Dance and Skylark

by John Moore

  “May the sun shine upon our brief reign …” he wrote; but already his mind was wandering away from the Beauty Queens’ Address, and the elusive rhythms which were always tormenting him began to play through it like the wind in an aspen-tree. Dusk was falling over the river, inexpressibly beautiful, inexpressibly sad, bringing with it those intimations of mortality to which only the very young can afford to give heed. It will still be here, all this, he thought, in a hundred years’ time: the murmurous water, the white mist swirling over it, the greeny-blue sky, Sirius blinking over the distant hills, the small moon coming up behind the melancholy willows; and I shall not be aware of it. The midge-hunting bats will dart and squeal, and the lovely bright salmon leap like spears thrown by Poseidon; and I shall not see them. On this very bank, young girls like Edna will walk beside young men like me; and I shall know nothing of their heart-beats and their heart-aches. O tenuous, transient, beautiful world, thought Lance, how brief, how brief, and how it will hurt to leave it!

  Ah, yes! But perhaps it only hurt if you were young when you left it. For delight faded with the passing of the years, as the colours in the landscape were fading now. A sunset was just another day gone; a new moon was just another month beginning. “The grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail.” Even at thirty, Lance had read somewhere, a man’s ears could no longer pick up the bats’ slate-pencil squealing; and although the sound was not in itself beautiful, it seemed to Lance a very tragic thought that in eight years’ time he would not be able to hear it. If the physical senses were so quickly blunted, what of the emotions, the passions, the quick dreams? Did one look back from thirty with a shrug of the shoulders at the torment of twenty-two: “I had an affair with a factory girl once____I actually wrote verses about her. How odd!”

  The whole of Lance’s spirit cried out against such a blasphemy; the whole of his reason told him it was true. “Then I must write it all down now,” he thought. “Now, before it is too late—the sunset sky, the crescent moon, the bat’s swiftness, the salmon’s leap, my own heart’s leap every time I see her.” The wind of words blew through Lance’s head, and their rhythms sang to him like the wind in an aspen-tree; and with a sense of terrible urgency he began to write. It was becoming so dark that he could hardly see what he was writing, and he scribbled his adolescent poetry all over the Beauty Queens’ Address. He had no eyes now for the salmon which showed themselves among the white waters, like molten ingots of silver; he had no ears for the trumpet which summoned York and Lancaster to battle in the arena less than half a mile away. The beauty and the terror of the words possessed him; and as he wrote there ran down his spine a little shiver of the most exquisite sadness: “Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight.”

  III

  Out Of the darkness a trumpet sounded its querulous challenge, and that was a signal for the lights. The floods, for once obedient to their cue, poured broad white beams upon one half of the arena, leaving the other half in deep shadow; and the Yorkist line of battle, thus suddenly revealed, looked like a flower-border at midsummer. The heralds and trumpeters in the forefront were golden marigolds, blue lobelias, fire-red salvias; the tabards of the knights behind them made a low hedge of scarlet and gold; and the pennons were long-stemmed blossoms waving in the wind.

  “Why, Stevie,” said Polly softly, “it’s beautiful.” And then the floods faded and a dim green spotlight like a will-o’-the-wisp in a marsh picked out the Lancastrian ambuscade, ghostly bowmen crouching behind a clump of bushes, motionless horsemen drawn up among the trees. A horse neighed, a bit jangled, and Stephen felt Polly’s hand tightening on his elbow. “Oh, Stevie, d’you remember that night near Larissa? When we lay in wait for the convoy at the edge of the cork-forest? And how I had to take the bridle off my mule, because of the noise it made chewing its bit?” The pale glimmer, creeping between the willows, just touched the silvery helmets of the knights, gleamed dully on their chainmail, and in its turn faded. Now the other half of the field was floodlit; and on a great chestnut horse, groomed so that the muscles of its shoulders seemed etched like an anatomical drawing, Robin rode into the brightness. There was a rose as red as blood on the banner borne before him, and all the knights of Lancaster trotted at his heels.

  Again the trumpet wailed its brazen cry into the darkness; all the lights came on at once; and the Yorkists with Sir Almeric at their head broke into a hand gallop.

