Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  ‘Put a light to Coleman’s fuse and shock Humphries out of his wits, you mean?’

  ‘No, no, no! Nothing like that at all.’

  ‘But isn’t Humphries dead against the bands? Isn’t his task to morally advise them clean out of existence?’

  ‘Not altogether. He says that while they strike him as pretty squalid, if they take people’s minds off class rancour, agnosticism and the Sankey award, he’s for them, always hoping for the day, he says, when the people generally will find the same release he does in a good funeral or a long argument about Baptism. So why don’t we approach Humphries and explain that Cynlais and his boys are puritans at heart and want nothing better than to get hold of some decent, God-fearing costumes so that they can turn out looking less repulsive and frightening to the pious. We could also add that Cynlais has given up his old promiscuity since he came across Moira Hallam and swallowed that draught of Caney’s cure. Then we can tap Humphries for some cash. He must have a soft side to his nature or he wouldn’t keep all those birds in his front room.’

  Teilo Dew and Gomer stared at the chessboard and the stagnant pieces as if they found this game as inscrutable as they had always found Humphries.

  ‘Your mind’s just singing, Milton,’ said Gomer. ‘From what I know of Humphries he probably keeps those birds in his front room just to test for gas. When the birds die Humphries changes the potted shrubs and chalks up a new cautionary text on the wall. He was the grumpiest boy I ever met behind a counter, although I will say that iron at all levels is a pretty sombre trade. He was the one ironmonger who sold paraffin that put out the match. But let’s go and see him anyway.’

  Gomer and Milton left Teilo to brood over the blockage in the chess game and picked up Uncle Edwin who was sitting in the Reading Room humming a mossy old funeral chant over a brassily authoritative leading article in a national paper that was open in front of him. He invited Gomer and Milton to scan this article. They rushed their eyes down it. The writer had been dealing with the carnival bands and frankly felt that there was something potentially threatening to the State in having such masses of men, with nothing better to do, moving about the streets in march time. He suggested that a monster carnival to end all carnivals be organised, set it in motion with a strong platoon of Guards in the rear to ensure no getaways, then keep the whole procession in motion until it reached the South Pole where they could swap bits of political wisdom with the pen guins. When Gomer and Milton finished reading the article they joined Uncle Edwin in humming the last verse of the funeral chant, coming out clearly with the words of the last line which praised the dignity and cheapness of the grave.

  ‘But never mind about that now,’ said Gomer. ‘Milton has an idea that Ephraim Humphries might supply the money to drag Coleman and his band up into the temperate zone.’

  Edwin was not enthusiastic. He said about the only thing he could recommend in the case of Humphries was a load of hot clinker for the man’s bleaker and colder urges, but he responded to the glow of enthusiasm in Milton Nicholas’ face and we started the journey across the town to the house of Ephraim Humphries.

  Humphries lived in one of a group of larger houses on some high ground just outside the town’s west side. There was a diamond-shaped pane of dark blue glass in the centre of his door which created an effect exactly halfway between sadness and intimidation. After our first knock we could see Humphries and his wife take up position in the passageway. They peered out at us and it was plain they felt no happiness or confidence at the sight of us. There was an open fanlight above the door through which we could hear most of what they said. They were speaking in whispers but whispers bred on long years in oratorio.

  ‘I count four,’ we heard Mrs Humphries say, ‘but there may be more arranged on either side of the door.’

  ‘Stop fearing the worst, Harriet,’ said Humphries. ‘You’ve never been the same since that lecturer told you your great-grandfather had had his bakehouse cooled in the Chartist troubles. Who are these fellows?’

  ‘Can’t tell for sure. There’s a shady look about them.’

  ‘That’s the blue glass. My own father, seen through that diamond, looks as if he’s just come running from the County Keep.’

