarked,

"I wish you could help me to understand the health of the Precincts a little better. We seem to be going through some kind of cyclic depression for quite a while. That seems clear. But for the cause I am at a complete loss. I used to be a great believer in water infections. Sometimes there are slow epidemics, with low fevers and general decline. Certainly we lie too low here to be sure that our water supply is above any level of possible contamination. But"—he paused—*Tm not satisfied that the basic trouble is enteric." He looked quickly at her, masking his enquiry with a smile. "You would be surprised, Miss Throcton, to the extent I have strayed from orthodox diagnosis in trying to account for the indispositions"—he chose the word without satisfaction—"that have lately attacked us."

Then, his face frankly serious and in his voice something that was almost an appeal for help, he asked, "The Dean?" adding, 'Whenever he has spoken with me, about the health of the Close, he himself has rightly boasted that he has kept me professionally at bay."

She realized that this was the next step. She herself, she felt

sure, had done what she had to do and now someone else perhaps could and would carry the issue further.

"I think, Dr. Wilkes, you may be right. But I am as much in the dark as you as to his condition. My brother is gravely indisposed, of that there can be little doubt, more gravely"—her voice was low and without accent—"than was his, his predecessor.. . ."

"I gather you think it would be little use my seeing him?''

"He has not suggested it," she answered, "and I am sure you understand that without his leave I would prefer not to do so."

'Yes." he allowed with quiet frankness. "In many cases if the patient himself has not called in aid, for us to offer it but alarms. Besides, can a profession which depends so much on chemistry and now increasingly on sheer carving, can we minister to a mind " He stopped, leaving out the following adjective.

She felt she could reward that friendliness that could be so frank by asking his advice. She felt absolutely alone. And the actual details of her brother's state she could not imagine sharing with even a close friend or relative, not with their parents had they been alive—they had so admired this their successful son.

"My brother," she heard herself saying, 'lias had an invitation to attend a conference. . . ."

"Do you know I was going to suggest that," Dr. Wilkes gave her his full support. "Get him away, yes, even if he seems quite sick. One thing I do feel sure of. This place has somehow dragged him down."

"It's to a quiet conference of some scholars at Cambridge."

"Couldn't be better," he agreed. "Couldn't be better. No physical exertion; the favourite interests of his mind will be entertained; and the place will bear for him pleasant memories of his youth and academic successes. I wish you a happy return," he said, bowing and leaving her.

Dr. Wilkes seemed to have been a reliable prescriptionist even without seeing the patient. For when Miss Throcton went in to

see her patient it was hard to disbelieve that some slight sign of cure was already apparent. Her brother was awake, sitting up calm and self-possessed, able indeed not merely to mask things but to say quietly to her,

"The one chance I now see is that I get away, put some distance between myself and this involvement. Then even if I still remain incapable of sustained thought, I may be able to comprehend what has befallen me."

She showed him the letter. He read it slowly, then looking up without a smile, or any relief of the gravity of his face, remarked, 'Tes, this is clearly the next step."

There were three days before they should leave. They passed without incident; at least within the house. He still slept in her sitting room, but he did sleep. And she was learning to enter at least a half state during the quieter hours of the day. She told her servants that he was suffering from a slight non-infectious attack which would yield to quiet and some little nursing. He spent almost the whole day, as well, in her sitting room. He evidently felt safest there. Apparently, too, the prospect of getting away had in some manner sufficiently strengthened his mind that he seemed less open, perhaps for the moment immune, to the molestation. The only event that befell her during these three days of waiting took place early one afternoon when she had gone out to sit for a quarter of an hour under the limes in the Close. It was clear that he was uneasy lest she should go into their garden. The place she had chosen was a quiet spot as it was a corner of the Precincts which led only to the Palace. There was no danger that any of the inmates passing by would engage her in talk and inquisitive enquiries. And not only quiet, it was now cool and fragrant, some of the lime blossom being still scattered on the ground and a little remaining in the trees themselves. Bees were busy with it. Scent, sound and light, the three memory-senses, seemed blended into a chord recalling all peace-

ful scenes and episodes. Here was the true, quiet atmosphere of things; this was the climate of reality; bright, unhurried, serene —even when late summer and early autumn had begun to recall it to repose.

She started, though, when a voice near her said, "Oh, excuse me Miss Throcton, I was just on my way across to the Deanery to see whether I might talk with you for a few minutes?"

Looking up she saw the Bishop's Chaplain.

'The Bishop was intending to call himself when he was summoned away to London earlier than he had expected...."

Young Halliwell paused. He was evidently a little nervous.

'Won't you sit down?"

She made room for him on the green bench. She looked at him. He certainly had good eyes, not yet narrowed by too much judging of men and lit with the humour that can play because it still laughs with people, not at them. But now the corners of his mouth, which also had to acquire the narrowed diplomatic line, showed his lack of ease. His unguardedness, the fact that he made no attempt to raise a mask of defensive discretion, appealed to her.

'"You are calling to inquire about my brother's health?"

And as he nodded frankly to her half-question, she went on, "It would also seem to appear, would it not, as though preferment might cause a species of vertigo."

