Dance and Skylark

by John Moore

  Stephen was still chuckling to himself at Polly’s adventures when he arrived at his shop; and the boisterous memories had dispelled most of his gloom. But when he thought again of Odo and Dodo and W. G. and the chinchillas, he wished, oh, he wished, that he had Polly’s company in this desperate affair, for then surely all would be well. On the spur of the moment he pulled out his notecase and hunted through it for Polly’s address; and when he found it he went into the back shop where Miss Pargetter was sitting very prim and still at her typewriter and told her:

  “Put one of those Festival folders in an envelope, please, and send it by airmail to this address. I’ll write a letter to go with it.” Then he spelt out the address to her very slowly: Mr. Polycarpos Gabrielides, 1256 Esplanade Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A.

  He went back into the front shop to write his letter. He had got as far as “My knee is still a better weather-forecaster than the Met used to be” (and was wondering whether it was quite fair to Polly to mention his knee at all) when he was aware of Miss Pargetter standing at his side with her notebook held out in that helpless and appealing attitude which she adopted when she was Stuck.

  “Polly-something,” said Miss Pargetter abruptly. “I can’t remember whether it ends with us or os.”

  “Polycarpos,” said Stephen, spelling it again.

  “Yes, Mr. Tasker.”

  “It means ‘many-seeded,’” added Stephen. “What a funny name.”

  “Yes; but apt. By the way,” said Stephen, “I don’t suppose you sold any books?”

  “I’m afraid there was only one customer all the afternoon.”

  “That’s above the average,” said Stephen.

  “He wanted something to read in a bus. I sold him these.” Miss Pargetter stared for a long time at her notebook. “I put down the titles in shorthand for practice,” she said. “The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry—and, oh, yes, I’ve got it, Meditations on Death and Eternity.”

  “If you sold those books,” said Stephen, “you could sell anything.”

  “Yes, but—I’m afraid I knocked sixpence off Death and Eternity” Miss Pargetter still looked as solemn as an owl. “I felt sure you wouldn’t mind. He was a Scottish Minister,” she said, “and rather poor.”

  Part Two

  I

  There Was a long sultry spell, as May melted into June ; the close sticky nights were shot with sheet-lightning, and black thunderstorms punctuated the scorching days. The Vicar announced that his promised fine-weather system was building up slowly. Nevertheless, some of the storms were heavy, and in one twenty-four-hour period he had the satisfaction of registering no less than .62 inches of rain on his gauge. The Vicar always did record more rain than any other observer within a hundred miles; and on the charts at the Air Ministry the neighbourhood was shown as a pocket of exceptional rainfall and pointed out to students as a remarkable phenomenon, due perhaps to the effect of the nearby hills. But it is possible that the true cause was to be sought in the mischief of the choir boys who under cover of darkness would play an exceedingly naughty trick as they went home through the Vicar’s garden after a late practice.

  The thundery and electric atmosphere got on everybody’s nerves, and as the days went by Stephen had a sense of mounting tension. Disaster was in the air, and its premonitory rumblings were as plain to him as those of the circumambient storms. The first rehearsal had been a ludicrous failure, for owing to a typing mistake in Miss Pargetter’s circular to the performers—she had put “Thursday” instead of “Tuesday”—half the company failed to turn up. The rehearsal therefore became a sort of Tactical Exercise Without Troops; but even so tenuous an affair resulted in five separate and distinct quarrels among the leading actors. In addition, Odo and Dodo, complaining perhaps with reason that their parts were not sufficiently spectacular, had resigned from the company; they would be knights or nothing, and there were not enough horses to go round. A savage rainstorm had finally drenched everybody before they went home.

  Stephen had other troubles too. Lance’s choruses had turned out to be incomprehensible to anybody but their author, and in order to persuade him to rewrite them it had been necessary to apply the ultimate sanction to which, alas, young poets are singularly vulnerable: the Committee had withheld his fee. The Wardrobe Mistress threatened to throw her hand in because she couldn’t; understand Robin’s designs. The men who were building the grandstand went on strike. Mr. Gurney and Councillor Noakes were like two old tomcats snarling at each other in dreadful undertones every time they met. And the Beauty Queens, it was rumoured, had had a row in public at a local dance.

