by John Moore
“And we want a donkey. Mr. Gurney says the Holy Hermit’s got to be led on to the field by Odo and Dodo, riding on a donkey.”
“What, Odo and Dodo?”
“No, the Hermit.”
“Well, that’s lucky,” said Faith. “If they were as drunk as they were at the rehearsal last night they’d fall off.” “But can you get a donkey?”
“Of course. Old Mother Perks at the bottom of our lane has one in her orchard. It’s older than I am so it ought to be quiet.”
“Good girl. What a life it is!”
She put down her fork and examined him for a moment with her pitying and curious stare.
“Does it ever occur to you,” she said, “that if we’re going to play to empty stands all this hurly-burly hasn’t got much point?”
And indeed it had occurred to him. He was only too well aware that the turmoil in his office was, in a sense, a sort of bombinating in a vacuum. You had only to look at the seating-plans in Virginia’s booking office to discover that the public at large regarded the Festival with supreme indifference. There was a thin speckling of crosses in the half-crown section, mostly representing charabanc parties, and here and there a few of the more expensive seats had been sold; but Stephen suspected that the purchasers of these were devoted or dutiful friends and relations of the performers. Virginia, knitting away uninterrupted, had finished her twin-set in record time and started on another one; her total takings amounted to less than a hundred and fifty pounds.
Encouraged by this, the anti-Festival faction had become more vociferous. The opposition was by no means confined to Miss Foulkes’ supporters and the workers in the balloon factory; letters began to appear in the Intelligencer signed “Ratepayer” and “Pro Bono Publico” asking who was going to foot the bill if the Festival lost two or three thousand pounds. Mr. Runcorn, meeting Stephen one morning in the street, declared in his most sepulchral tone: “I have my finger on the pulse of the town, Mr. Tasker; I do not like the feel of it at all.” Councillor Noakes haunted the booking office anxiously, peering short-sightedly at the seating-plans over Virginia’s shoulder and sighing deeply while he gave her small consoling pats upon various parts of her anatomy. In fact the only remaining optimists were the Mayor, who held fast to his belief that there would be a last-minute influx of Foreign Visitors, and the Vicar, who insisted that when the anticyclone arrived the bookings would be immediately trebled.
“Buzz-buzz-buzz,” said Faith, “like blowflies in a bottle. We make ourselves so busy we forget that nobody’s taking any notice of us.”
“We’ve spent more than we ought to on advertising already.”
“Just ordinary advertising. Posters and things. That’s no good. We must do something different. Have some cheese?”
“No, thanks, I’m full.”
Faith helped herself to a lump of Double Gloucester.
“Something different,” she munched.
“Yes, but what?”
“Bloons.”
“What?”
Faith finished her cheese in her own time and said:
“Balloons. Kill two birds with one stone. Win over the opposition by supporting a local industry and advertise the Festival all over the place.”
“I don’t quite get it,” said Stephen.
“You print on the balloons a neat little caption about the Pageant. You fill them with hydrogen. You ask for volunteers to let them go. (That’s more publicity because people love letting off balloons.) And they sail away wherever the wind listeth. I thought of it in the bath,” said Faith.
“Wouldn’t most of them come down in open country where they’d never be seen?”
“Yes. You’d want a lot of balloons.”
“How many?”
“Twenty thousand,” said Faith coolly. “At least. And perhaps you’d have to offer rewards and prizes to start people looking for them. But I worked it out in the bath and I thought that if five per cent were picked up, we’d have set a thousand people talking. There’s a lot of publicity in that.”
It sounded to Stephen a crazy idea. In any case, he protested, the factory couldn’t make them in time. There were only three weeks to go before the Festival; and to do any good the balloons would have to be dispatched within ten days.
“They can make them in ten days,” said Faith.
“What? You’ve talked to John Handiman already?”
“Have fixed,” said Faith. “One hundred and fifty gross at twelve-and-six a gross. Delivery to-morrow week. That just gives us time to persuade old Runcorn to write a leader about it, asking for volunteers to let them go from the top of the hill.”
