The Fox in the Attic Read Free Page A

there were still discernible faded inkstains and blurred inscriptions and knife-cuts from its earlier days in the schoolroom. As Augustine moved towards it to lay the guns down his own initials, “A.L.P.-H.,” suddenly leapt out at him from the dark wood, pricked there with his compass-points and colored (he recalled) one drowsy morning in the schoolroom long ago—in imitation of Henry, his godlike elder cousin. For though this house had not been actually his childhood home, much of Augustine’s childhood had in fact been spent here: from his earliest age his two old great-uncles used to invite him on prolonged visits, as company for Henry chiefly ... ah, now Henry’s “H.P.-H.” had leaped out of the smudges too (ten times more elegantly tattooed than his, of course).
    That little Purdey 20-bore behind the glass (momentarily it stood out from the background of its fellows as the figure in a painted portrait does) had been Henry’s first gun. When Henry quite grew out of it, it had descended to teach Augustine too to shoot. That of course was before 1914: in the halcyon days before the war when the two old men were still living and Henry was the heir.
    Augustine, still humping the little body, moved towards the telephone bracketed to the wall behind the door. This was a peculiar apparatus, evidently built to order. It had two hinged ear-pieces, installed one on each side in case one ear or the other should be deaf; and it was ancient enough to have a handle to wind. Augustine wound the handle and asked for the police, addressing the instrument in the toneless but very articulate manner habitual to someone a solitary by his own act and choice who prefers to use his voice as seldom and as briefly as he can.
    Then the machine answered him. The upshot was that the sergeant would come out this evening on his bicycle to view, but doubted he could get an ambulance to fetch it till the morning. For tonight it must just stay where it was.
    When at last (in a remote and half-darkened formal place of elegance, a room he never used) Augustine did lift the morsel off his shoulder, he found that it had stiffened. This had ceased to be “child” at all: it was total cadaver now. It had taken into its soft contours the exact mold of the shoulder over which it had been doubled and it had set like that—into a matrix of him . If (which God forbid) he had put it on again it would have fitted.
    Augustine was absolutely alone with it in all this huge, empty house. He left it dumped there on the big dust-sheeted drawing-room sofa and hurried across the silent stone hall to wash his creeping hands.
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    For a while, cleaning the two guns and toweling the dog took all Augustine’s attention; but then he was at a loss till the sergeant should come. He craved for and gulped a spoonful of sugar but otherwise could not eat because he had become aware of his hands again: they felt large, and as if he had not washed them enough. Indeed he was loth to taint with them even the pages of a book.
    In this dilemma he wandered from the gunroom almost without knowing it into the billiardroom. This smelt of old carpeting and perished leather; it was a place he seldom went these days, but unlike most of the rest of the house it was unshuttered and now there was still enough of the failing daylight in here to see by.
    Billiardrooms are never small. In childhood this one used to seem to Augustine as interminable as the vaults of heaven: it had always been a room of wonder, moreover, for what might not happen in a room where a rhinoceros—lurking in an Africa that must have been just behind the plaster—had thrust head and horn clean through the wall? (Often as a small thing he had peeped in fearfully before breakfast to find if during the night that rhinoceros in his wooden collar had inched any further through.)
    This had been a man’s room, which no woman except housemaids ever entered. So, traditionally, it