There was almost a smile in her voice if not on her lips, but she was grave and sad as she added, "Perhaps few can climb up and look down from even the lowest pinnacle of the Temple without risking this giddiness."

"My father"—he was answering her, she noticed gratefully, with the same detached frankness with which she had found it possible to speak—"My father often used to say that the wisest men he had ever known used to tell him, The full truth may never shine in your heart so long as you have any power over another!' They thought, it seems, that power itself was bad, or at least must almost inevitably blind you."

"Who were these wise men?" She smiled. "Surely they must have been Wise men from the East'?"

He glanced at her. 'They certainly were no kings with golden gifts. Indeed they were, I believe, as afraid of money as of power!"

'That sounds even more Eastern." she replied. "I gather from reading our Cathedral's history that not since the Middle Ages, and then perhaps not very consistently, have we shunned rank and salary, provided they came from recognized sources. How much simpler life would be if we did!" She paused. "But yon want news of my brother. I am hoping a few days' absence—he is to attend a conference on Arabic studies in Cambridge—will permit him to throw off this indisposition."

She was aware that he was watching her, not impertinently, to read more in her looks than her voice might be willing to tell, but with a real question, an honest concern.

'"Yes," she replied looking at him, "I have had a word with Dr. Wilkes. He is sure that a brief change of scene would be the best thing."

She saw that he had noticed precisely what she had said—that Dr. Wilkes had, in fact, only given a general consent and not been asked for specific medical advice. She saw further that her questioner was beginning to blush. He was charged, it was dear, to obtain information and he had the intelligence to judge what he was being given; but he certainly had no liking for any task that might be construed as prying. The sympathy which the gentle elderly must always feel for the young, as the juveniles begin to enter upon mankind's constant task of keeping charity and truth linked, was suddenly doubled in Miss Throcton by the sense that this boy, young enough to be her son, somehow sympathized by intuition with her.

"Yes," she said again, "It is baffling by any medical standards, It is nothing physical. It is nervous strain."

Of course that was such understatement as to be almost sup'pressio veri. But even if she was sure in her own mind, how could this young modern mind understand that a nightmare might be real; and what must be his judgement of an elderly woman who told him so. After a moment in which he had looked at the ground, he turned again and faced her.

"Please don't think I'm absurd"—he hesitated—"but the Bishop is uneasy, too, you see." She nodded. "I know," he continued with more definiteness. "It's what the world calls 'just a run of bad luck.' But, don't you think that religious people really have no right to talk about chance? Whatever happens must be God's Will for us? It's to teach us something, surely? After all, we would never have learnt any Natural Laws if we had said of every run of similar events, "They are simply contingencies, coincidences. Post hoc is never propter hoc?"

"And sometimes"—she added her question to his—"sometimes we can see the hidden causes which have set in motion the very evident, but seemingly inexplicable, results?"

He nodded. She was silent, too, for a moment. But he evidently had followed her thought when she continued, "We are free, of course. We can initiate—I mean we ourselves must often be the cause of the things that befall us. I know that sounds trite, self-evident, I mean. . . ."

He continued for her, "We can become involved in certain, certain moods. , . ." He stumbled, then went on, 'What I am trying to get clear in my mind is, I think, a question. I remember a remark I heard Dr. Wilkes make at a conference to which the Bishop took me where a number of professional men met together for discussion of social trends; Dr. Wilkes' point, as far as I recall, was that infection, physical infection, seems to be a thing we must view increasingly as pervasive, general, almost a climate. I know what he said interested me because then our bodily health would depend less on disinfectants than on keeping up our general resistance. He meant it, I believe, to point to a link between his work and ours. If so, then at times we might, by worry, by resentment, by any negative mood, let our mental resistance become lowered."

"And then" she concluded, "the ill infection breaks in, inundates."

'We do need soul-physicians." was his conclusion.

She smiled frankly at him. "Thank you for being so confidential with me. You are treating me as an associate of the Faculty!"

He did not, however, smile back at her. Indeed his face was now more clouded. But though overcast his expression was more open than before. He had from his first days in the Close felt an intuitive liking for this quiet woman, of his mothers generation, with no children of her own, taking care of that forbidding brother, ready to let him completely eclipse her and ready, it seemed, with the same silent charity, to let Close gossip and its small petty competitions apparently go by. Naturally he had taken her quietude as serenity. Even the most informative of the Cathedral wives left Miss Throcton's character alone. He had been told, as soon as he came into residence, that, whereas Miss So-and-So was lively and Mrs. So-and-So very conservative, of Miss Throcton it was only said, with uncommon agreement and a certain finality, that she was "remote."

"Sometimes, Miss Throcton, I am sorry to say, I get discouraged. I know it is wrong of me. I know I have been blessed, favoured. But somehow I thought it was going to be different. "

'What?" She knew, but knew also that he needed encouragement.

"I have been fortunate, as the world says and as it counts. I

am sure you know my loyalty to the Bishop. He is a wonderful man under whom to work, learn about administration and the understanding of men. And this lovely spot to work in. . . ."

He looked at the perfect blend of cultured comfort and antiquarian picturesqueness which a well-kept Cathedral Close then achieved, all the charm of the past distilled and all its inconveniences strained away.