The Fox in the Attic

  Dear Augustine! That queer isolated life he chose to lead ... Now, of course, he was going to be dragged back into society by the short hairs—inquests, newspapers and all that: was this possibly a blessing in disguise? She was sure he had great talents, if only he would apply them to something.

  Mary sighed. Nature is as wasteful of promising young men as she is of fish-spawn. It’s not just getting them killed in wars: mere middle age snuffs out ten times more young talent than ever wars and sudden death do. Then who was she, that she dared to hope her young brother whom she had so cherished and so admired was going to prove that one little fish-egg out of millions destined to survive and grow?

  Mary set down her cup half drunk: the coffee seemed too bitter ... She might be going to have another baby! It was high time, for Polly’s sake. She’d know in a day or two ...

  If it was a boy it would begin all over again, the cherishing and the sisterly admiring—but this time, in little Polly.

  *

  In the dining-room the long silence was broken at last.

  “Was it ...” Jeremy began to ask a little hesitantly: “was it ... well, an upper-class child do you think?”

  Augustine started, and suddenly paled. “Hard to tell,” he said at last, slowly. “N-n-no, I wouldn’t say it was.”

  “Good!” said Jeremy, relieved. “That’s something to be thankful for.”

  The blood came back into Augustine’s face with a rush: “Jeremy!” he said, very gently, “what a beastly thing to say!”

  Now Jeremy blushed too—hotly, horrified at himself. “God it was!” he blurted out honestly. Then he recovered himself a little and went on: “But you know what I mean: not your own ... tribe, you don’t feel it quite the same. Makes it less near home, somehow.” Whereon instantly the same thought sprang into both minds: Suppose it had been Polly?

  Augustine jumped to his feet and ground the stopper into the neck of the decanter: “Shall we join the lady?” he said roughly, already making a beeline for the door.

  19

  They found Mary in the drawing-room reading Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians” while she waited to pour their cooling coffee for them.

  “But the only really eminent Victorians were Marx, Freud and Einstein!” said Jeremy. “People poor dear Lytton has probably never heard of. And the greatest of these is Freud.”

  “I suppose there can’t have been three such figures alive at the same time since Confucius, Buddha and Pythagoras,” said Mary, interested.

  “An apt parallel,” said Jeremy: “Society, the individual soul, mathematics ...”

  “Sugar,” said Mary.

  “Marx is certainly the least of them,” said Augustine, stirring his cup absently, “partly because the one most eminently Victorian ...” He began to explain—with that sudden excessive rush of words to which the solitary is liable now and then—that all “Victorian” science had been dogmatic: its aim, systems of valid answers. Now, when Einstein had lifted modern science onto the altogether higher level of systems of valid questions ...

  “Fair enough!” put in Jeremy: “You can make machines to answer questions but you can’t make a machine to ask them.”

  “... Marxism is a science still fossilized at the Victorian, dogmatic level of mere answers,” Augustine continued.

  “And therefore,” Jeremy nipped in, spooning the sugar out of the bottom of his cup with relish, “rapidly degenerating into a religion! No wonder only a backward, religious people like the Russians take Marxism seriously nowadays.”

  “Whereas Freud ...” Augustine was resuming, but then stopped thunderstruck. The great revelation which was Freud! He had been right, then, in the billiardroom: his own generation really was a new creation, a new kind of human being, because of Freud! For theirs was the first generation in the whole cave-to-cathedral history of the human race completely to disbelieve in sin. Actions nowadays weren’t thought of as “right” or “wrong” any more: they were merely judged social or anti-social, personal fulfillment or frustration ...

  “But that lands us with two dichotomies instead of one,” said Jeremy, “and sometimes they clash ...”

  Soon they were at it again, hammer and tongs. But on one thing Augustine and Jeremy were agreed: theirs was a generation relieved of the necessity even of active evangelistic atheism because the whole “God” idea had now subsided below the level of belief or disbelief. “God” and “Sin” had ceased to be problems because Freudian analysis had explained how such notions arise historically: i.e., that they are merely a primitive psychological blemish which, once explained, mankind can outgrow ...

