The Fox in the Attic Read Online Free PDF Page A

“There’s mentality in the blood, they say.”
    â€œMentality!” exclaimed Mrs. Roberts contemptuously: “Wickedness you mean!” Then she too lowered her voice to a sinister tone: “Why for should he shut hisself away like that if his life was fit to be seen ?”
    A knowing and a scandalized look descended on them all:
    â€œFlying in the face of Almighty God!”
    â€œEnough to bring his uncles back from the grave.”
    There was a brief pause. Then:
    â€œPoor young Mr. Henry ... Pity he got hisself killed in that old war.”
    â€œThe little duck! I seen him guv his bath once, the little angel! Loviest little bit of meat ...”
    â€œAye, it’s always that way: while them as could be spared ...”
    â€œ Rotten old Kayser!”
    â€œStill: if most days he’s out shooting with your Dai ...”
    â€œâ€˜Days’! But what about the nights , Mrs. Pritchard? Answer me that!”
    Mrs. Pritchard evidently couldn’t.
    Dr. Brinley strolled on, but now another early arrival had paused for breath after the steep ascent. This was the new bishop, whose first visit to Flemton it was. Meanwhile the talk had been continuing:
    â€œ All alone there with no one to see—it just don’t bear thinking on! ”
    â€œ I wouldn’t go near the place—not if you paid me. ”
    â€œ Quite right, Mrs. Locarno! Nor I wouldn’t neither! ”
    â€œ Not even by daylight I wouldn’t! ”
    The bishop sighed, closing his fine eyes. These unhappy women! So palpably striving to warm their own several loneliness and unlikeability at the fires of some common hatred ... They were closing in like a scrum now—huddling over the little hellish warmth they had kindled, and hissing their words. But why this anathema against solitariness? “Women who have failed to achieve companionship in their homes, in their marriages: women with loneliness thrust upon them, I suppose they’re bound to be outraged by anyone who deliberately chooses loneliness.”
    A man of orderly mind, the bishop liked to get things generalized and taped like that. Now, his generalization achieved, the tension in his dark face relaxed a little.
    Meanwhile Dr. Brinley had poked in his nose at the “Wreckers’ Arms” (as he always called the place). Here, and in the Assembly Room behind, preparation of the banquet was going ahead with equal enjoyment whether their rich neighbor Augustine was going to honor them with his presence or not.
    All that morning, while the tide was out, farm carts from the mainland had driven down the river bank to where the track ended at a wide bight of smooth hard tidal sand. This divided the last stretch of low-water river-channel from the saltings of the Marsh; traversing the length of it, they had reached the final sickle of the dunes and the way up into Flemton. These carts had carried chickens, geese, turkeys, even whole sheep; or at least a sack of flour or a crock of butter, for the High Steward’s Banquet was something of a Dutch treat and few of the guests came quite empty-handed.
    But that was over, now. Now, the evening tide had welled in through the river mouth and round behind the rock, flooding the sandy bight and turning it from Flemton’s only highway into a vast shallow lagoon. In the dark the shining water was dotted with little boats nodding at anchor and the slanting poles of fish-traps. Flemton was now cut off, except for an isthmus of hummocky sand leading only to the dunes. But already ducks, chickens, geese, turkeys, legs and shoulders of mutton, loins of pork, sirloins of beef, sucking-pigs—there was far more provender than the Wreckers ever could have cooked alone, and according to custom it had been farmed out among all the private ovens in the place.
    Now, with all these and with huge home-cured hams boiled in cider as well, with pans of sausages, apple-pies, shuddering jellies in purple