“Oh, no,” another quickly interrupts. “You’re wrong there! The reason that he grins that grin and turns away is that he’s trying hard to hear—the reason that he doesn’t answer when you speak to him is that he’s deaf----”
“Ah, deaf!” says still another in derision. “Deaf, hell! Deaf as a Fox, he is! That deafness is a stall—a trick—a gag! He hears you when he wants to hear you! If it’s anything he wants to hear, he’ll hear you though you’re forty yards away and talking in a whisper! He’s a Fox, I tell you!”
“Yes, a Fox, a Fox!” they chorus in agreement. “That much is certain—the man’s a Fox!”
So the Aimers and the Missers whisper, argue, and deduce. They lay siege to intimates and friends of Fox, ply them with flattery and strong drink, trying thus to pluck out the heart of Fox’s mystery. They find out nothing, because there’s nothing to find out, nothing anyone can tell them. They are reduced at length to exasperated bafflement and finish where they started. They advance to their positions, take aim—and miss!
And so, in all their ways, they lay cunning snares throughout the coverts of the city. They lay siege to life. They think out tactics, crafty stratagems. They devise deep plans to bag the game. They complete masterly flanking operations in the night-time (while the great Fox sleeps), get in behind the enemy when he isn’t looking, are sure that victory is within their grasp, take aim magnificently—and fire—and shoot one another painfully in the seats of their expensive pants!
Meanwhile, the Fox is sleeping soundly through the night, as sweetly as a child.
Night passes, dawn comes, eight o’clock arrives. How to describe him now as he awakes?
A man of five and forty years, not really seeming younger, yet always seeming something of the boy. Rather, the boy is there within that frame of face, behind the eyes, within the tenement of flesh and bone—not imprisoned, just held there in a frame—a frame a little worn by the years, webbed with small wrinkles round the eyes—invincibly the same as it has always been. The hair, once fair and blond, no longer fair and blond now, feathered at the temples with a touch of grey, elsewhere darkened by time and weather to a kind of steel-grey—blondness really almost dark now, yet, somehow, still suggesting fair and blond. The head well set and small, boy’s head still, the hair sticking thick and close to it, growing to a V in the centre of the forehead, then back straight and shapely, full of natural grace. Eyes pale blue, full of a strange misty light, a kind of far weather of the sea in them, eyes of a New England sailor long months outbound for China on a clipper ship, with something drowned, sea-sunken in them.
The general frame and structure of the face is somewhat lean and long and narrow—face of the ancestors, a bred face, face of people who have looked the same for generations. A stern, lonely face, with the enduring fortitude of granite, face of the New England seacoast, really his grandfather’s face, New England statesman’s face, whose bust sits there on the mantel, looking at the bed. Yet something else has happened on Fox’s face to transfigure it from the primeval nakedness of granite: in its essential framework, granite still, but a kind of radiance and warmth of life has enriched and mellowed it. A light is burning in the Fox, shining outwards through the face, through every gesture, grace, and movement of the body, ‘something swift, mercurial, mutable, and tender, something buried and withheld, but passionate—something out of his mother’s face, perhaps,’ or out of his father’s or his father’s mother’s—something that subdues the granite with warmth—something from poetry, intuition, genius, imagination, living, inner radiance, and beauty. This face, then, with the shapely head, the pale, far-misted vision of the eyes, held in round bony cages like a bird’s, the strong, straight nose, curved at the end, a little scornful and patrician, sensitive, sniffing, swift-nostriled as a hound’s—the whole face with its passionate and proud serenity might almost be the face of a great poet, or the visage of some strange and mighty bird.
But now the sleeping figure stirs, opens its eyes and listens, rouses, starts up like a flash.
“What?” says Fox.
The Fox awake now.
“FOXHALL MORTON EDWARDS.”
The great name chanted slowly through his brain—someone had surely spoken it—it filled his ears with sound—it rang down solemnly through the aisles of consciousness—it was no dream—the very walls were singing with its grave and proud sonorities as he awoke.
“What?” cried Fox again.