  ‘I told you you should never have accepted that invitation to go to those carnivals as adviser on morals. These are probably some louts you’ve offended with your straight talk about how bruises have now taken the place of woad as a darkening element on the moral fabric of the Celt. These men are very likely a group sent here by Cynlais Coleman, the leading der vish, to do you some mischief.’ Her tone became strained and sharply informative. ‘Do you know that the very word assassin comes from the Middle East where Coleman has his spiritual home. Let’s bar the doors.’ She made a quick move towards the door and there was a shifting of iron such as we would never normally hear outside a gaol.

  ‘Stop being such a teacher, Harriet,’ said Humphries. ‘And throw those bolts back. I’d never have had them if they hadn’t come to me cheap through the trade.’

  The door was opened.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Humphries, showing only his head.

  ‘We’d like a word with you, Mr Humphries,’ said Gomer, and he gave us the cue with his hand to start smiling in the broadest, most unmalicious way we could manage. This performance was so out of tune with the mood of the times that Mrs Humphries, thinking from the lunatic look of us that we were out to kill them on more general grounds than she had imagined, tried to drag Humphries back into the passage and ram the bolts back home. He threw her off.

  ‘Come on into the front room,’ he said, his voice rustling with caution.

  We moved slowly behind Humphries into the most tightly packed front parlour we had ever seen. On the wall, frame to frame, as if a broad gap would only aggravate the loneliness that had tormented and killed them on earth, were huge photo graphs of the most austere voters, a lot of them bearded and all of them frowning and staring straight at Humphries and us.

  ‘Beloved pastors on the right-hand wall and irreplaceable relatives on the left,’ said Humphries as he saw us trying to map the great patches of gloom created by those faces. It struck us that with all these elements speaking up for the Black Meadow and the County Assizes on his flank he must have been driven into the ironmongery trade by centuries of in herited ill-feeling about the species. The furniture of the room, and it seemed from the amount of it that Humphries and his wife had both thrown a front-room suite into the marriage chest, was thick with plush and chenille. It made the whole chamber look like the hidden badge of all the world’s outlawed or discouraged sensuousness. Our fascinated fingers kept reach ing out and stroking the stuff until Humphries, looking con vinced that we were all going to unpick and make off with a length of chenille to eke out the costumes of a carnival band, told us to stop it and get to the point. Around the room were eight or nine birdcages and we watched the birds inside with great interest. There might have been a time when the budgeri gars had thought of trying to give some light relief to those divines and relatives in the photographs but they had broken their beaks on all that ambient gravity and lost. They now sat on their perches looking as sad and damned and muffled as the gallery of perished censors. Their singing had been soaked futilely into the layers of plush and they had shut up. As we squeezed into the tiny areas of free floor space, with Mrs Humphries pushing hard at Uncle Edwin because she did not fancy the idea of any of our delegation being left with her in the passageway, one of the birds let out a note. It was not gay or musical. It was like the first note of the last post in a low-grade military funeral, heard through rain and trees. It sounded as if the bird thought we had come to bail him out.

  Humphries looked up at the bird and said:

  ‘You hear that? You hear that? They might come yet.’

  ‘Oh, nice birds,’ said Milton Nicholas with real rapture in his voice. We admired Milton for this because we had never before heard a word of interest, let alone praise, from him on
the subject of birds. Once in the Discussion Group he had gone so far as to praise the habit of migration and wheeling off south at the approach of autumn as a tactically sound approach and one which, he hoped, would be copied when man resolved the last cramp of tribal idiocy and took the whole world as his available playground. Milton won his motion that night on the rheumatic vote alone, because there was a whole fleet of voters present stiffened up by winter rains and as badly in need of a stronger sun as of a more encouraging government. Later, Milton qualified those words of approval about birds by saying that he considered pigeon fancying, which at the time was running neck and neck with sex as a life form among the more torpid prolies, a very lulling activity and worthy to be classed as opium for those people who had somehow managed to emerge awake from under the long, soporific cone of our traditional prescriptions.

  Humphries let his eyes go right around the room, nodding at each of the cages.

  ‘Would that men were more like them. So bright, so brief, so harmless, and no sorrow in their singing.’

