The Black Fox A Novel Of The Seventies (28 page)

"It is you who should watch your spirits. Anxiety is the demon of our age. You should have the strength of mind to settle down to your duties, as I do to mine. And you would do well to have

an avocation as I have mine. Yours might be gardening when the summer returns. Meanwhile I prescribe a little needlework to keep your mind off gloomy reveries. You must not be cast down by the pathetic fallacy that Nature's seasonal fall should affect our spirits. Here in this spacious, seemly security"—his eye swept the stately proportions of the room—"we can smile at the hobgoblin fancies that haunted man confined in such weather to a cave, or even to an unheated, ill-glazed cathedral! Put aside these lurking, substanceless misgivings. Black care does not only ride behind the horseman as Horace says. Just as much he sits beside the woman in her all-too-easy chair by the bright hearth. Drive him away."

And again he made one of those finished conclusive pulpit gestures that his hands almost fell into as he closed a sentence. This time, however, she did check any outward sign of her shudder. It shook her then all the more. For not only had that fine white hand brushed along the filthy, pus-streaked coat of the thing that was sitting beside him, but, as his hand swept, as though stroking down the leprous pelt, the creature rose and arched its back. As though it had received a message and dismissal from him, it slowly hobbled over.

It came limping across and sat down at her side.

SHE DID NOT SEE IT EVERY DAY. ONCE FOR A WHOLE WEEK SHE did not catch a glimpse of it. She could, however, nearly always hear it, whenever the house was still, snuffing at the door, or from behind some piece of furniture in the room, gobbling at its sores. It became almost impossible for her to swallow any food, such nausea took her, when, under the dining table, with its long white damask that reached nearly to the floor, she heard the sound. Next, she could feel its touch: it would lean against her foot. Once or twice she could not resist the temptation— she raised the hem of the table-cloth to see. There was nothing her eye could find. Her brother noticed though.

"To whom the heavens are not clean'—Job's idea of the Almighty is appealing to you?" he asked with that irritable humour, watchful hypercriticism that masked in him real insight. "Surely." he concluded, "the inspection could be carried out earlier?"

She lied feebly, "I thought I'd dropped my napkin," and then wondered was it worth the effort. Did it really deceive? Was he, tinder his simmering of complaint, trying to rid a curiosity that could only be answered by his putting a question he dared not ask? Would it be better if the truth came out?

The last query did, however, rouse her. She saw how she had been drifting. This was happening to her—the whole range of misery from his exasperating nagging miscomprehension right down into the horrible dark of the molestation itself—because the alternative was that he would be swept away, engulfed. She was standing—she had chosen to stand—between him and it. Because she had so chosen, he was able to show this contemptuous complacence—he had to. His petty irritability was the transmuted expression of a knowledge, of a responsibility and a punishment that his surface mind would not endure.

Once this knowledge became clear in her mind—as after a day of fog, the sun setting, the night is cloudless—she found her courage had returned. But the suffering became worse. The attack now seemed to have become tidal, sweeping in first by one aperture and then by another. She realized that when she could see it she could not feel it and vice versa. The senses were being assaulted alternatively. For three days she saw the jackal; it was everywhere she went on her household duties, as though the entity, if such it was, felt that it must not let her out of its sight. She could escape it for a while by going out. The weather was, however, very raw, the shortest walk seemed to bring on a miserable chill and exhaustion.

She knew enough of sickness to realize, however short a time she consulted her mirror, that it was signalling back one word to her, anaemia. Her brother, too, showed his same scolding concern and practically ordered her to stay indoors. He even forbade her to go to Evensong. On Sunday, however, she insisted on attending Morning Prayer. He was preaching. As he came down from his study, his sermon case in his hand, and found her waiting in the hall, dressed to accompany him, she noticed on his face the interplay of protest with complacence.

The Cathedral audiences, he had begun to notice, were small; every contribution, of a listener, was therefore welcome.

