by John Moore
So, with no shortage of volunteers, the strange ceremony began promptly at six and continued without a hitch for nearly four hours. Stephen had at first been doubtful whether it would be possible to release so many balloons in so short a time; but for once in a way Faith’s uncertain mathematics did not let him down. John Handiman had provided eight hydrogen cylinders and fitted them up on the lee side of the birch-wood. It took just five seconds to inflate each balloon and make a knot in the rubber mouthpiece; so they went off at the rate of about a hundred a minute. They were in five different colours, blue, pink, green, yellow, and white, and each was overprinted with a caption about the Festival and the symbol of a formalised rose. Streaming away in batches on the strong wind they looked like a flurry of flower-petals blown off by a summer gale; and then as they mounted into the blue-and-white sky, spiralling, somersaulting and chasing each other while the fickle air-currents whirled them along, they reminded one of butterflies on a ma ting-flight, when the males pursue the females until both vanish from sight in the unattainable heaven.
It was a pretty spectacle, and worth a poem, thought Lance, as he watched a little cluster of coloured specks hardly bigger than the Pleiades melting into the luminous blue. His head was always full of words and phrases, and the lines which ran through it now came from Adonais: “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity.” It hurt your eyes to look for too long into that white radiance, tie blinked them, and looked at Edna instead.
Edna, obviously, had decided that sending off balloons was the jolliest game in the world; a lark indeed. Every time she released one she indulged in a little jump or skip in order to give hers a better start than its fellows. Her giggles succeeded one another like the merry cascade of a mountain stream tumbling down from waterfall to waterfall. Lance thought she looked like a dancing Maenad. How eagerly the little lustful eyes of the sileni and the satyrs would watch her from the edge of the birch-brake, on what light feet would she lead them up hill and down dale in the chase that could have only one ending:
The ivy falls from the Bacchanal’s hair
Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes;
The wild vine slipping down leaves bare
Her bright breast shortening into sighs. …
Lance reluctantly withdrew his gaze from her as he became aware of his father standing beside him. The Vicar in his wind-fluttered cassock presented an incongruous figure, for he held a big bunch of balloons in each hand. “If I could paint that picture,” thought Lance, “I should title it simply ‘Church Fête’ and it would somehow stand for all the nice silly homeliness of the Church of England !” The Vicar boomed cheerfully: “I feel like Noah loosing his dove. Go, each of you, and find an Ararat !” It seemed to please his fancy to set off his balloons in flocks of seven or eight at a time, and to watch them for as long as possible to see which outclimbed the others. Mr. Oxford and his friend Timms had had the same idea, and were now making quite a good thing out of backing their fancy against anybody who cared to risk half a crown. “Two to one the blue!” shouted Mr. Oxford. Fives the pink, fives the yellow, the green’s gone down in the water! “Five to one bar one, five to one bar!” He was in excellent spirits, for he had just won a pound off Sir Almeric, who had come down on horseback from his manor to watch the proceedings though apparently he did not think it compatible with his dignity to take part.
“Put it on the bill,” drawled Sir Almeric, standing up in his stirrups and peering into the sky, “and give me fours in half-dollars against the yellow. It’s a bad starter, but I like its action. I reckon it’ll stay.”
Little Mr. Handiman was listening with disapproval. “They’d bet on anything, Mr. Lance,” he whispered. “It isn’t right, to my mind, to treat money so casual in front of folks who haven’t, some of them, got much to bless themselves with.” And he shook his head sadly. He was so globular, thought Lance, that he looked rather like a balloon himself. Fill him with hydrogen and he’d surely fly away, over the flooded meadows, over the roof-tops, over the Abbey tower!
“No, it isn’t right, Mr. Lance, to my way of thinking.” Then his glance fell upon Edna and in sudden embarrassment he shuffled off.
And now Virginia, who had been kept late at the Booking Office, came wending her way daintily up the hill, wearing a ridiculous picture hat because she knew she was going to have her photograph taken. Mr. Runcorn’s photographer had been waiting for her, and he made haste before the light faded to pose the two finalists on the very summit each with a bunch of balloons held aloft. The Mayor and Stephen stood between them.
