The Fox in the Attic Read Online Free

fanaticism in those two old Tories: yet in practice so much actual kindness to many, including Augustine himself—the “Liberal Woman’s” child! The two things seemed hard to reconcile. Over the carved autumnal marbles of the empty fireplace there hung a huge presentation portrait of Uncle Arthur as Master, his otterhounds grouped around him; so Augustine fell to studying the face now, in the gloaming, in the hope of discovering its secret. But all it showed was that years of concentration on the animal had made the Master himself grow so like an otter it was a wonder his own hounds had not rent him, Actaeon-wise. And Uncle William? The only portrait of him here was a small lady-like watercolor in full uniform painted by an artistic color-sergeant at Hongkong. It showed the General’s eye large and liquid as a Reynolds cherub’s, the rounded cheek as innocent (there can have been no Liberals in Hongkong for Uncle William to look so much at peace).
    The sky was darkening, but the mist seemed to have cleared now: through the tall uncurtained window what seemed like a single low star suddenly winked out, blurred only by the runnels on the glass.
    Augustine raised the sash. That “star” must be the lamps in distant Flemton being lit (Flemton was a little mediaeval rock-citadel eight miles away guarding the river mouth: a kind of Welsh Mont-St.-Michel, or miniature Gibraltar). For a minute or two he stood watching, his solid height silhouetted against the window, what little daylight remained illumining his freckled, sensitive, sensible young face. But although his thoughts were distracted now, his features still wore the imprint of the shock he had had—like yesterday’s footprints still discernible on dewy grass.
4
    Uncle Arthur the otter and Uncle William the faded general ... Augustine had been fond of both old men when he was a child, and he warmed to their memory now—but fond of them as objects rather than as people, for what grotesques they were! Too old even for billiards in the end, they had sat here day-in day-out winter and summer one each side of a roaring fire while dust settled on the cover of the ever-shrouded table. Uncle Arthur was stone deaf in the left ear, hard of hearing in the right: Uncle William stone deaf in the right ear, hard of hearing in the left (hence that peculiar custom-built telephone). Both used enormous ear-trumpets: Uncle William was nearly blind too, so used a powerful monocle as well.
    Suddenly it struck Augustine with force: how was it so great a gulf divided his own from every previous generation, so that they seemed like different species?
    The kind of Time called “History” ended at the Battle of Waterloo: after that, Time had gone into a long dark tunnel or chrysalis called the Victorian Age. It had come out into daylight again at the Present Day, but as something quite different: it was as impossible to imagine oneself born a Victorian or born in “History” as ... as born a puma.
    But wherein did the difference demonstrably lie? For the moment he could not get beyond his starting-point that all previous generations had been objects, whereas his were people : that is, what mattered were their insides—what they thought, what they felt. Not their outsides at all: the natural face in the shaving-glass was not him , only the invisible mind and the erupting ego within it ranked as him . Whereas those ... those ancient objects his uncles and their generation were outsides only: hollow bundles of behaviorist gestures, of stylized reactions to stimuli like Pavlov’s dogs. Their only “reality” was the grotesques they looked, the grotesqueries they did.—Take Uncle William’s story of old Sir Rhydderch Prydderch, a neighbor said to have torn out his staircase at the age of seventy and thereafter swarmed up a rope every night to go to bed: had such a grotesque any reality except as an imagined spectacle