The Fox in the Attic
“Getting generally pecked!”—Yes (he thought), that’s about all Social Co-operation ever seems to amount to in practice. Then surely it’s high time we humans gave up behaving like birds?
But just then the door clicked. It was Polly, and she climbed quickly onto his bed in expectation of a story.
At eight that same chilly morning, when the postman arrived, Mrs. Winter had already licked and stamped her letter for him to take. But he had a telegram for her, from Gloucester: it was a boy, and mother and child both doing well.
Nellie’s pains had begun the previous evening and the doctor had carried her off to hospital in his car himself. The birth was quite normal: it was the baby’s safety after birth the doctor had been anxious about in the mother’s unnatural mood; but in fact Nellie gave her breast quite readily when they brought the infant to her, because in her drowsy state she believed it was somehow Baby Rachel come again.
Mrs. Winter added a few words on the back of the envelope, then re-addressed her letter to the hospital; for the sooner now it was fixed about Rachel coming here the better.
Another telegram to the sanatorium told Gwilym, even this little buff envelope bringing an unmistakably “outside” smell into the faint odor of illness which tainted everything round him there. The news excited him wildly and brought on a fearful fit of coughing.
A son! Then his name should be called Sylvanus ...
How pleased little Rachel would be! How he longed to be watching her face the first time they let her hold her baby brother! Surely the doctors must let him go home now (indeed they probably soon would—but because they needed his bed for some less hopeless case).
Little Rachel ... how long would it be before she got the news, he wondered? Wales must be a nice change for her after Gloucester Docks but the place was terribly cutoff. For his mother’s new home been a lonely sluice-keeper’s cottage once—in the piping days of farming, when the sluices were still kept on Llantony Marsh.
*
None of these people knew yet that Rachel lay under an official rubber sheet in the mortuary at Penrys Cross.
*
Gwilym’s old mother lived alone, and on Tuesday had somehow walked alone the whole nine miles to the Cross to report the child missing. She knew already that whatever his letters said her son was dying; she knew that Nellie was about to be brought to bed at any hour: they showed her the body on the slab and she collapsed. She recovered, but for the time being had lost the power of speech.
Thus Augustine had already left for the inquest at Penrys Cross by the time the news reached Mellton.
22
The cold had come early to the Continent that fall: in the next few days it crossed over, driving Dorset’s late mellow muggy autumn away before it.
Mary’s mind at Mellton these days was full of the tragedy: she was cudgeling her brains how best Nellie behind the barrier that was Mrs. Winter could be helped; but now the cold had come and her brains refused to respond. Dorset never got quite so cold as central Europe of course; but at Mellton she had not those gigantic porcelain stoves she had once laughed at in Schloss Lorienburg, nor the double windows, nor even central heating: houses in Britain were nowadays no warmer than before the war—yet, as if they had been, women had ceased wearing wool next to the skin, ankle-length drawers and long thick petticoats. Thus in a large and draughty place like Mellton Mary always found it difficult in winter to think: her blood kept being called away to do battle in her extremities, leaving her brain on terribly short commons. Thus Mary in winter had to do most of her thinking in her bath, where her brain responded to the hot water like a tortoise in the sun: she saved up most of the day’s knottier problems for the bath she took each evening before dressing for dinner: and it was in her evening bath that Mary now had her brainwave about the Hermitage as somewhere for Nellie with her baby and her diseased husband to live.
That morning Mrs. Winter had told her the doctors were going to send Gwilym home. There had been a pleading look in Mary’s eye as she offered to help, for she was deeply moved and longed to be allowed-to. Nellie must be desperately hard-up: naturally there was no question of Gwilym working “yet” (that “yet” which deceived no one except Gwilym himself!): with a husband to nurse and a new baby Nellie couldn’t go out to work, even if she could find work now there were millions unemployed ...