“Forward a bit, Miss Edna; back a bit, Miss Virginia,” said the photographer. “That’s right, I want you looking windswept. Now, when I say Go, loose the balloons.”
But when he said Go, it was Virginia’s hat that took the air. Just as the shutter clicked it sailed away, revolving rapidly like a tea-tray spun out of the hand, and because it presented so large a surface to the wind it almost kept pace with the balloons and Sir Almeric had time to shout: “Six to four the Gainsborough!” before it fell into the muddy gateway at the bottom of the hill. Faith, who was sorry for Virginia, ran to pick it up; but Edna, although she was sorry too, found a simple pleasure in watching the gyrations of the hat and was unable to suppress a giggle. Patting into place her neat permanent wave, Virginia said in accents of dangerous refinement:
“Ay don’t know whay you think thet’s funny.”
“Keep your hair on, ducks,” said Edna tactlessly (her own yellow curls were blown all over her face); and the Mayor, who privately thought that Beauty Queens were as tiresome as Councillors though one got less weary of their faces, saved the situation by announcing in his formal speechifying voice:
“The last batch of balloons is just going up, ladies and gentlemen; and it only remains for me to thank you for this very fine turn-out which exemplifies, if I may say so, the magnificent public spirit that characterises our ancient town. …”
Pink, yellow, blue and green, and pearly-white like huge mistletoe berries, the balloons rose up into the paling sky; and everybody cheered as they sailed away—slowly and smoothly now, for the wind had dropped with the setting of the sun. Standing next to Stephen, Faith said in her matter-of-fact voice:
“So that’s that. I wonder if it’ll work?”
“Goodness knows,” he said. “But how pretty!”
The last lot of two or three dozen kept so close together that you could have covered them with an umbrella; it was as if a many-coloured flower-bed had taken wing. The crowd stood and watched them until they were lost to view; and then, curiously hushed, like people who had taken part in some ancient rite, some strange druidical act of sacrifice, they began to make their way down the slippery slope towards their homes.
The Vicar, luckily, had left before the end; so Lance was able, unnoticed, to take Edna’s hand and draw her into the bosky clumps where they hid until the last of the balloonists were out of sight. Now they shared the birch-wood, which they had come to regard as their private playground, with none but Philomel. Lance quoted:
“So hote he lovede that by nightertale
He sleep namore than doth a nightingale.”
And Edna said: “You do talk silly,” and ruffled his hair.
“It’s Chaucer talking silly, not me.”
“You and your poetry!” A momentary look of trouble crossed her face, wrinkling her brow like a cat’s-paw of wind passing over the surface of a sunlit pool. “Lance—” she said.
“Yes?”
“We’re so different, you and me. Poetry, for instance. Half the time I just don’t know what you’re talking about. D’you think it matters?”
“I don’t suppose the nymphs knew much about poetry,” said Lance irrelevantly, “nor the yellow-skirted fays either. They certainly didn’t make poetry; but they made poets. Like you do.”
“Go on! You don’t write poems about me, I bet.”
“You are poetry. Your eyes are lyrics,
your hair’s an aubade, a song to wake lovers with in the morning; your nose is a roundelay, your chin is a triolet, your lips are couplets better than ever I could string together, your limbs are sonnets, each of them, your—”
“Get on with you!” She laughed, and the troubled look vanished; it had never been much more than the shadow of a passing cloud in April. “It’s getting dark. I can see the stars through the branches. What does your father say about all these late nights?”
“Oh, he’s a Wordsworthian, my father; he believes that a poet has to spend a great deal of his time worshipping Nature.”
“That’s what you tell him.”
“It’s true. I’m very worshipful.”
“Like the Mayor!” She laughed.
“More worshipful than the Mayor.” And, indeed, thought Lance, it was so. Within his narrow field of vision, circumscribed as it was by the tall ferns, he could see a single feathery sprig of woodruff, a bracken-frond half-curled and prehensile-looking, like a hawk’s claw, a brave tall foxglove, a dainty yellow pimpernel, a quaint and exquisite little beetle with burnished wing-cases crawling up a stem, and Edna’s soft and rounded forearm with the french chalk still powdering it like bloom on a peach. He could smell honeysuckle and meadowsweet; he could hear the brown bright nightingale amorously pouring out its heart, and Edna’s delightful chuckle as she repeated, “The worshipful Mr. Lance!” and drew him towards her. If God manifested Himself in each and all of these various and beautiful things, in bracken-frond and beetle and in the little golden hairs on Edna’s arm, “Then,” thought Lance, “there is truly no man more worshipful than I!” But perhaps his was an older god than the Vicar’s; a god in whose doxology the laurel, the palms and the pæon had their proper place. The laurel, the palms and the pæon, echoed Lance’s exultant heart, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake!