  On the first of June, according to plan, a pink nettlerash of posters had broken out all over the town. Designed by Robin, they were somewhat impressionistic, and seemed to represent a crowd of knights and ladies in a blurry snow-storm of red and white roses—pretty enough when you looked at them closely, but on the hoardings they might have been advertisements for strawberry ice-cream. During the night following their appearance somebody plastered a second lot of posters side by side with them. These declared in bold scarlet lettering:

  WE DON’T WANT FESTIVALS WE WANT HOUSES, WORK AND WAGES

  and were generally attributed to the machinations of Miss Foulkes.

  All that morning Stephen’s inadequate office in the back shop was overcrowded with Councillors and members of the Committee who had looked in to discuss this atrocity. He now had two telephones, which went continually as well-meaning people rang up to tell him about the posters or to ask him what he was going to do about them. Councillor Noakes, fleshy and perspiring, fussed around as usual, got in everybody’s way, and frequently and unnecessarily patted Miss Pargetter on the shoulder, who in her summer dress was the only cool and placid person in the room. At last Stephen could stand it no longer, and making the excuse that he must personally inspect the outrage he escaped from the shop and followed in the footsteps of Mr. Gurney, who had just “dodged out” (Back in half an hour) to have his mid-morning drink at the Red Lion.

  Even in the sleepy High Street one could not help being aware of conflict, frayed tempers, and a population at odds among themselves. Wherever two passers-by had paused to have a word together, or a small group stood gossiping outside a shop, it was ten to one they were disputing either about the Festival or about the Beauty Queens. No longer had the Mayor any reason to complain of apathy. “Rouse ’em, Runcorn, rouse ’em,” he had said; and Mr. Runcorn had responded with a colourful leader about “the verdant meadow, known as Sanguinary, encompassed by umbrageous trees.” It had finished neatly with a quotation from Shakespeare: “This green plot shall be our stage.” Probably hardly anybody had bothered to read it, but the unpredictable citizens had roused themselves with a vengeance. Unfortunately theirs was not exactly the enthusiastic awakening the Mayor had looked forward to; it was more like the resentful agitation of ants in a suddenly disturbed anthill.

  Half-way up the street Stephen found the Inspector of Police, with two of his men, scraping the offending posters off the walls. This pompous and lugubrious individual, whose unsuitable name was Heyhoe, hinted to Stephen that although he was doing his duty he didn’t hold with the Festival either. “I looks around me,” he said, “and what do I see but trouble, trouble everywhere?” He was, however, already on the track of the culprits, for he had searched the balloon factory “from floor to ceiling” and at last had discovered a paste-pot. The paste, he said, in the tone of one speaking of bloodstains, was still wet. He had impounded the pot in case it should be required as an exhibit in court.

  Next Stephen called at Mr. Handiman’s shop, which had recently been opened as the Festival Booking Office with Virginia in charge. She had been lent to the Committee by Mr. Runcorn, an act of self-sacrifice more apparent than real; and now she dreamed her day-dreams over an immaculate seating-plan, as virginal as herself, that had not so far a single X in any of its multitudinous squares. It was Councillor Noakes who had urged that a Beauty Queen
would be the very person to sell tickets; but Stephen had his doubts when he entered the shop and Virginia did not even look up from the sheet of paper on which, in round schoolgirlish characters, she was copying something from a magazine.

  He coughed, and she came to earth from the dizzy heights of stardom, fluttering her eyelids at him.

  “Not very busy yet,” he said.

  “Ay’m not expecting a rush till nearer the tame.”

  He glanced over her shoulder at the sheet of paper and read: K2 tog, PI, K2 …

  “It’s a pettern,” she explained, “for a twin-set.”

  “Oh, I see.” Glancing out of the window, from which Mr. Handiman had at last removed the unseasonable skates, Stephen became aware of a square poster stuck on the outside of the pane, next to Robin’s oblong one.

  “Good Lord, look at that!” he said.

  It was quite easy to read the big letters backwards: WE DON’T WANT FESTIVALS. …

  “Well, Ay never !” was all Virginia said.

