by John Moore
One hundred and fifty pounds! At the thought of that hateful figure Mr. Handiman’s mouth became dry again, as dry and rough to the tongue as sandpaper. Once more he saw the Recorder in his wig, once more he heard his own still small voice in the huge cold courtroom: “Guilty, my lord.” Guilty of embezzling one hundred and fifty pounds.
But at the back of his mind another, and a most startling, picture was forming. It was a picture of one of those numbered pegs which he had nearly tripped over on that Sunday afternoon when he saw the couple in the mowing grass with the folded yellow dress beside them. On the bank close to the peg stood Mr. Handiman. Mr. Handiman was fishing.
And why not? he asked himself. There was nothing actually wicked about fishing competitions; they were merely distasteful. Betting? Well, that was another thing altogether; he had been brought up strict, and he didn’t hold with betting. He had never questioned the ethics which his old father, and a succession of Ministers, had drummed into him ever since he was old enough to go to chapel. Gambling was sinful, drinking was even more sinful, and one didn’t fish on Sunday. There were worse sins, such as fornication, but these were beyond the bounds of possibility and were neither mentioned nor contemplated.
Mr. Handiman’s father had been, even by Methodist standards, pretty narrow. He had not permitted his children to read anything on Sunday except an unillustrated Bible. Mr. Handiman himself, progressing towards liberality, had allowed John, when he was a boy, the exceptional privilege of reading a Bible with highly-coloured illustrations. The frontispiece was cf Adam and Eve without any clothes on. So Freedom broadened down from precedent to precedent until Sunday papers began to appear in the house, and now Mr. Handiman regularly sat in his armchair after dinner to read all about the remote incomprehensible troubles of dance-hostesses, men-about-town, night-club proprietors, girl-wives, elderly clergymen and Scoutmasters. He was hebdomadally dumbfounded by these grotesque and dreadful fairy-tales, as they seemed to him, which he could never properly understand.
But betting was a reality; one actually knew people who had been ruined by betting, and its evils provided a recurrent theme for the Minister’s sermons. The Minister, indeed, held it to be wrong to subscribe sixpence to a Church Bazaar sweepstake if by doing so one became liable to win a boiling fowl, an iced cake, a box of chocolates or a bottle of ginger wine (non-alchoholic). “The High people do it,” he said; “but we Low Churchmen know too well how one thing leads to another.” And perhaps he was right; for Mr. Handiman, who had once won a hundredweight of coal at a whist drive, now leaned upon the bridge, saw the incautious chub rise for a second time behind the withy bush to gobble up a fly, and, with a spiritual gesture at least as impetuous, himself swallowed hook, line and sinker his principles, his scruples and his conscience, and determined to enter for the fishing competition and back himself to win. Curiously enough, he had forgotten all about his earlier intention to commit suicide; and as he walked home, and felt his heart quicken at the thought of his own great daring, he was more cheerful than he had been for ten days.
IV
Stephen Walked with Faith as far as the cross-roads at the bottom of the hill, where she had left her bicycle. Both of them had a sense of anticlimax now that the balloons had been launched into the void. Stephen had never had much confidence in the idea, and Faith, its only begetter, began to wonder whether after all it had not been extravagantly silly. How absurd to suppose that those airy nothings could restore the fortunes of their doomed Pageant! Scattered upon the capricious winds, most of them would come to rest on barren hillsides, in tangled thickets, in sodden marshes where only duck-shooters trod, in the fields of farmers who cared nothing for Festivals. Faith sighed deeply.
“Penny for your thoughts,” said Stephen.
“Dandelions,” said Faith, “and built-up areas.”
“Don’t see.”
“We had twenty thousand balloons; but I wonder how many seeds on their little parachutes Nature wastes to produce one dandelion!”
“A sobering thought.”
“Yes. And built-up areas. The proportion must be awfully small. Then there are the roofs. And chimneys and tree-tops and rivers and lakes. And even the sea.”
“Perhaps some of them will cross it,” said Stephen.
“Taking a meaningless message to French peasants. I’m sorry, Stephen: I think I’ve been a rather silly girl.”
She picked up her bicycle out of the hedge. It amused Stephen to see that she had thrown it down there in exactly the same way as an old farmer abandons his mowing-machine or his hay-rake when he has for the time being no further use for it.
“Good night,” she said.
“Good night, Faith.” She bicycled away into the dusk, and as Stephen watched the zigzagging will-o’-the-wisp of her lamp growing fainter in the distance—for she rode as she typed, most erratically—he suddenly discovered in his mind a dozen things which he had wanted to tell her about, the minor comedies and mischances of the day. Moreover, it occurred to him that he had this same feeling almost every evening now, when Faith left the office and went home. He was surprised, puzzled, and faintly disturbed by this revelation.