III
On His way home Mr. Handiman paused out of habit to lean upon the parapet of the old bridge and stare at the river. The parapet was made of soft sandstone and its top was notched with smooth rounded grooves where a dozen generations of men and boys had sharpened their pocket-knives. Mr. Handiman had carved his initials there with his tenth-birthday knife in the year of Mafeking. How many hundreds of times, on summer evenings, had he leaned there since!
But never before had it passed through his mind, as it did now, that a man could cock his legs over that parapet as easily as when he crossed a stile and that with the river running so full there would be quite a short drop on the other side. After that, if the man couldn’t swim, there would be a minute or less of gasping and choking, and then nothing. No empty paying-in book, no kindly, puzzled, incredulous Mayor, no pompous Inspector Heyhoe reading the charge, no Quarter Sessions, no stern Recorder. He remembered how frightened he had been of the Recorder when, as Foreman of a Jury, he had helped to send a gipsy to prison for stealing a horse. All he had had to say was “Yes, my lord” and “Guilty, my lord,” yet he had trembled like a man with the palsy. Now he repeated to himself the terrible phrase, “Guilty, my lord,” and his mouth went dry as he did so. He leaned a little farther over the parapet, and saw the stars drowning in the swift dark current, and thought that if he sank down among them he would never have to say those words.
Yet nothing had happened to make his plight any worse to-day than it had been yesterday or the day before. John’s Agent hadn’t written, it was true, but John had said he didn’t really expect that letter with the cheques in it before Saturday. And still nobody suspected him, Mr. Handiman assured himself: certainly not the Bank Manager, who had rung him up—a terrible moment!—to discuss the arrangements for providing the programme sellers with change; certainly not Mr. Tasker, who had sent round a batch of Festival cheques for his signature; least of all the Mayor, who had put an arm round his shoulder and called him “Dear old George” when they stood watching the balloons go off from the hill.
Why, then, he asked himself, had he known all day such panic as he had experienced before only in dreams, pounding down lightless corridors with a nameless, shapeless, stealthy, swift Thing at his heels and a closed door, which he both longed and feared to open, at the corridor’s end? Perhaps it was the waiting that had got on his nerves: the waiting for somebody to find him out. Or perhaps it was the lack of sleep, for he had only dozed wretchedly and briefly during the last four or five nights. At any rate, to-day had been a long lightless corridor indeed, down which he had fled in terror, and now at the very heels of his spirit panted the pursuer. Before him lay the door which he dreaded to open, not knowing whether he would find refuge there or not.
So Mr. Handiman slung his right leg over the parapet and paused there, looking down, with just the toecap of his left boot still touching the ground.
Immediately below him was a thin streak of bubbles trailing away from the topmost twig of a submerged withy bush which jutted out into the river. He remembered the bush well, because once with a fat grasshopper on his hook he had caught a two-pound chub there; but now the flood covered it save for this one green twig, like the olive on Mount Ararat, at which the current plucked in vain.
In one part of Mr. Handiman’s mind his dreadful purpose lurked still; but in another and, it seemed, quite unrelated part, there stirred all manner of speculations about the course of the eddies and little whirlpools and the way they would carry the drowned flies and beetles into the backwater just beyond the withy. There, surely, out of the current, was the very place for a big chub; for it is only the little fishes, the foolish fry, which like busybodies dart to and fro in the swift shallows, wasting their substance in the ceaseless pursuit of trifles. The old wise ones take up their station in some place where the conflicting currents cancel each other out; and in that small still pool maintain themselves with faintly tremulous fins, watching the flotsam and jetsam which the currents, like conveyor-belts in a factory, endlessly carry past them. There are dead leaves, cigarette-ends and sodden paper bags on the conveyor-belts; but there are also hairy caterpillars and fat white grubs, beetles, caddises and flies.