Faith helped herself to another piece of cheese.
“I do hope it blows like hell,” she said.
V
Adeflated pig lay upon John Handiman’s desk; it was a sample of the latest batch, which Miss Foulkes had put there. Beneath it were two letters which had arrived by the morning post. John removed the pig and read them for the third time.
The first was from the Bank. It ran:
“Dear Mr. Handiman: I am disappointed to find that the promised payment into your company’s account has not materialised. You will realise of course that it is impossible for me to allow any further increase in the overdraft, which stands at £571 3s. 6d. and that provision must therefore be made for your Wages Cheque on Friday. I can only suggest that you take the necessary steps to ensure that the cheque due to you from your Agent is received by that date. …”
The second was from the company’s Agent in London. Certain currency difficulties, it said, had cropped up in connection with the Argentine payment. No doubt all would be well in the end, but the money had not yet arrived and no settlement could be expected for at least a week. “Meanwhile,” the Agent added, “we enclose a translation of the explanation we have received from the Argentine importer.”
The “explanation,” if it was one, was wrapped up in Latin courtesies. It spoke of pesos and Exchange controls as if they were the language of love; and the very literal translation finished with a flourish: “Your servants who kiss your hand.”
So this, thought John, was the end: not with a bang but a whimper. On an impulse he blew up the pig and stood it on his desk. Its long falsetto squeal was dying away when Miss Foulkes came in, and she regarded it with disapproval as the wrinkles began to appear on its back and with a final faint squeak it toppled over as if it had been pole-axed. She didn’t think that balloons in the shape of pigs were very funny. Then she noticed the bowl of scarlet peonies on the filing-cabinet and began to blush.
“The messenger-boy brought them and I put them in water,” said John, trying not to look at her. “There was no message.”
“Thank you. By the way,” she said briefly, “the shop stewards have called a meeting. It’s just starting now.”
The “shop stewards” were Jim and Joe. They were in fact the only Trade Unionists in the factory, and their title was an honorary one, bestowed upon them by Miss Foulkes.
“A meeting? Oh, yes. I suppose I ought to go and give them a sort of farewell talk or something. On the lines of ‘It was a good show while it lasted’?”
“This is a private meeting,” said Miss Foulkes, “for the workers.”
“Oh! All right. Enid,” he said, “I’m sorry about it all.”
“So am I.”
“I should have liked to do that job for the Festival. I wonder if we could carry on just long enough—”
“Wait and see,” snapped Miss Foulkes.
In the small yard at the back of the factory, a desolate place full of empty latex-containers, some of which had rolled down into the mud at the river’s edge and stuck there, with bits of old bicycles, motor tyres and a half-submerged punt, Jim was making a speech. It was a long, confused and rambling speech, which would surely have puzzled any student of industrial relations, and it was delivered in the voice of a raven with tonsillitis. The B. capitalists, Jim said, had made another B. muck-up. A proper mi
litary muck-up it was, like Dunkirk. The Argentinos were partly to blame for it too. Run away without paying. He never did hold with that Peron. Anyhow, the long and the short of it was there was no money in the B. kitty. Pretty kettle of fish. Just the sort of thing that happened under B. capitalism. Always would happen until the whole shooting-match was in the hands of the workers. Then they’d show ’em.
Not that he had anything against Mr. Handiman. They ought to have seen him at Walcheren. Shot through the stomach and half drownded, and asking about Jim and Joe.
No money in the kitty. And along came this contract for a hundred and fifty gross of balloons for the Festival. What the hell the Festival wanted balloons for Jim couldn’t say. He didn’t hold with the B. Festival. Since there was no B. copper listening he didn’t mind admitting he’d had a hand in sticking up them posters. Him and some others he wouldn’t name.
That Inspector Heyhoe was a Fascist Beast, he was, proper.