  Even Stephen caught his breath. Thus he had imagined it, months ago, when he had begun work on Mr. Gurney’s synopsis and read for the first time an account of the battle in Fleetwood’s Chronicler:

  “Edward apparailed hymselfe and all his hoost set in good array; ordeined three wards, displayed his bannars; dyd blow up the trompcts; committed his caws and qwarrel to Almighty God, to our blessed Lady his Mothar, Vyrgyn Mary, the glorious Martyr Seint George and all the Saynts, and avaunced directly upon his enemyes.”

  Thus he had imagined it, stirred by those old words and by a picture in his mind of the sunlight on the helmets and the pemions waving like a border of tall flowers. But during the long weeks of preparation and rehearsal the pristine vision had faded; indeed he had lost it altogether, and now, when it so unexpectedly unfolded itself before his eyes, it almost startled him, he could scarcely believe that it had been liis. “Did / imagine this pattern of a whole garden on the move? Did J dream that shadowy ambush, half-seen, half-hinted at, like the Third Murderer in Macbeth?” In wonder and delight he watched the pattern changing and breaking up as bright splinters flew off to right and left of the Yorkist lines, the Bang’s party with herald and pursuivant, the horsemen moving out to cover the flanks. And then suddenly it was as if a great wind had blown through the garden of flowers, scattering them and laying them low, as all the waving pennons dropped and the knights of York spurred their horses to the charge.

  When the Dress Rehearsal was over, Stephen and Polly walked back across the arena, dimly lit now that the big floods were out, in which Roundheads rubbed shoulders with Lancastrians, plumed Cavaliers strolled arm-in-arm with nuns, the girls from the Drama School fluttered about like ghost-moths in their white muslin dresses, the bandsmen of the British Legion noisily packed up their instruments, and Sir Almeric’s huntsman cracked his whip with a sound like a pistol-shot as he called together his hounds.

  “It was fine, Stevie, fine!” said Polly, as excited as a schoolboy. “Three hundred actors—gee, and I boasted of six ecdysiasts!”

  Even the Grand Finale, which Stephen had so much dreaded, had gone off without a hitch—instead of “heavily vanishing” the various groups had wheeled like trained soldiers to their separate exits. Indeed there had been scarcely a flaw in the whole performance; and the scenes which yesterday had seemed quite moribund had suddenly and miraculously come alive. Perhaps Robin’s costumes, worn for the first time, had something to do with it; perhaps the lights, working properly at last, had helped to effect the transformation. But Stephen, most absurdly, was inclined to put it down to the presence of Polly. He was a sort of talisman, he had arrived out of the blue like a sign from Dionysus; and Stephen felt as he had done in Greece, that nothing could go wrong when Polly was there.

  “They wanna hold that ambush,” he was saying eagerly. “Like we did at Larissa—they wanna take ’em in the flank and the rear and give ’em the works!”

  “Right you are! I’ll polish it up on Monday.” Polly was a born soldier, so he ought to know! But he was a born showman too, and he went on:

  “Those kings or princes or whatever they was—when they’re scrapping together you wanna cut your floods and just catch ’em in a spotlight, all by themselves—”

  “By God, you’re right again!” said Stephen. “I ought to have thought of that—”

  “And, Stevie—”

  “Yes?”

  “You wanna put in a bang somewhere.”

  “A bang?”

  “You wanna blow something up.”

  Stephen laughed. “You and your bangs!�
��

  “Why, Stevie, you’re limping!” Polly seemed to have noticed it for the first time. “I sure do feel bad about your knee. But I mean what I was saying. We gotta have a good-big-bang. That skirmish—Roundheads and Cavaliers, I never could figure out which was which—it just tails off; but if we could blow up a mine, or maybe build a little bridge across the river and send it sky-high, that’d kinda finish the scene off neat and tidy. Say, did Roundheads and Cavaliers have gunpowder?”

  “Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament with it long before that!”

  “Well, there you are; sure they had gunpowder; sure they could blow up a bridge. If we could get hold of two or three sticks of dynamite—”

  Stephen was smiling to himself at the “we” which kept creeping into Polly’s discourse—-for Polly was never content to remain a mere spectator of anything—when they reached the main exit, where a single floodlight pointed the way to the turnstiles. Through them streamed a motley crowd of players on their way home, Sir Almeric in shining armour, Bloody Mary with her folk-dancers, Dame Joanna, a bunch of assorted Elizabethans, Odo and Dodo with their eremite mounted on a donkey chosen at random from Faith’s innumerable herd. In the midst of this hotch-potch from the past stood a small stiff figure in a shabby mackintosh, looking curiously out of place and unaccountably pathetic. With the air of a Salvation Army lass in a pub, an air of heroic disapprobation, Miss Foulkes parted the crowd with her banner held up before her as if it were a shield:

  WE DON’T WANT FESTIVALS

  WE WANT HOUSES, WORK AND WAGES

  FORGET THE DEAD PAST

  JOIN THE C.P. AND LOOK TO THE

  LIVING FUTURE

  “Well!” said Polly, stopping dead in his tracks.

