The Black Fox A Novel Of The Seventies (26 page)

'This time it was I who touched you, so that you might see,

yes as clearly as I saw and see. That, I am now permitted to do to whom I please, for whom I believe it would serve. But the fact that you can see when you touch him (no one else could receive vision—light or dark—through him), that is because you are willing still to love him, in spite of your knowledge."

"That means, then, that there is still a chance?"

"You realize what that may mean?"

"I repeat, I am willing. Could I endure to see him go down, if there remained any possible thing I might do to guard, screen him from that fate? How could I not be willing."

'Tfou have said it the third time. And now it is accepted. I will help. But my help will not appear to you, until the end." • The Dean was already coming back for them, accompanied by Dr. McPhail. Together the quartet made for the college courts and passing through two of them finally reached the main gate leading to the street. The big doors were open and the small tunnel was dusty yellow with a sloping cone of sunlight. As they reached that Dr. McPhail stopped, "I and the Sheik will say good-bye to you here."

He put out his hand, took Miss Throcton's and then the Dean's, bowed to them both and stepped back to make way for the Arab to make his farewell. He put out both his hands taking both the Dean's and his sister's at the same time. For a moment, as he so did, he brought the hand of the brother and sister together in his double hand-clasp. Then he bent his head, murmuring, "May the Power of the Most High overshadow you with His invincible protection," and drew back toward the court whither his host was already leading the way.

"Rather touching that gesture of Oriental courtesy in farewell, and even the theological language, which is after all embedded in our laconic 'Good-bye,' takes on a certain grace and almost conviction when said with such presence, don't you think?" her brother asked as they went along the street to their lodgings.

Then added, as she Lad not replied, "You mustn't mind that kind of elaboration of our simpler manners." A slight touch of impatience rose, however, in his tone as he concluded, "But I see my interest in the customs of other peoples cannot take your mind from the, of course, quite rightful observation of your own. I suppose ladies must wear these trains, better than the crinoline, but they seem to take if anything more management."

She looked up at him and seeing that he was looking at her, she smiled, "Yes, I thought that the hem of my dress had caught."

'Well, we managed to get quite a good deal off our hands at the conference. Though it was an extemporized affair it was certainly well worth while." He was following his obviously self-satisfied thoughts.

"Yes, yes."

Her agreement pleased him though he did not restrain himself from remarking that she could hardly estimate the amount of technical information that had been exchanged. "I wonder," he summed up, just as they came to their rooms, "whether some time in the not too far future it would be possible to obtain a long enough vacation to visit the Near East. Both McPhail and the Sheilc tell me that not only is there so much worth seeing but that a scholar can find in the libraries of Cairo and Alexandria, now that they have been somewhat ordered, and in other places, documents that throw much light on linguistic and other problems. I have a feeling that the Sheik would not find a visitor such as myself at all unwelcome and of no little interest."

HER BROTHER S FREEDOM FROM ALL APPARENT STRAIN SHOWED no sign of leaving him when they arrived back at the Deanery. Without question or explanation he went to the Cathedral and he made no comments as to the way the stalls were being kept or the choir garnished. He spoke briefly to her about his work, remarked that he had received much encouragement—not merely refreshment—by attending the conference, and would now prosecute his studies with renewed assurance as to their worth. He settled into regular hours of study punctuated by as regular attendances in his stall. Except that occasionally he would appear for a moment a little blank and ask her what he had just been saying, he seemed to her much as he had always been, perhaps a trifle less inclined to let satire tinge his accent or pride show through a phrase.

She was not surprised that when she passed Dr. Wilkes in the street she was not able to gain right of passage merely with a bow. He was honestly pleased with what he called the complete improvement.

"Change," he said brightly, "is so often treated by moralists, and in most sermons, as something that must be always for tbe

worse—until of course the final one for heaven. And even then we poor physicians are treated as having permitted one more failure! But change of air and change of place, as I think I mentioned to you earlier, I have found among the soundest allies of health. Here we are being given a vivid and most welcome example, are we not!"

He paused and as she only bowed slightly, added, "Indeed I would venture further: Mr. Dean looks to me as though a weight had been lifted from him. He seems to me to be not only in his old health but actually to appear younger."

There was of course almost a question in his voice.

The "I believe you are right" with which she closed their conference, disappointed him a little. As they went their ways he remarked to himself, "But can this be, as I had begun to suspect earlier it might be, a cyclic thing—as one subject gains resistance the next falls a prey, as one conquers the infection he passes it on to one who has so far escaped?"

He had no doubts that he had been right when after a fortnight he met Miss Throcton again in the Close. "I wonder that she does not call me in?" was his not unnatural self-interrogation.

The question never crossed her mind, though she was not unaware that it would probably occur to anyone who met her. She had not expected things to be otherwise and was indeed grateful that the two weeks, that had been specified as the space during which the molestation would find no purchase on her brother, had gone quietly. Both she, as well as he, had seemed to be under the cover of a calm that was so secure as to feel almost anaesthetic. She had found herself incapable of thinking of past or future. She could not rouse either regret or foreboding so long as she was held in that almost animal peace. They had parted from the Sheik in Cambridge on a Friday afternoon. That had been the seventh of September.

The actual day of the autumnal equinox opened as calm as its predecessors and even more still. The trees now were wearing considerable yellow but as yet no touch of the frost-given red. "It is even more peaceful than Cambridge." her brother had remarked at breakfast. Cook, being more practical and food-absorbed, told her, when she went into the kitchen for the morning consultation, that harvest was yet to be lifted and rain was feared. She had answered that farmers were always pessimists and asked whether they oughn't be getting another cat. This brought out Cook's own pessimism,

" 'We ought never to have lost Tiss. As fine a cat as ever I've seen; quite an aristocrat. It was all that horrid dog-fox coming in. When I was with hunting folk they'd say, Fox in the covert, good: Fox in the house, bad.' "

Miss Throcton left the kitchen silently and when she was gone Cook added herself to those who shook heads and said, "Bad to start low with die leaf in the fall."