Now the B. puzzle was, what happened next? Did they go on the dole or did they work out that contract on half-pay, overtime chucked in, and have the other half when and if there was something in the kitty again? Union Rules? To hell with Union Rules. Who was talking about Union Rules anyway? He and Joe were the only loyal Trade Unionists there, and if they couldn’t say to hell with the Union who could?
“We wants to do fings proper and we wants to do fings Democratic,” croaked Jim, “so we’ll put it in the form of a resolution and settle it by a show of hands. The proposition is—but I’ll ask our secretary to read it out. Go on, oe.”
It was a very complicated resolution, and it took the shape, for some obscure ideological reason, of an ultimatum to the Management. Because Joe had forgotten the last part of the sentence, it ended “or else—”
“Or else what?” put in Mrs. Greening.
“Or else it’s a lock-out, see,” said Jim. “Not a strike, but a B. lock-out. Some of you scabs that ain’t in the Union don’t know the difference. If he don’t accept it, then it’s simply another B. lock-out. Now put it to the meeting, Joe.”
A woman at the back of the crowd said:
“What about the Festival? We don’t want it to go out as we holds with it, do we?”
“Amendment accepted,” said Jim with alacrity. “Put in somefing to that effect, Joe—while not in favour of the Festival at a time when man-hours and materials—you remember that piece Carrots had in the letter to the paper?”
“It makes it sound a bit round-the-’ouses,” protested Joe.
“Never mind. We wants to say what we means. Put it to the meeting.”
Joe did so.
“Now we wants a proposer.”
Mrs. Greening put up her hand; Edna seconded, because she liked Mrs. Greening and was sorry for John Handiman; and twenty-nine men, women and girls, who lived in leaky tumbledown cottages in the back alleys of a rural slum, the rag-tag-and-bobtail of the town, raised their hands in favour.
“Carried unanimously,” said Jim; and a corncrake mocked him from the long grass of the Bloody Meadow.
It was Joe’s duty, as Secretary, to lay the resolution upon John’s desk. He did this without undue ceremony, because he could never quite make up his mind, when he entered the office, whether he was the accredited spokesman of the workers or Private 256389 Collins, J. He stumped in with his beret on, gave a sort of compromise-salute which could be interpreted either as a token of respect or a comradely acknowledgment of John’s greeting, observed that it was a proper muck-up, regarded Miss Foulkes’ peonies with interest, and stumped out.
John read the resolution four times before he understood it. At last he looked up.
“Enid. You knew about this?”
“I dare say.”
“You know what it means?”
“No beer or cigarettes for anybody for a fortnight— won’t hurt them, anyhow—and then if the Argentine pays, and we get some more contracts, we might just scrape through.”
“If I can raise a hundred and fifty pounds. That’s half the wages, for two weeks.”
“Can you?”
“Somehow. The Lord knows. I’ve got to.”
“Then we’d better get started,” she said, “on those Festival balloons.”
John looked at her for a little while in silence; and then suddenly he grinned.
“Enid.”
“Yes?”
“Are you quite sure that this is in strict accordance with the Party Line?”
“If you’re thinking of the Festival.” she said, pursing her prim little mouth, “we are still opposed to it. Our solidarity—you needn’t laugh.”
“Go on. Your solidarity—”
“It isn’t funny.”
“By God, it isn’t!” he said gravely, looking down at the resolution on his desk.
“Well, what I mean to say is, we’re doing this for the factory, not for the Festival.” She had a watertight-compartment mind. In her woodcut-world there were no half-tones, the black never merged into the white. “As for the Festival,” she said, bloody, bold and resolute, “we shall continue to fight. Joe, Jim and I propose to picket the entrance with banners.”