He walked back to his shop and pottered about among his books for half an hour before he went to bed. The Vicar had persuaded him to make a special display of Lance’s book of poems, but in the hot window the cheap bindings had curled back like dead leaves and faded to the same autumnal brown; so he collected up all the copies he could find and pressed them underneath an enormous Classical Atlas, which had been his first foolish purchase when he started bookselling and being too large for the shelves had lain in the corner of the room ever since he had bought it. Some common fault in the binding had caused all Lance’s slim volumes to spring open at the same page, so that Stephen knew the title-poem, La Vie est Vaine, by heart. It was an unconscious pastiche of Swinburne:
We have laughed a little and wept,
We have loved a little and slept …
and Stephen smiled at its youthful nihilism. You have to be very young, he thought, to be on such easy terms with despair!
Next he tried to make room on his shelves for the completely unsaleable set of Bulwer Lytton’s Works which the Vicar had sold him for fifteen shillings that very afternoon. “I suppose, my dear Stephen,” he had boomed, as he pouched the money, “I suppose such books as these might be described as the bread-and-butter of your trade.” That would amuse Faith; he must remember to tell her in the morning. But in the morning there never seemed to be time.
The black cat sat on the table and watched him with lazy eyes as he took down in turn a Thomas Browne, a Motley’s Dutch Republic, a Housman, a Shakespeare, a Shelley and a Byron, opening them at certain remembered pages, reading a passage or a few lines, and adding them to the miscellaneous heap on the table. All his attempts at tidying up the shop, revising his prices, or making a catalogue, petered out like this into a sort of aimless literary dabbling. Once he had thought he would turn the desultory habit to good purpose by compiling an anthology; but that project too had died away in the pages of a half-filled notebook which he had finally lost.
He had never quite succeeded in looking upon his books as commodities; which was perhaps why he was such an unsuccessful bookseller. The most prosperous dealer he knew, who occasionally called upon him in the hope of picking up something cheap or selling something dear, confessed that he never read anything but detective stories and always spoke of the world’s greatest masterpieces as “titles.” “I can offer you some very good titles to-day.” The Collected Works of Sir Thomas Browne was quite a good title; you could always sell it for ten and sixpence. But Stephen couldn’t think of it in those terms. He took it down from the shelf now and opened it, and read aloud to none but the luminous-eyed cat that marvellous first sentence of Urn-Buriall: “When the funeral pyre is out and the last valediction over …” But in Motley’s Dutch Republic it was the final sentence of all which he always turned to, the perfect epitaph on William
the Silent: “He was the guiding-star of a whole brave nation; and when he died the little children cried in the streets.”
Thus he clipped in turn into the Housman and the Shakespeare and the Shelley, and finally hunted through the Byron until he found a half-remembered fragment which had long been teasing him:
The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece,
Where burning Sappho loved and sang …
and straightway his thoughts went back to Thessaly, to Polly and the anemones and the grey-green olive-groves, the rosy-fingered dawn over the mountains, the islands as he had first seen them from the air in the early morning: Chios, Lesbos and Lemnos rising up out of the wine-dark sea.
But although they shone so brightly in his memory, they seemed farther away to-night than ever before. Until a few weeks ago he had looked back on his year in Greece as if it were the only reality he had ever known; all the rest of his life, schoolmastering and bookselling, had seemed in comparison like a drab dream. But now he was aware of a slow and puzzling change. The shabby and ruinous little bookshop nevertheless had begun to mean something to him, for the first time he looked upon it as his home. QUOD PETIS HIC EST, said the motto over the shelves. Perhaps what he sought was here after all. And as he passed through the back room on his way to bed, and glanced at Faith’s untidy desk on which the typewriter had not been covered up (for she treated it, like her bicycle, as a farmer treats his machines)—he knew in his heart what he sought, although he would not yet admit to himself that he knew it.
V
And Now there occurred one of those quirks of circumstance, those fortunate freaks of chance, which were easier to believe in when people thought that sportive gods occasionally took a hand in the affairs of men. While Stephen pottered about in his shop, wishing that Faith were there beside him—while Edna and Lance dallied pleasantly upon their hillock—and while Mr. Handiman on the old stone bridge contemplated chub and suicide, the balloons sailed on to the south-westward. Their vanguard, caught up in a strong steady current, had already travelled about fifty miles and was passing over a small village on the Welsh border which bore the unlovely name of Goytre.
It happened that simultaneously a Mr. Emrys Jones, a hack reporter for the local weekly, was driving home in his old car after a tedious assignment at a village fête. His boredom had been slightly mitigated by the proximity of a beer-tent, in which he had spent most of his time. Being considerably fuddled, he failed to notice the first group of yokels who stood by the roadside gazing into the sky; but the second group was much larger and aroused his curiosity, so that he stopped to ask them what they were staring at. For answer they pointed upwards at a cluster of tiny globules, transparent as soap-bubbles, which freckled the clear evening blue like spots on a bird’s egg.
“Flying saucers we were wondering could they be,” said an old man.
Having with some difficulty focused his eyes upon the objects, which were extremely minute and in rapid motion, Mr. Jones tried to count them. He had reckoned up to a hundred and fifty when he became dizzy and had to desist.
“Terrible times we do live in,” said the old man.
“Saying, peace, peace, when there is no peace. Jeremiah, six, fourteen.”