Anyhow she and her farming friends did not have to wait long to be proved right about the weather. By noon it had clouded. The clouds did not roll up from the west. They formed first as a curdle of grey in the vault of blue, a curdle that grew steadily denser and darker while across it appeared still darker bands, almost black. Then, without hesitation, as though it had been timed and planned to a moment, as though the sound had precipitated it, just as the two forty-five chime sounded, the chime which set the bell tolling for Evensong at three, the rain began. It was from the first drop a steady deluge, straight, unswayed by draught or eddy, as though fine lines of unbroken water, and not drops, were running staunchlessly onto the flooding earth from the heavens, which had become a vast sagging perforated bag* Through this grey curtain of ten thousand liquid threads, as Miss Throcton stood looking out of the south parlor window, it was now hardly possible to see with any distinctness the looming mass of the Cathedrals West Front. The ear, too, received all other sounds—as happens when going under an anaesthetic— through a web of steady hissing. Though the sun must of course be still well above the horizon, the light under this depth of cloud had become no more than submerged shadow.

She stood looking out at the great swamping Cathedral lawn. She had rung for tea and to tell the servants to light a fire, the gas chandelier, and also to bring a couple of lamps. She had caught sight of her brother under a big umbrella, making his way from the north porch as Evensong was ended. She noticed that the pallid gleam of the water running on the flat stretched dome of the umbrella, the tassels of rain that swept down from its edges as he strode through the downpour—all made his figure a confusion of greys and vague blacks.

The full, long coat which he was wearing over his clerical frock-coat and "apron" flapped, too, around his heels as he hurried across. The lining, evidently, must have caught in his foot sometime, perhaps now, as he was almost trotting. She must look to it as soon as he came in; it might trip'him. But, as he turned across the small Cathedral lane, to gain the shelter of the house, she saw that the black moving object at his heels, though so close to him as to seem part of his coat or shadow, had a life of its own and a way of its own—every now and then, with a kind of playfulness, it would frisk up. Once or twice she thought that, as a puppy will, it almost had his hand in its mouth or at least could give him a lick. Still, as he entered the room, she was able to say to his not unexpected remark, "This is the Deluge!"

"We are fortunate in having an Ark." And a queer, perhaps desperate sense of humor made her go on to herself, "And so must not refuse hospitality to the animals."

Surely it was better to joke as long as humour, that strange anaesthetic vapour, floated up through the mind. And surely there was some animal in the room. The lamps had been brought

in, the chandelier spread its small bright fans of hissing gas, the fire had taken and was as radiant. Whatever had followed her brother into the room had no liking for the light. But it had not left. Through the hiss of the rain outside she could hear something panting close at hand; and, through the lapping of the flames, the sound as a creature licking.

The drowning of the daylight and the disappearance of the dry earth under a quicksilver-like deposit of water had been similarly watched from the one other edifice in the Close that was higher in social status, though still closer to sea level, than the Deanery.

"One feels some flavour of Lot's relief as he entered Zoar and then was safely able to glance back at the mire-pit engulfment of his former home," the Bishop remarked to his Chaplain as, having won to the refuge of his Palace, after a shower-bath scuttle from the Cathedral, he now went to the window.

"This would have extinguished the Cities of the Plain!"

Young Halliwell, like a good alter-ego, took what he judged to be his master's mood.

"I suppose it's better to be drowned than burnt," the Bishop continued. Then the meteorological mood damping his spirits, he added, "Dante enlarged the traditional high-temperature hell with the contrast of a sub-zero inferno. But eschatological invention has yet to give us a submerged satanic realm wherein the sinner will always be in utmost agony of suffocation and always sinking helplessly into a darker depth, a more awful and stygian abyss, crushed in upon and tormentingly constricted by ever more frightful pressures."

"Sir!" Young Halliwell smilingly shuddered at the strange little verbal exercise in redemptorist rhetoric. "May I ask, could you be an incarnation of that poetical but minatory preacher, the late Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. John Donne? I had not suspected

from your gentle sway of the pastoral staff, a very sceptre of peace in your hand, that you could turn and let fly such a neat bolt of apocalyptic thunder!"

The Bishop took the cheering amiably and patted his lieutenant on the shoulder, "That style, my son, won't come back as long as we are prosperous. Yet, maybe, we are more neurotic than were godly folk in my father's time. They took their brimstone with very little treacle, kept it down and thrived on it— when our light digestions would never stomach such hot salve."

"But I often wonder"—he sighed, looking with unfocused eyes at the sight-dazing rain-curtains—"I often wonder whether we have been wholly right in going over so heartily, uncritically to progress, gradualism and inevitable amelioration. The weather and our lives are both of them more cataclysmic than we like to allow. Yes, I sometimes wonder whether the pathetic fallacy itself may not be less a fallacy than we allow and less pathetic than grim. These sudden meteorological breakdowns of customary balance and restraint, no one seems able to foresee them but only to be wise after the event and so we tend to overlook them or quickly forget them. And in the process of our lives—the same spastic factor. We had a lengthy summer of longevities, almost a drought of deaths. And now in the last few months, a veritable cloud-burst of casualties, carrying away not only those overdue, but invading the levels where life-expectation seemed still secure. Perhaps it has not stopped even now."

He looked up at the sky that seemed more black and massive than the earth, greyly shimmering in semi-inundation.

"Perhaps this time it won't stop and a second Deluge engulf this island. We here would certainly be first to be submerged." The Cathedral clock chimed.