  ‘You’re right, boy,’ said Milton. ‘Good and deep as the singing has been in most of our chapels, I think we’ve overdone the note of death and desperation in certain types of cadence.’ He pointed at the cage of the bird that had let out the solitary note. ‘Give us the same seed and the same sure accommodation and we’d be there with the budgies.’

  Milton’s reference to the chapel singing and the slightly demagogic tilt of the last sentence had made Humphries very wary again.

  ‘Your business, gentlemen?’

  ‘We want to thank you,’ said Gomer, ‘for the fine stand you made at Tregysgod and the remarks you made about Cynlais Coleman’s band. We think the same. Those home-grown dervishes have cancelled out the landing of Augustus. We are collecting among ourselves to fit Coleman and his men out in such a way that they will not cause the very hillsides to blush as they do now. Could you help us?’

  Humphries stood stock still for at least two minutes, his lips drawn in and his eyes fixed hypnotically on the most forbidding of the portraits. Uncle Edwin muttered to Gomer that someone should give Humphries an investigatory push in case he had chosen this moment to die just to put us in the wrong. But Humphries came suddenly back to life, shaking his head as if recovering from some spell laid upon him by the granite features of the voter in the portrait.

  ‘That was my uncle, Cadman Humphries,’ he said, his voice still a little muffled, uncertain. We remembered Cadman. He had been a quarry-owner, the only quarry owner whose face had made his employees think they were working double time or made them constantly doubtful about where they should place the explosive charge.

  ‘As a matter of fact I could and will help you,’ he said. His voice was now loudly vibrant and overwhelming. Four of the birds came rushing to the bars of their cage and Uncle Edwin pressed his body against the plush flank of a settee to mute the effect of Humphries’ outburst. ‘It will be my great pleasure to do so. I am vice president of a committee which is gathering funds to supply wholesome entertainments for the valley folk during this emergency. Just in case these carnivals should become a permanent part of our lives we must at least see that minimum standards of decorum are accepted, and that the marchers are decently covered against both wind and temptation. As for Coleman, whose first appearance before my wife gave her such hiccups as would take a lagoon of small sips to cure, I will leave it to you men to think out an alternative cos tume for this buffoon and you may leave the bill, within reason, to me. Nothing too royal or lavish, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gomer. ‘By the way, Mr Humphries, have you seen Georgie Young’s women’s band, the Britannias?’

  Humphries’ eyes became a twitch of embarrassed guilt and he whipped back around to face Cadman Humphries and to salute the need for a really stony ethic in a softening world.

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t had a good look at them. I’ve heard about them and I’ve had some good reports of Mr Georgie Young’s excellent work as a driller. But I haven’t really seen them. Last week at Tregysgod, for some reason they didn’t arrive as far as the judges’ stand.’

  ‘Take a good look at them, Mr Humphries. When you see them you’ll lose what is left of your hair. Then you’ll start an other fund to have Young hung and the bands-women treated with balsam of missionary.’

  Milton tugged at Gomer, thinking that any more talk that Humphries might construe as being morally double-jointed and we would be getting the boot. But Mr Humphries did not seem put out. Through his eyes I thought I could now see a film of comfortable steam above his thoughts. We said thank you and goodnight.

  ‘Goodnight,’ said Humphries. ‘I’m surprised to find you men so helpful, such watchdogs in the cause of wholesomeness.’

  ‘Just let us catch a whiff of anything that isn’t wholesome, Mr Humphries,’ said Milton Nicholas, ‘then watch us bark and bite.’

  We went straight from the house of Ephraim Humphries to that of Cynlais Coleman. Cynlais’ mother, a ravelled woman whose fabric, even without Cynlais, would not have stood up to too much wear and tear, took us instantly to Cynlais’ bedroom, glad to be sharing her problem. Cynlais was in bed, flattened under the load of his grief and a big family Bible, trying to re assemble the fragments of himself after the two disasters. We were puzzled by the Bible and were going to ask Mrs Coleman whether she had meant it just to keep Cynlais in bed and off his feet, but she explained that she had given it to him to read the Book of Job to help him keep his troubles in proportion, but Cynlais had kept flicking the pages and referring to Moira Hallam as Delilah, and saying that Job seemed to have come right out of one of the blacker Thursday night sessions at the Discussion Group in the Institute.