Mr. Jones, admittedly, was a hack. He was elderly, disillusioned and drunken, and he had suffered for a great many years from a surfeit of bazaars run by Capel Bethesda and Capel Moriah. Nevertheless, blunted though it was by sermons, christenings, weddings, and innumerable silver, golden and diamond jubilees (and also, of course, by alcohol), he possessed still the remains of a sense of News. This now sent him full speed down the road to a public house called the Red Dragon, where he put through a call to the Press Association, and while he was waiting for it filled three pages of his reporter’s notebook with swift if indifferent shorthand. He was so weary of writing about the dresses of bridesmaids (from information supplied by the bride’s mother) that he reacted powerfully to the stimulus of a less factual theme; and his pencil ran away with him to the tune of three hundred and fifty words. These he dictated very slowly and impressively to the Press Association’s telephonist, having first given his name and credentials; he ended, with only a little pardonable exaggeration:
“…And these objects, described as resembling flying saucers, have been passing over at a great height for several hours, causing not a little alarm in the neighbourhood. At times several hundred can be counted in the air at once. The extraordinary spectacle has brought out large crowds into the streets of Goytre, where they stand craning their necks to watch the stratospheric phenomenon. …”
Mr. Jones, well satisfied with himself, then went into the bar and ordered drinks all round. He remained there, discussing flying saucers, until well past closing time, when there arrived at the back door of the pub the old man he had encountered earlier, carrying a deflated balloon in his hand. Apparently it had sprung a leak, lost height, and descended upon a hedgerow, whence the old man with due caution had retrieved it.
“How art thou fallen from heaven,” said the old man. “Isaiah, fourteen, twelve.”
Mr. Jones, stretching the piece of pink rubber to read the caption on it, felt as if he had fallen from heaven also. Like the balloon, he was utterly deflated. But he had retained, through all the long years of chapel bazaars, some tattered remnant of his professional honour. This he now summoned to his aid as he ordered a stiff whisky and with the air of one who says to himself, “Nevertheless, I also have my virginity,” put through a second call to the P.A. It took a long time to get through from Goytre to London at that time of night; and by the time his message had been received most of the London editors were in the process of putting their papers to bed. Those of them, therefore, who had featured the strange story from Goytre found it necessary to put the denial in their Stop Press column.
“The objects reported over the village,” dictated Mr. Jones thickly, “were not, repeat not, flying saucers. No, I didn’t say anything about Chaucer—not flying chaucers, but balloons. Please spell that back. Balloons—B for balderdash—released to advertise the Festival and Pageant to be held at …” et cetera, et cetera.
With the telephone still held to his ear, having done his duty according to his lights, Mr. Jones then fell asleep; and he has no further part in this story.
Part Four
I
“Vertigo,” said Councillor Noakes as his glance fell upon the newspapers lying on Stephen’s desk. “Poor fellow, it must have been vertigo. Otherwise he wouldn’t have bought a ticket before he climbed up, would he? Still, it’s an ill wind; and I must say you’ve cashed in on it very nicely.”
The gods never do things by halves; it is all or nothing with the gods. On the day after the appearance of the flying-saucer story, which was featured by five papers and corrected in the Stop Press by three, a retired commercial traveller called Micklethwaite, on holiday from Scotland, had walked into the Booking Office and paid Virginia ten shillings for a seat in the grandstand. With this evidence of his ambition to survive for at least another week in his pocket, he had climbed to the top of the Abbey tower, whence he had fallen, or cast himself, into the churchyard below. Entirely unmoved by this sad event, Faith had at once despatched excellent photographs of the tower to every London newspaper with a caption typed on the back of them describing the tragedy and mentioning, of course, the forthcoming Festival. Each of the morning papers which now littered Stephen’s desk displayed one of these pictures in a prominent position, giving to the town’s little Festival a better advertisement than could have been bought for thousands of pounds. Heartlessly, Faith hoped for still more publicity from the inquest.
Already the bookings had taken a dramatic turn for the better; Virginia, indeed, had been hard put to it to deal with the telephone calls. Moreover, the flood had subsided, the ground was drying quickly under a hot sun, and the workmen were busily repairing the damaged stands. “Everything hunky-dory!” beamed Councillor Noakes to Stephen. “And since that young spitfire of y
ours isn’t here —she fairly snapped my head off the other day—I’ll take the opportunity of asking you to get me a little book I’ve been told of”—he whispered hoarsely though there was nobody within hearing— “called Fanny Hill. On the strict q.t., you know; after all, a man has a Public Life and a Private Life, and in my position one can’t be too careful; although of course there’s not a bad word in it.”
Faith had temporarily taken charge of the Booking Office while Virginia, unsuitably dressed in transparent purple chiffon with a mauve slip, and a big black cartwheel hat, went off to give evidence at the inquest. She was required to testify that the unfortunate Micklethwaite had told her he was looking forward to the Pageant very much. This was regarded—unreasonably, Stephen thought—as evidence of his sanity. Faith had urged her to make the most of it.
“Not a bad word in it,” repeated Councillor Noakes, “and yet my friend assures me that it made him wriggle.” “Its author,” said Stephen, “a chap called Cleland, is probably the only man who’s ever been paid for not writing books. Fanny was regarded as so scandalous that he was given a pension on condition that he didn’t write any more.”