If you are an angler, therefore, you must chart these currents in your mind. You must cultivate a special sort of eyesight and a special sort of imagination; and when you have fished off and on for fifty years or so this habit of cartography-in-miniature becomes second nature to you, and you find yourself practising it every time you are by the river, whether you have a rod in your hand or not. This was what Mr. Handiman began to do as soon as the bending twig attracted his attention; and as he speculated he eased himself back a little so that the heel of his left foot rested upon the ground.
Then, suddenly, he saw a dull bronze flash below the withy bush, an arrow-headed wave, a great swirl which set all the stars dancing in the water. The big chub was there, and he had just taken a fly.
The spectacular confirmation of his theory gave Mr. Handiman great satisfaction. “ I knew there would be one in that hole.” he said to himself, “and I knew he’d be a whopper. But exactly how or why I knew I cannot say. That’s experience, that is; and experience is what makes you catch fish when other chaps catch nothing.” Meanwhile, unconsciously, he had withdrawn his right leg altogether from the parapet and he now leaned upon it in just the same innocent way as he had done ever since he first carved his initials there.
The part of his mind which was concerned with fishes continued its cogitations. Experience and knowledge of the river: that was better than all your fancy baits and all your expensive tackle. He had never possessed a rod that cost more than a pound (wholesale, of course) nor owned one of those complicated reels which required an engineer to take them to pieces. He used an old wooden reel with a home-made ratchet which made a noise like a death-watch beetle when the line ran out; and how many splendid fish had he landed to the accompaniment of that click-click-clicking! After all, Izaak Walton managed quite well without a reel of any kind; he had never seen one, or he wouldn’t have written in his simple ingenuous way (pretending he knew all about it but not quite liki
ng to tell a he): “Some use a wheel about the middle of their rod, or near their hand; which is to be observed better by seeing one of them than by a large demonstration of words.” He had caught his chub with a line made fast to a ring at the rod-point; and his line was of twisted horse-hair gleaned from the nearest gate!
But the week-end anglers from Birmingham, whom Mr. Handiman so greatly despised, thought you couldn’t catch fish unless you had enough tackle to set up shop with. Their split-cane rods cost eight guineas apiece, their silken lines were like gossamer, and their enormous wicker creels were filled with every sort of gadget imaginable. Ordinary baits didn’t suit them either; their bread paste had to be flavoured with aniseed or honey, and their maggots stained scarlet or chrome-yellow, despite the fact that fish were probably colour-blind! From time to time they came into Mr. Handiman’s shop and asked him for patent spinners which he had never heard of, and luminous floats for night fishing, and special gut-casts dyed green as water-weed, and even a so-called magic oil which, when you anointed your bait with it, was supposed to attract the fish from fifty yards away. Mr. Handiman didn’t stock such rubbish. “We’ve no call for it in these parts,” he would say. And the Birmingham men would look pityingly at his dusty shelves and the penny hooks for the children and the rusty skates hanging in the window.
Yet Mr. Handiman felt quite sure that with his bamboo rod, his water-cord line, his penny hook and a tobacco-tin of red worms from his garden muck-heap he could teach any of those visiting anglers a lesson. He wasn’t conceited about it, for he accepted his skill with a fishing-rod in the same way that he accepted his rotundity; it was just the way he was made. With that skill, plus his long experience of the river, he reckoned he could catch ten fish, any day, to the visitor’s one. But he had never put the matter to the test, of course, because he didn’t approve of fishing competitions and the Goings-on which accompanied them; referees to see that nobody cheated, paper-hatted harridans drinking stout on the banks behind the fishermen, and worst of all, the bookies and the betting. Why, only last year the winner of the All-Midlands Cup had backed himself with ten shillings and won a hundred and fifty pounds! Mr. Oxford had dropped into the shop to tell him about it. “One roach, one skimmer”—that was a little bream— “one daddy-ruffe and five eels as thick as bootlaces,” said Mr. Oxford, “and off he goes home with a hundred and fifty smackers. Makes you think, Mr. Handiman, makes you think!”