"I observe." he said, "that you insist on your major religious duties. And perhaps I need not insist on your obeying my dispensation. The morning is mild, the earth more viscid than fluid. The Anthem, too, is a charming one, by Purcell, and may serve to raise your spirits. After all, the original, putative author of the Psalms, we are told, had his initial success in relieving the acute mental distress of Israel's first monarch." He added, as they passed out over the Deanery threshold, and she glanced down and back, "Yes, you would do well to carry your train. The mud has now set to the consistency of a mucilage."

He did not ask had she any other reason for that final glance.

In the choir, as the Dean's sister, she was seated in die sub-stall immediately under his curtained and canopied chief-seat. Taking the massive choir copy of the Book of Common Prayer, she turned over the pages to find and mark the day's psalms. Her eye caught the Latin captions— De Profundis, Domine! Adhesit Pavimentol Deus, Deus, Meusl

How often divine inspiration seemed to have spoken through human desperation! Yet, today, these cries of terror and agonized appeal would be chanted and carolled into a mild aesthetic pattern. How like these demon faces clustered on the canopies around her! They had originally been meant, she mused, to remind the faithful that even in prayer—even more in prayer— the soul's invisible enemies were alert and roused. But here they had been turned by the medieval carver, weary of a zeal he could not understand and maybe never saw practised, into comic gargoyles.

Her eye, glancing back at the Psalter, was caught by a verse in the full English text, "My darling from the power of the dog!" She had often wondered why with the whole menagerie for his imagination to draw upon, and with lions and unicorns ramping in this very psalm, the Psalmist suddenly found his terror fixed on a mere dog. Perhaps he too had found himself— exposed? She prayed the appeal with the intensity its first utterer had evidently felt. But as deep fear spurred her mind she recognized at a still deeper level that she was glad that the author in this passage had not asked deliverance for himself but for someone he loved.

The service ran its smooth course worn by immemorial repetition to a perfectly memorized almost-inattention. Then, the divine courtesies discharged, acknowledgements made and reassurances uttered, there came discourse. Her brother, fetched and verger-led like a priest-king to the pulpit, mounted the ornate scaffold and unfolded his argument.

She certainly wished to attend as much as he desired to be attended to. She was, however, exhausted; her sleep at home was of course a travesty; for this brief twenty minutes—while she was "in sanctuary" in the real if not in the architectural sense— sleep with its overdue account came down like a gaoler. It wrapt her round with the suffocating force of an anaesthetic. She struggled, experiencing that curious, acute distress—worse, though rarer, than its opposite, insomnia—that misery when sleep becomes an enemy, a tyrant, and tortures us if we would forbid it taking over our consciousness. She tried the usual stimulants, pinching her finger, then putting her hand to her face and biting lip and fingertip. Her head simply declined on her hand, welcoming the offered support and disguise.

'In conclusion, therefore. . . ." It was Charles' voice. What was ended? Something terrible had been finished. Charles was safe, she was sure from the certainty in his voice, and he was telling her. A great refreshment and relief rose in her. She was rested, she felt. She was being raised from where she had been bent down, intolerably oppressed, down in the dark mire with foul creatures. . . . She felt her hand against her bowed face, smelt the scent of her glove, heard her brother's voice, "We see "

Her orientation in time and space flashed on her. She must rouse herself cautiously. She put out her free hand, smoothed her dress, then touched the hymn-book lying before her, open for the final hymn. Finally she glanced up at the pulpit. Already he had wheeled round to the east for the Ascription,

" 'And now.' " his voice boomed, while with a rustle of recollection the congregation rose to restore its circulation and clear its throat with a good tune.

As he threw open the Deanery door for her to enter he remarked, 'You were mistaken in disregarding my advice. You would have had better slumber here than in the choir." She would not have made a retort or even a reply, even had she not, the moment they crossed the threshold, been met.