  Stephen went out and scratched off the poster with a penknife. There was something of the Nelson Touch, he thought, about Miss Foulkes’ campaign; and he smiled as there came into his mind’s eye a picture of that angular little figure padding about the town in the small hours, probably wearing gym-shoes and the kind of dirty old mackintosh which revolutionaries all over the world seemed to favour; dabbling away with the paste-brush, scurrying round corners, lurking breathless in the dark shadows, and imagining herself to be at last of true fellowship with Sacco and Vanzetti and Dimitrov and all the other martyrs in the Leftists’ hagiology. (But Dimitrov, Stephen remembered, had deviated; he had been liquidated and expunged from proletarian memory.) Poor little Miss Foulkes! he thought, and hoped sincerely that Inspector Heyhoe wouldn’t catch her and drag her to court on some such silly charge as Unauthorised Billposting—if indeed there was such an offence in the catalogue. The way to deal with Miss Foulkes was not to take her seriously; and to laugh off the posters as if they were a boy’s prank.

  Stephen threw the bits of paper into the gutter and continued on his way to the Red Lion.

  II

  Lounging On the bar, in a canary-yellow polo jumper t and a segmented tweed cap with a little button on the crown of it such as English milords are supposed by the French to wear, Sir Almeric Jukes, Baronet and Master of Foxhounds, was holding forth on the subject of the Beauty Queens.

  “A good-lookin’ pair of fillies,” he said. “High-spirited. A fine pair of fillies.”

  The Festival Committee had appointed him Master of the Horse. He had also been cast originally for Edward Prince of Wales; but he had seemed to think that his horsemanship would show to better advantage if he were on the winning side, so he was going to lead the victorious charge of the Yorkists on his own grey steeplechaser. He was an arrogant and supercilious young man, who had made it clear at the first rehearsal that he did not intend to take orders from anybody—least of all from a second-hand bookseller. Stephen disliked him intensely.

  “I dunno which of ’em to put my money on,” he drawled. “’Pon my word I don’t.”

  He was addressing Mr. Gurney, who sat in his customary corner with his umbrella between his knees. At the other end of the bar, Florrie, the old barmaid, had just hung up one of Robin’s posters, and her two most faithful customers, Mr. Oxford and his friend Timms were admiring it and talking about History.

  “What I always says,” declared Mr. Oxford, whose real surname was possibly Huxford, but he had persuaded the world to accept his own version of it, “is that ’istory is tradition and tradition is ’istory, if you see what I mean.”

  “Plain as a pikestaff, old man,” agreed Timms the pianotuner—at least that had been his profession long ago, but the owners of pianos nowadays mostly regarded them as pieces of furniture, which had to be dusted but need not be tuned, so Timms had drifted into a more profitable job, that of bookie’s runner to Mr. Oxford. Fortunately, for he was as scrimp and meagre as Francis Feeble, he didn’t have to do any running; his morning round of half a dozen pubs was accomplished at a leisurely pace, for Inspector Heyhoe was the last man to look for trouble, though he found it everywhere; and besides he liked a little flutter himself. Regularly at twelve o’clock Timms brought the betting-slips to the Red Lion, where he met his employer, and they drank together till closing time, doing a bit of business now and then. At night they went round the pubs wearing broad and benevolent smiles as they distributed largesse in furtive little envelopes to those of their clients who happened to have won. It was a pleasant, profitable and not a very arduous existence if you had no particular desire to look upon the world with a clear and sober eye; and neither of them had any such ambition.

  “Now take those knights,” Mr. Oxford went on, prodding a fat finger into the poster, which was still sticky with printing ink. “Just like the good old ’Ome Guard, I bet they was, comin’ in ’ere arter the battle for their pints of mead or sack or whatever they drank in those days. There’s tradition for you!”

  “Quite right, old man.”

  “What’s more,” said Mr. Oxford, “I’ve heard that battles were nice comfortable affairs then, nothing like Arras and the Somme where we got our feet wet, and I dare say the ’habitants of this town were standing on the touchline ’avin’ a bet on the result: just like you and me at a game of football. An Englishman will bet on anything.”

  “Just like you said; tradition,” echoed Timms dutifully.

  “I knew a Rechabite once,” mused Mr. Oxford, “who had two children called Peter and Josephine; and although he disapproved of ’orse-racing, he had a standing order with me for five bob each way every time an ’orse ran with Peter or Josephine in its name. He put his winnings into Savings Certificates for his kids. But Josephine didn’t get much, did she, Timms?”

  Timms shook his head.