  “Conscience is an operable cancer ...”

  In the age of illimitable human progress and fulfillment now dawning the very words “God” and “guilt” must atrophy and ultimately drop off the language. People would still be born with a propensity for being what used to be called “good”; but even goodness would become innocent once its name was forgotten.

  Meanwhile Mary busied herself with her quilting: a simple, peasant little coverlet for Polly’s bed. Suddenly she frowned. Suppose that child she had invited (Mrs. Winter’s little niece) turned out to be religious? Wasn’t her father some sort of dissenting minister? She ought to have thought of that before accepting her as a fit companion for Polly.

  Children talk so!—Of course children should talk freely about sex, and about excreta and so on; but there are still words and ideas that tender childish ears like Polly’s ought to be shielded from, at least till they are old enough to resist or succumb of their own free will: such words as “God” and “Jesus.” In Mary’s own case and Augustine’s those words had been knotted in their very navel-strings ...

  Wantage must be made to go to bed but she must remind him to leave the whiskey out in case Gilbert and his friends were very late. Some sandwiches too: railway food was practically uneatable. And Gilbert had said these guests might be important. There was a movement on foot for reuniting the liberal party, with much coming and going in the inner councils. Gilbert wasn’t perhaps quite “in” those councils yet, but he was a rising young man with his foot in the door at any rate: he could be a Go-between even if he wasn’t yet quite a Gone-between.

  Gilbert hoped to be bringing someone important down to Mellton that night—Mond, perhaps, or Simon, or Samuel. If a significant step towards Liberal reunion was taken at a Mellton houseparty it would be a feather in Gilbert’s cap worth wearing ...

  Gilbert had told her the Little Man (Lloyd George) seemed ready enough to be reconciled: it was Asquith who was being rather wary and uncordial. “He acts as if he has something on his chest!” So L.G.—surprised at it, apparently—had confided to someone who had confided it to Gilbert. Said L.G., “The old boy is different to me, he just doesn’t know when to forget.”

  In private life (she continued musing) it would be looked on as rather despicable if an Asquith did “forget”—if he ever spoke to a Lloyd George again, the nasty little goat. But now, even his own friends were blaming him. For in public life you aren’t free to act on your inclinations or even your principles: in order to acquire power you have to forfeit free-will, which seems rather paradoxical.

  And how much more so must it be in a dictatorship! A man like Lenin must have about as much choice and freedom of action as the topmost acrobat in a human pyramid ...

  Mary opened her ears for a moment: but the boys’ discussion had reached the late-evening stage of merely going round and round. “It’s eleven o’clock,” said Mary: “I think I’m going to bed, but don’t you ...” Whereon Jeremy sprang to his feet, full of apologies for outstaying his welcome.

  Augustine saw Jeremy to the front door and helped him light his bicycle lamp. For Jeremy’s father was a country parson and far from well-off (Jeremy might even have to go into the Civil Service).

  “Well I have enjoyed myself!” Jeremy exclaimed, with an enthusiasm bordering almost on surprise: “I don’t know when!” He flung his leg over the sadd
le and pedaled off one-handed down the drive.

  Augustine set off for bed. He was just crossing the ballroom when he heard that distant, desolate scream.

  20

  For Polly was having a nightmare—Polly, the child so cushioned on love!

  Often, when Polly was just dropping asleep, the air would suddenly be full of hands. Not threatening hands: just hands. Hands coming out of the floor, reaching down from the ceiling, coming out of the air—small as she was, there was hardly room to wriggle between them. That wasn’t exactly frightening; but tonight she was having a proper nightmare—the worst she had ever had.

  It began in Mr. Wantage’s serving pantry, where Mrs. Winter was sitting in Sunday bonnet and cape. But this wasn’t quite Mrs. Winter ... actually, it was more a lion dressed in Mrs. Winter’s clothes and it said to Polly in quite a pleasant voice: “We’re going to have you for our supper.”