She had thought of actually calling on young Halliwell. Their short talk had convinced her that, at least, if he could not answer, he would understand her problem. Of course she could not ask him to the house. Quite apart from the fact that her brother would certainly be subconsciously suspicious and so discourteous, it was utterly out of the question that she should suddenly request this junior to visit them, and find an occasion for a private conference! Almost for the last time the involuntary mouth-tension careless people call a smile, twisted her lips. First the Cambridge assignation, and then, the habit formed abroad, she now at home takes the initiative. And if she did go out and call on him—he lived in the Palace—would Mrs. Bendwell understand, just by woman's famed intuition, her wish for a t£te-a-tete}

She bit her lip, so painful was the hopeless silliness of the idea. Yet this young and already disappointed but not yet discouraged Chaplain alone seemed to have even the ghost of an idea about the actual situation. He was the one person who might at least listen. All the rest would simply look on her as insane, an insanity prompted no doubt by an unrecognized jealousy of her brother. But even with this one acquaintance, it was now too late. If she was going to speak she should have done so as soon as she came back, when there seemed to be a respite and even some dim dawn of hope. Now she was no longer sure herself that the strange visitor at Cambridge had possessed any more gift or power than—his own phrase, she remembered—a clever character-reader at a fair!

It was clear also that every day the power became stronger, the crisis, in whatever form it would finally manifest itself, was quickly approaching. That was shown by the growing familiarity of the familiar. Once, when she came in to tea, it had run ahead and leapt, like a spoiled pet, into her chair. She had tried to take another, though it sprang out as soon as she came close. Her brother was, however, as usual, in-comprehendingly vigilant.

"That's your chair, Laetitia, the throne of the lady of the house, as she presides over the mystery of tea-brewing, the stall of the Deepness— not deacon-ness. None of this wrongful humility in the home—taking the lesser, lower seat. None of this outward mortification, even though we have entered Advent. 'Rend your heart and not your garments,' as we had in the Anthem today. Mortify your spirit and not, as our very unhygienic spiritual predecessors did, the flesh."

Whereupon he launched into a peculiarly apposite description of medieval filth, Catholic austerities and the odour of unwashed sanctity; of Thomas of Canterbury whose "garment companions"—as the Dean called them—fell from his sleeves onto the table as he ate; of Teresa of Avila who wore a tight-lacing corset but with holes in it through which her merit-gaining flesh protruded suppurating. Then seeing that his sister's face had become ghastly, he added, "You must forgive my male toughness. I was only trying to laugh you into a little rational self-indulgence."

But in spite of this kindly explanation she failed to rally to his offer to be amiable and, feeling that she had better be left to sulk alone—the nursery phrase came to his lips, though he held it back—he went to his study.

Her constant companion, too, seemed to have entered a "dark-cycle." She could not see him though she could hear him snuffling at his disgusting grooming. Then he was so lost to sight and sound also that she found herself repeating the text, "And Satan departed for a season." If it were so it was no more than to change costume, for soon her attention was caught by signs that some other plan of approach was being prepared. She realized that her brother must not notice her attempts to sound the unseen dark tide that was flowing in and rising up round her. So she would wait till he left the room—and the long silences that now came down upon them were sufficient to drive him away after comparatively short visits. Then she could not resist getting down on her knees. She knew it was no use sending for the servants. Indeed she felt she must, by touch, prove whether sight was deceiving her. Always there were those little balls of fuzz and hair rolling along in an imperceptible draft where the wainscot touched the polished floor boards. In the evening, too, the light would time and again show large black cobwebs in the comers. She kept a long cane concealed in the big parlor cupboard. "Like an eczemic that must scratch his sores"—the phrase came into her mind—it was so pat that the words seemed given, not composed by her.

Finally, to sight, sound and touch, came the fourth sense.

It was near the year's end. It was at dinner. She was surprised into sending her plate from the table saying that it had not been washed. She saw the oil on it and smelt the sickly scent. As she raised her eyes, however, she caught sight of her brother's eye upon her. She left the room, gained her breath for a moment outside the door, and came back saying,

"I may have been mistaken."

Wisely attempting no further explanation she gave all her attention to making herself swallow some mouthfuls, though on the substituted plate also she saw and could smell the greenish smear of oil. Nor would she change her bedroom, not even when on going there on New Year's Eve she found the jackal returned. As she entered with her candle he was there seated on the foot of the bed. She did take the pillow away and noticed that none of the long greasy hairs and the oil stain, that were in a patch on it, had spread to the sheet under. She got ready. Then turned back resolutely to the bed. The jackal leapt off and cowered beside it.