  “The name was too uncommon,” said Mr. Oxford. “But it just shows you: an Englishman, be he Rechabite or racing-man, will bet on anything. For example, there’s Sir Halmeric wantin’ to ’ave a pony with me on the Beauty Comp. Two to one bar one, Sir Halmeric, two to one bar!”

  “Which d’you bar?” asked Sir Almeric swiftly.

  “We’ll discuss it together later,” said Mr. Oxford with fine sensibility. “It wouldn’t be right to bandy the names of ladies about over the counter, like. But, as I say”—he jabbed the poster again— “that’s tradition, that’s England. And these Communists or whoever they are that are kicking up such a row, they ain’t got no tradition, they ain’t what I call English.”

  “I’d put the rats up against a wall,” said Sir Almeric.

  “That’s right. Shoot ’em,” said Timms into his whisky glass. “Jolly good tradition.”

  Just then John Handiman came into the bar and Florrie made haste to serve him.

  “You look tired, dearie,” she said. “Need a nice glass of stout to buck you up.”

  An empress in black lace with jet buttons and a pink artificial rose, she had ruled over the Red Lion Bar for nearly thirty years. Like a constitutional monarch, although she took no part in the conduct of affairs, she had a clearer view than the more active participants of everything that went on. She knew all about the balloon factory and John Handiman’s financial troubles, and because it was unusual for him to drink in the morning she guessed that he was on his way to or from an uncomfortable interview at the Bank. She knew all about the ups-and-downs of the Festival too, about the midnight doings of Miss Foulkes, about the Beauty Queens’ quarrel and about the tentative and tangled courtship of the Beauty Queens by Robin and Lance. She knew that Sir Almeric hadn’t as much money as he pretended to have and that Mr. Oxford had a great deal more; that Mr. Gurney made a good thing out of selling “antique” furniture with artificial worm-holes in it, and that Stephen’s bookshop was tottering to its ruin. And she locked up all this knowledge in her large and compassionate heart, regarding the whole distressing scene with the tolerance and calm of one who had married
three husbands and buried them all.

  They had been no ordinary husbands either. Her first was said to have been a lion-tamer from a circus. Her second had endeavoured to predict the winners of horse races by studying the stars, and had lost all her savings, as as well as his own, through a trifling miscalculation about the date when Jupiter entered the aqueous sign of Pisces. Her third had possessed the absorbing hobby of collecting the labels off whisky-bottles and sticking them in a scrap-book; he had drunk himself to death during the war and left the labels of ninety-nine different brands as his strange memorial. From these and other experiences Florrie had acquired her comfortable conviction that it took all sorts to make a world.

  But the manager, Old Screwnose as she called him, who now came creeping into the bar through the door at the back, nevertheless tried her patience sorely. He was carrying by their necks, as if they were snakes which might bite him, two bottles of whisky. “This is all you get,” he said defensively, dumping them on the counter. “It’s our Allocation.” That was one of the words which he always spoke reverently and as it were with a capital letter, as if they were some sort of abracadabra or mumbo-jumbo of which he stood in awe: Allocation, Triplicate, Quota, Directive; for in the war he had been a Temporary Civil Servant. To Florrie, who had worked for nearly a dozen innkeepers in her time, good and bad ones, drunken and sober ones, gamblers, spendthrifts, wife-beaters, likers of bits of skirt, and even one who had cut his throat in the cellar all among the beer barrels, Mr. Hawker was a source of perpetual astonishment and dismay. Not that there was anything remarkable about him, except his crooked nose; he was just an ordinary petty puritan, with a thin peaky face, sandy moustache, and rimless glasses, habited in the shiny black pin-stripe which had been his bureaucratic uniform. Among Licensed Victuallers, however, puritans and teetotallers are rare birds; and Florrie often caught herself staring at him as if he were a hoopoe hopping about on the lawn. All her previous employers, even the worst of them, had been like large or lesser suns, giving out light and warmth to customer and crony. They shone, they glowed in her memory, each the centre of a miniature solar system which revolved merrily about him. But Mr. Hawker generated no warmth; he was as cold as a dead star; he possessed no planetary cronies. His only interest in the customers took the form of a niggling apprehension lest they should misbehave themselves; and his only concern about the bar was how many glasses had been broken last week. He disapproved strongly of the Festival because he thought it would bring undesirable charabanc people to the town.