  Shrinking back, she now saw many of the other grown-ups who best loved her ranged stiffly round the wall, surrounding her. All were principally turned to beasts of prey, even if they didn’t entirely look it.

  That was the moment she caught sight of Gusting, standing idly by the baize swing-door which led to the kitchen passage ...

  This surely was entirely Gusting, for he could never turn! She dashed to him for protection.

  But even as she flung herself into his arms she saw what a big mistake she had made: for this was in fact a huge gorilla in disguise, stretching its arms across the door of escape and smiling down cruelly at her with exactly Gusting’s face.

  A trap, baited with Gusting’s convincing image! At this moment of panic and betrayal she began to wake. She still saw him there, but now realized with a flood of relief she was dreaming—this monster wasn’t real. So she hit him in the stomach with her fist and cried triumphantly: “I’m not afraid of you! I know you’re only a dream!” Then she opened her mouth to scream herself entirely awake, only ... only to find she was not as near waking as she had thought, and the scream wouldn’t come. She had only “woken” from one level of sleep to the level next above—and now she was slipping back ... the figure was growing solid again.

  “Oho, so I’m only a dream, am I?” he said sardonically, and his dreadful hands began to close on her murderously ... Gusting’s hard hands which she always so much loved.

  In this extreme of terror her strangled voice just came back: she managed at last to scream, and woke herself in floods of tears—with the Gusting-Gorilla still shadowy against the billowing darkness of her room (where no night-light was kept burning, for modern atheist children have no need to fear the dark).

  When Augustine on his way to bed heard that scream he raced up the stairs three at a time, but Nanny had reached the night-nursery before him and was already rocking the sobbing, nightgowned little figure in her arms.

  Polly was quieter already; but now at the sight of Gusting really standing in her bedroom doorway she began to scream again so wildly and in a voice so strangled with fear it was more a hysterical coughing than a proper scream, and she was arching her spine backwards like a baby in a fit.

  Nanny signed to him so imperiously to be gone that he obeyed her; but only with feelings of violent jealousy and distrust. “That woman ought to be sacked!” he muttered loudly (half hoping she would hear), as he retreated down the nursery passage. For of course it was all her fault—she must have been frightening the child ... goblins ... tales of black men coming down the chimbley if you aren’t good ... What on earth was the use of Mary trying to bring the child up free of complexes in the new way while confiding her to an uneducated woman like Nanny? “You can never trust that class!” Augustine added bitterly.

  —There is no hell of course but surely there ought to be one for such a woman, who could deliberately teach a child to be afraid! Augustine’s anger with that horrible woman gnawed so he would have liked to have it out with Mary there and then: but alas, she had gone to bed.

  He knew there’d be a fight, for Mary seemed almost hypnotized by Nanny Halloran: which was surprising, seeing how often and how deeply they disagreed ...

  There’s no need nowadays for any child even to know what Fear is—nor Guilt! Not since the great revelation which was Freud ...

  *

  Half way down the long drive, Jeremy on his way home was dazzled by the lights of an approaching car. He jumped off and dragged his machine right into the bushes.

  But it wasn’t Trivett driving at all. This was a big limousine with brass and mahogany upperworks like a yacht, and lit up inside: the hire-car from the Mellton Arms, which the Wadamys sometimes bespoke on these occasions.

  It seemed full to bursting with young men with sleekly brushed hair and black overcoats, and they were all turned inwards—like bees just beginning to swarm on a new queen—towards the central figure wrapped in a tartan rug in the middle of the back seat: the elongated figure and well-known hawklike face of Sir John Simon.

  21

  Wantage had been shocked at the idea he should go to bed before the Master got home, and was there to attend to his needs. But Mary was already asleep when Gilbert and his guests arrived, and it must have been an hour or two later that she woke abruptly. Something was worrying her—what someone had said earlier about religion subsiding “below the level of belief or disbelief.” Surely that wasn’t quite right? “Below the level of argument” he ought to have said. We have learned to distinguish these days between concepts which are verifiable and those by nature unverifiable—and which therefore can’t be argued about: so really we now need two words for “belief” and two for “truth,” since we don’t mean the same things by “belief” and “truth” in both cases.