But Mrs. Winter had shaken her head. Not money: in a life-time of domestic service she herself had saved nearly three hundred pounds, and that should at least last out Gwilym’s brief time: It was her own privilege to support her sister, not an outsider’s. Yet Mrs. Winter felt quite sorry for her mistress, for Mrs. Wadamy looked so sad at being shut out.
Moreover there was one kind of help they could surely properly accept. If Gwilym was “to get well” they had to find somewhere to live right out in the country: somewhere high up and windswept, such as the chalk downs ...
Mary’s face had lightened at the “chalk downs”: she would speak to the Master about it at once. But when she did so, Gilbert had astonished her by being “difficult”: he had practically ticked her off for even suggesting he might let these people have a cottage! In the end she hadn’t dared confess to him she had virtually promised Mrs. Winter.
Now, while Mary lay long in the hot water thinking about the Hermitage as a solution, Gilbert was already tying his evening tie and also thinking. His brisk game of squash with the doctor’s son ought to have left him enjoying unalloyed that virtuous feeling which is the chief reward of exercise when you are sedentary and thirty; but thoughts of the morning’s argument with Mary were troubling him.
A most pathetic case ... yes, but a question of Principle was involved. Yet he doubted if Mary even in the end had hoisted in fully how right he had been to refuse—and the doubt pained him, for he loved Mary. The point was that these people were strangers. His first duty was to his own people, he had tried to show Mary; and cottages were scarce: at the moment even his own new carpenter was having to live in lodgings till a cottage fell vacant for him. But Mary had seemed unimpressed (her picture of the dying Gwilym refusing to be ousted from her mind). The bachelor carpenter was quite comfortable at the Tucketts, she had urged: couldn’t he wait?
Couldn’t Mary see it would be morally wrong to give strangers a Mellton cottage over Mellton heads? If you don’t draw the line somewhere (Gilbert argued), you soon cease being able to do your duty by your own people, the people to whom it is owed. One’s duty to mankind at large isn’t in that same way a personal, man-to-man relationship: it’s a collective duty, and one’s services to Liberalism rather are its proper discharge—not random little drop-in-a-bucket acts of kindness. Surely no one supposed he ought to rush off to Turkey personally to rescue a massacred Armenian or two? But he’d certainly make time to address that Armenian Atrocities Protest Meeting next month; and similarly his correct Liberal response to these strangers’ plight was to campaign for improved National Insurance, more Houses for the Poor: not try to take these particular poor under his own personal wing ...
As Gilbert stood there tying his tie the lean face which looked back at him from the glass ought to have been reassuring: with its firm jaw and permanently indignant gray eyes it was so palpably the face of a Man of Principle. But was Mary truly a woman of Principle? That was the trouble. Alas, Mary yielded all too easily to irrational instinct! There were times lately you almost sensed a distaste in her for all a-priori reasoning, however clearly it was put ...
Gilbert loved Mary; but was he perhaps a little afraid of her always in any ethical context?
Gilbert was silent and distrait at dinner that night—not on Nellie’s account however, or because of the Poor: no, it was something of vital importance. For as he left his dressing-room he had been called to the telephone and what he had heard was disturbing. The speaker knew someone very close to L.G. (with him now, on his American tour). It had been noised widely abroad that lately the Little Man seemed bent on concocting his own little economic ideas
unaided, and from what this chap said might not be quite sound even about Free Trade any more! Then the cat was among the Liberal pigeons indeed.
In short, Liberalism just then had problems on its plate more immediate than slaughtered Armenians and the Poor ... imprimis, there was the split in the party itself to heal—or to exploit; and Gilbert was involved in all that up to the neck.
Thus at dinner Gilbert hardly understood Mary at first when she mentioned the Hermitage: his mind flew first to St. Petersburg, then to his wine-cellar.
“No—up on the downs! In the chase. As somewhere for Mrs. Winter’s sister.”
That place—for her to live in?—Lumme ... but after all, why not? Certainly no one else would want it.