VI
MR. Handiman senior never went fishing on Sunday, because he was strict Methody, but it was his custom to take an afternoon stroll by the riverside instead. There could be no harm in watching other fishermen who had been brought up more easy-going, nor in marking down a likely eddy or a deep quiet bream-hole where the fish might be biting later in the week. Besides, the slow-flowing, peaceful river acted as a sort of salve upon his spirit; it soothed all his worries away. Merely to walk beside it, to listen to the song of the larks upspringing or spiralling down, to watch the silly ducks dabbling, to see the loosestrife and the willowherb and those yellow waterlilies that boys called brandy-bottles (because they smelled like brandy, he supposed, though never a drop of it had passed his lips)— all this afforded him a deep contentment. He described it to himself as “communing with Nature,” and every Sunday afternoon between the time when he finished his nap and the time when the Abbey bells called the High Church folk to evensong he communed with nature in his chapel-going bowler hat.
But he had never needed this communion so much as he needed it now, nor ever had less hope of comfort from it. When he thought of the terrible thing he had done, the deceitful, wicked, almost criminal thing, his heart nearly stopped beating and he asked himself why God did not strike him dead then and there. This morning in Chapel, while the Minister was praying, he had hung his head and staring at the bare stone floor had fancifully contemplated the possibility that it might suddenly open and swallow him up; for he worshipped, without knowing he did so, a devil called Jehovah, who was certainly capable of such acts of vengeance.
His dreadful deed, at the time, had seemed comparatively innocent; though he had performed it with trembling fingers and a quickening breath. But now he could see there had been no excuse for it at all; except the folly of a doting old man.
John had come to his shop late on Thursday evening and had asked for the loan of a hundred and fifty pounds. He had explained all about the troubles of the factory, and about the Festival balloons and the people working on half-pay. He had promised that the money should be paid back within a fortnight; and he had ended: “I wouldn’t have troubled you, Dad, not for worlds, save that you told me to if ever I was in a jam.”
And that was perfectly true. When John had come back from the war to discover that the ironmonger’s shop had shrunk while he was away and become too small to contain him, like his civilian clothes; when he had planned to strike out on his own and set up the balloon factory, Mr. Handiman, full of pride, had suggested that if he ever wanted a temporary loan he knew where to look for it. “You come to me,” he had said. “You come along to your old dad and he won’t let you down.” It was, as he saw now, a vain and foolish thing to say; why, then, had he uttered it? Because John had looked so fine in his uniform, because he had fought so many fights and killed so many G
ermans, because he had been wounded, because he was surely the most upstanding son that a silly old widower had ever doted on. But now those unconsidered words had come back to roost with a vengeance. Mr. Handiman hadn’t got a hundred and fifty pounds. He had less than fifty; and out of that small sum he owed a quarter’s rent. Yet with John sitting there before him, anxious and apologetic, he couldn’t bring himself to say so. It was as if Satan had entered into him and spoken the words:
“Just a minute, my boy, while I think it out. Just let me reckon up my resources.”
And all the time he wasn’t thinking of his resources at all. That was the monstrous lie. He was thinking of that paying-in book with the thick wad of notes in it, and the slip made out ready for the Bank, which he had put away in the shop safe and forgotten about for nearly a week. He was thinking, with appalling casuistry, that since the balloons had been ordered by the Festival, and would have to be paid for by the Festival, it wouldn’t be stealing or anything like stealing, it would merely be “putting down a deposit” or “making a payment on account.” But he didn’t say so to John; he dared not; for John would have seen through that flimsy argument at once. And thus he had made John an unknowing party to his crime; for he had said, or Satan had said, so calmly and smoothly:
“Now you sit yourself comfortable here while I go and see what I’ve got.”
What I’ve got!
He had still kept up the pretence that he wasn’t stealing —or embezzling, did they call it? That sounded even shabbier. He had written plainly on a blank paying-in slip “Paid to J. Handiman junior on a/c for balloons. One hundred and fifty pounds: J. Handiman senior, Treasurer.” Yes, but that didn’t excuse him morally or legally as he knew very well. For one thing he hadn’t asked John the price of the balloons. It might be much less than a hundred and fifty. For another, all Festival payments had to be made by cheque; and the cheques had to be countersigned by Councillor Noakes. That prudent rule had been passed at the first meeting and it was in the minutes; indeed he had proposed it himself.