  After all, even Aquinas spoke of faith as an act involving the will: that distinguishes it entirely from verifiable truth—which is the only real truth, of course, she hastened to assure herself.

  Through the dressing-room door Mary could hear Gilbert snoring: so he had arrived all right. She hoped they would pull off Liberal Reunion this time ... it was bound to come sooner or later, of course—it takes more than a rift of personalities to dissipate so mighty a force as Liberalism. In fact, Gilbert had said this Asquith v. Lloyd George split was just a repetition of the Rosebery-Harcourt split at the turn of the century; and that had been prelude to the solidest victory the Liberals had ever achieved, the general election of 1906.

  Mary could still remember being driven to the village, that sunny January polling-day, in the governess-cart with little Augustine: everyone wore colored rosettes and even the politest gentry children put out their tongues at children of a different color.

  At this rate (she forecast) the Liberals should be back in power by 1930 or so; and by that time Gilbert ...

  Having tidied in her mind these two incongruous loose ends, Mary sighed and went to sleep again.

  But now she dreamed—the first time for many years—of her German cousin, Otto von Kessen.

  It was in 1913—ten years ago—that Mary had gone on her visit to Schloss Lorienburg. Walther, the eldest von Kessen brother and owner of Lorienburg, was already married then of course—he had at least two sweet children, ten-year-old tow-haired Franz and the wide-eyed little Mitzi. But Otto was “married to his regiment,” they said. Handsome in uniform as some Ouida hero, in white flannels Otto played tennis with the beauty and vigor of a leaping white tiger ... Mary had been sixteen at Lorienburg, that last summer before the war, and the magnificent Otto thirty. Mary had fallen blindly, hopelessly in love; and had developed a boil on her unhappy chin.

  *

  Augustine that night was a long time getting to sleep at all, for the moment he was alone his mind reverted uncontrollably and quite fruitlessly from the living to the dead child. He was still racked with pity, and he thought of the coming inquest with foreboding.

  Pictured on the darkness he kept seeing again the deep black pool, the sixpenny boat floating just out of reach, then the whitish something in the water ... He had had no choi
ce, when they found she was quite dead, but to carry her home; for on the Marsh a duck shot at dusk, if the dog failed, was no more than a scatter of feathers by the time daylight came. Thus when Augustine fell asleep at last he dreamed horribly of those hungry rats that the whole Marsh teemed with.

  Mrs. Winter also stayed awake late, but deliberately. She was sitting up in bed, wearing the little bed-jacket Mrs. Wadamy had given her last Christmas over a white linen nightgown with a high frilled collar, and writing a letter—by candlelight, for there was no electricity in the servants’ rooms.

  Mrs. Winter’s “shape” looked natural now, comfortably buxom: her whalebone stays were neatly rolled on a chair. But her graying hair looked unusually skimpy; for it owed its daytime bulk to certain brown pads, and these now lay on the dressing-table. Her cheeks too looked sunken, for her pearly teeth also were on the dressing-table. They stood in a tumbler of water between two photographs in velvet frames: one was her late father, the other showed Nellie holding the baby Rachel.

  “Dear Nellie,” she wrote, “I spoke to Madam about you and Gwilym and darling Rachel and she was kindness itself. She said at once ...” Mrs. Winter wrote slowly, weighing every word. For now she had made up her mind she had come to want more than anything else in the world that Nellie should consent.

  It would be lovely having Rachel here. Pausing, she tried to picture dear little Rachel now as she must be that very moment, asleep in bed somewhere. But that was difficult, for she had never visited the parts where Gwilym’s mother was living these days.

  *

  Augustine was woken at six in the morning by the jackdaws arguing in his wide bedroom chimney. He lay awake listening to them, for he was interested in birds’ minds and would have liked to be able to make out what all the palaver was about. Jackdaws are notoriously social birds, and it sounded very much as if they were holding some sort of court of justice: certainly someone was getting generally pecked ...