  At the sight of us Cynlais drew the Bible and the bed-clothes up to his face as if to hide.

  ‘Hullo Cynlais,’ said Gomer. ‘Big news, boy. We’ve got the money for the new costumes. What fancies have you got on this subject, and for goodness’ sake keep inside Europe this time because we’re hoping to have enough to cover you all from top to bottom.’

  There was now nothing of Cynlais except his very small brow, and he had his hands clenched over the sides of the Bible as if he were thinking of throwing it at Gomer as a first step to clearing the bedroom. Uncle Edwin, at the foot of the bed, knocked solemnly on Cynlais’ tall foot as if it were a door.

  ‘Come on, Cynlais,’ he said. ‘Buck up, boy, and stop looking so shattered. This isn’t the end of the world; it’s only the first crack.’

  Cynlais’ whole face came into view. It was grey, shrunken and lined. Uncle Edwin said that between Caney’s kidney-whipper and carnal wishes it was clear that Coleman had been through the mill.

  ‘I keep thinking of what Moira told me,’ said Cynlais, with a look in his eye that made Milton Nicholas say that Caney should be held on charges of making a public mischief.

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Gomer.

  ‘She said, “Cynlais, has your heart ever been in the orange groves of Seville?”’

  We all tried to relate this statement to the carnivals and the news we had brought from Ephraim Humphries.

  ‘You can’t possibly have a band of marching oranges,’ said Gomer. ‘Just drop this greengrocery motif, Cynlais. You can be too subtle in these matters. Look what happened to those Eskimos from the top of the valley. You remember their manoeuvre of shuddering at the end of every blast from the gazookas to show extreme cold and the need for blubber, no one ever understood it. They shuddered themselves right out of the carnival league.’

  ‘I don’t mean oranges,’ said Cynlais. ‘I mean bullfighters, with me dressed up in the front as an even better bullfighter than Moelwyn Cox.’

  We had to move away from the bed at this point and explain in low voices to Milton Nicholas about Moelwyn Cox and his appearance with the Birchtown Amateur Operatic company as the matador Escamillo. Milton’s first impulse on hearing Cynlais make this reference to bullfighters was to think that Cynlais, between the w
eight of that Bible and the bushfires of his lustful wanting, had been flattened and charred into madness. Cynlais, with a glare of one hundred per cent paranoia, told us to stop whispering or get out of his bedroom.

  Gomer went back to the bedside and shook Cynlais gravely by the hand.

  ‘That’s a wonderful idea, Cyn,’ he said. ‘Come over to Tasso’s tomorrow night and we’ll talk it over. Do you think you can manage it?’

  Cynlais said at first that without some word of encouragement and hope from Moira Hallam he would never again leave that bedroom except to show the rent collector that he was not a subtenant. But we got him out of the bed and marched him around the room a few times, taking it in turns to catch him when his legs buckled. We all agreed that he would be able to do the trip to Tasso’s on the following evening with a few attendant helpers on his flank.

  Willie Silcox was in Tasso’s the next day. He was interested when we told him about our visit to Ephraim Humphries, and he made notes when he heard about the various quirks of body, face and thought we had noted in Humphries when we men tioned the Britannias.

  ‘One of these nights,’ said Willie, ‘Humphries will draw a thick serge veil over the portrait of Cadman Humphries, the quarry owner whose eyes and brows keep Ephraim in a suit of glacial combinations, and he will slip forth into the darkened street, just like Jack the Ripper, but knifeless and bent on a blander type of mischief altogether than was Jack. And you say he’s going to foot the bill for a new band for Coleman? That will bring him closer to the physical reality of these carnivals and allow his senses a freer play. What is this new band going to be called?’