This lonely Hermitage was a little romantic folly in 18th-century gothic: an architect’s freak, built of the biggest and knobbiest flints they could find and designed to look like a toothy fragment of ruined abbey (the largest window was a lancet, the rest more like arrow-slits). But it had been built for a habitable hermitage: indeed a professional hermit had originally been persuaded by a good salary to live there, groaning and beating his breast dutifully when visitors were brought to inspect him. Once hermits went out of fashion however it had mostly stood empty: it was too remote, as well as too uncomfortable ... the well even was a hundred feet deep, which is a long way to wind a bucket up.
Aesthetically in Gilbert’s opinion so arrant a sham deserved dynamite. However, it still stood; and at least you could be sure the woman wouldn’t roost there long! Moreover his consent would stop Mary ...
“Stop Mary” doing what?—“Nagging him” was the dire meaning he expunged before it could even form in his mind. (Jeremy had once remarked unkindly that Gilbert didn’t know how to be insincere: “He believes every word he says—as soon as he has said it!” Thus Gilbert had to be most careful what thoughts he allowed into the reality of words even in the privacy of his own head.)
“By all means—an inspiration, my dear!” he answered. “But now, if you’ll excuse me ...”
He had much to think over. Whether or not this was true about L.G. and Free Trade the Tories would soon get wind of the rumor—and what then?
Mary had never been inside that hermitage: only seen it in the distance. But the site though remote seemed so exactly what was wanted; and actually it was only about four miles from the house, an easy bicycle-ride for Mrs. Winter on her afternoons-off. She was so elated she told Mrs. Winter about it that same evening.
Mrs. Winter was very pleased. She too had never seen the place; but how lovely to have her Nellie at last so near, and be able to share her grief!
23
Discovery that the dead child had been Mrs. Winter’s famous little niece was not the only shock the inquest had had in store for Augustine. Apparently the deceased had not died of drowning, the police-surgeon said in evidence as soon as the proceedings opened: he had found hardly any water in the lungs and the skull was cracked.
He went on to testify he had found no medical signs whatever pointing to violence: the child’s skull was abnormally thin: perhaps her head had hit something as she tumbled in, reaching after her toy boat—even a floating branch could have done it. But this ghoulish sawbones had already had an effect on the court that nothing he said later could alter or undo.
Moreover as it turned out Augustine had found himself sole witness to the finding of the body: his companion Dai Roberts was still untraced.
In the front row of the public seats sat Mrs. Dai Roberts with her Flemton coven: as he told his story their glittering eyes never for a moment left his face. But the jury seemed unwilling to look at him at all: so long as he was in the box they averted their eyes to the well of the court where the public sat, and their faces were wooden and uneasy.
The police for their part said they also had found nothing on the spot either that suggested foul play—nothing at all. But when the police-witness protested perhaps over-much how satisfied they were, Mrs. Roberts under the eyes of the jury took out her purse and looked inside it. The sergeant at the door reddened with anger; but there was nothing he could do. Then a juryman asked for Augustine to be recalled, and put a suspicious question to him, in a suspicious voice: “Whyever did you move it, mun?”
Throughout the still court the questing breathing of those Flemton women could be heard ...
A scatter of torn frock and a bloody bone half gnawed ... Augustine’s mind’s-eye flash of the reason he’d had to bring the body away at once was so beastly he just stood there in the box tongue-tied and at last Dr. Brinley the coroner himself had blurted it out: “Rats, laddie!” he said to the juryman reprovingly. The juryman of course misunderstood Dr. Brinley’s meaning and flushed with mortification; but the old man never noticed.
Meanwhile a fly had settled on Dr. Brinley’s bald head and polished its dirty legs while the aged voice under it continued: “A very natural, decent thing to do!” But on this the juryman set his jaw and looked more obstinate still.
Dr. Brinley was troubled. The whole neighborhood had got it in for that boy ... but why? Notoriously wrongheaded, certainly ... tactless ... a bit of a recluse ... With that inadequate eggshell of a skull the wonder was the child had lived so long! The very first fall from her pony ... but she wouldn’t have had a pony, of course ... Why, too—Dai had been with the boy when he found her!—Damn Dai for his eternal Law-shy elusiveness: his presence today could have made all the difference ...
But at that point Dr. Brinley was distracted by the appearance of something lying on the desk before him. It was a hand; and a very old hand—the loose skin was blotched with brown under the white hairs, and wrinkled: the joints were knobbly, the ribbed nails horny and misshapen. The withered object was so redolent of old age it was seconds before he realized that this aged hand was his own.—Now, when he had never felt younger or better, when even those pains a week ago he had thought mortal were quite gone! But if all over he looked like that, all these idiots here must regard him as ... how dare they, puking puppies the whole sort of them!
Thrusting the offending hand out of sight he glared at his middle-aged jury as if he would like to slipper the lot; and they wriggled resentfully ... the old fool!
When the evidence was all taken the coroner strongly suggested a verdict of accidental death; but the verdict the jury obstinately returned was an “open” one.
The Flemton women looked gleeful: Dr. Brinley looked worried.
Meanwhile the police had found the Bentley in the street outside with its windscreen smashed, and belatedly had set a guard on it. After adjourning his court Dr. Brinley took one look at the damaged Bentley and then surprised Augustine by asking him for a lift home in it. He ignored someone else’s offer and insisted he wouldn’t mind the draught from the broken windscreen; but in fact his old eyes watered painfully the whole way back to his house.
The pavements in the High Street as they passed were unnaturally deserted—but not the windows.
*
At Newton that night two of those unshuttered billiardroom windows got smashed and late flowers in the garden were deliberately fouled. But of that Augustine knew nothing, for straight after dropping Dr. Brinley he had started for the north. He was embarked on what was presently to prove a none-too-satisfactory visit to Douglas Moss—the former Oxford luminary and leading philosophic wit. This was their first meeting since both went down. But Douglas was a native (surprisingly) of Leeds and already, alas, beginning to revert to native ways: he was out all day at the “Works,” leaving Augustine to his own devices—and then Augustine couldn’t get that inquest out of his mind, his thoughts kept returning to it. The Mosses’ home was a vast and almost bookless mansion in grimy crimson brick, built on the outskirts of the city. The old people made him as welcome as they could, but still the inquest continued to rankle. That accusing question: Why had he moved the body? That juryman’s suspicious voice, asking him “Why ever did you move it, mun?”
The whole thing was indeed an
intractable cud to chew ...
What was that phrase Jeremy had once used?—“Flemton’s tricoteuses.”
24
Waking next morning Mary did wonder a moment if she had been rash, telling Mrs. Winter without having even seen the place: but it was all settled now, so she put the thought from her. After breakfast, though, she would ride that way ... there might be repairs needed. There might even be no sink!
It was a golden mid-October morning when Mary started out: sun above, and in the hollows mist. There was a smell of frost in the air but none properly in the ground yet, and the oaks in the park still held their yellow leaves.
Polly was out exercising her pony there, under a groom’s surveillance: a tiny, narrow piebald pony off the Prescelly hills Augustine had given her like a miniature Arab, and perfectly schooled. Polly had a remarkable natural seat for so young a child, and the beauty of their effortless performance together under the trees that autumn morning plucked at Mary’s heart. Should she take Polly with her for company, then? But no, it might be too far (or was the real reason a fear Polly might not like the Hermitage?)—Anyway, Mary rode on alone, collecting her mare to take the low wall from the park into the stubble (no wire was allowed anywhere on Mellton land, however much the farmers grumbled).
The soil in the valley was still soggy with autumn water though today the tufts were frosted; but once on the high downs where lay the chase (a misnomer nowadays, with its ten-mile circuit of high wall) the going was crisp and solid, and the air was sharp.
As she entered the chase at last by the crumbling castellated gateway even the green unrutted track she had followed came to an end, and Mary realized fully for the first time how ungetatable this hermitage was. Once more she felt a twinge of anxiety; but again drove it from her, for Mrs. Winter would be bitterly disappointed by adverse reporting now.