  “Miss Foulkes, our only local Communist,” said Stephen.

  “Stevie,” said Polly, “that sorta makes me feel homesick.”

  “Homesick?”

  “The little Red schoolteacher I stole from Elas was the living spit of her.”

  “She works in the balloon factory.”

  “Funny,” said Polly, staring hard at Miss Foulkes, who had just caught sight of him and stared stonily back, “that Reds and redheads, in the case of dames, always seem to go together. That Elas dame was a redhead; and had she got guts? I carried her half a mile slung over my shoulder, going at a smart trot, with the Elas guys taking pot-shots at my backside, and all the time she was tearing my hair out by the roots. You’d got to hand it to her; I hid three nights in a cave, and it was like teaming up with a tigress. But when she’d worked the poison out of her system we kinda settled down; and could she cook! Stevie, I reckon I’ve gotten a special sort of soft spot for Red redheads. You gotta let me meet this Miss Foulkes of yours.”

  “She doesn’t approve of Americans,” said Stephen. “She’ll probably snap your head off.”

  “That’s just the way I like it,” said Polly simply. “Give me a dame with spirit every time. My little Red schoolteacher in Thessaly——”

  Just then, as Stephen was wondering what excuse he could find for the introduction, Sir Almeric bore down upon Miss Foulkes. Possibly he hadn’t noticed her, for his tall grey steeplechaser was throwing its head about and trying to break into a trot, while Sir Almeric reined it in with hands as light as a sailor’s on the sheet. More likely, however, he thought that the Communist rat deserved to be taught a lesson and rode his horse at her deliberately. White-faced, trembling, and obviously terrified of horses, Miss Foulkes stood her ground, defying the Fascist Beast with her frail banner. The horse was almost on top of her when Polly stretched out his arm, caught her firmly by the waist, and lifted her out of its way almost as casually as a man would pluck a flower.

  “Seems the Knights around these parts ain’t got much chivalry,” said Polly, so loudly that Sir Almeric turned and glared at him.

  Stephen seized his opportunity.

  “Miss Foulkes,” he said, “this is Mr, Gabrielides, a friend of mine from America.”

  Miss Foulkes wore the expression which a good Communist should who is saved from the brutalities of British Fascism only to find herself in the arms of Uncle Sam. She detached her waist from Polly’s grasp, and asserted her independence by taking two steps backwards.

  “Glad to meet you, Miss Foulkes,” said Polly gaily.

  “How do you do?” said Miss Foulkes, in a tone which implied that she was far from glad. She took a very small handkerchief out of her mackintosh pocket and wiped off some foam which had fallen from the horse’s mouth on to her forehead.

  “You sure got guts,” said Polly, “standing there all alone with that banner.”

  “This is a free country,” replied Miss Foulkes surprisingly, for she frequently asserted the opposite. “Unlike some other nations I could name, we do not yet throw our political opponents into prison. I suppose,” she added deliberately, “that you’ve come over here to buy us up with your almighty dollars?”

  Polly grinned.

  “Well, I don’t exactly know about that, but I do want to buy six zebras if you know where I can find them.”

  “Six zebras?”

  “Yeah. And I’m open to buy some balloons too, if you could make them in the shape of a duck-billed platypus.”

  Miss Foulkes gazed at him wide-eyed but without resentment; clearly he was no longer to be blamed for being an American, but to be pitied for being mad. She therefore made no protest when he took her in the friendliest way by her thin, knobbly elbow and drew her confidentially towards him.

  “See here,” he said, “I got a circus in Louisiana; five elephants, two lions, a grizzly bear called Theodore Roosevelt, forty-eight piebald horses, ten clowns, some performing fleas, six strip-tease dancers, and the only duck-billed platypus in America. I thought maybe I could advertise my circus with balloons like Mr. Tasker did his Pageant. So I’m asking whether your factory could make me a balloon in the shape of a duck-billed platypus, see?”

  “We could make a balloon in the shape of anything,” said Miss Foulkes. “It’s just a matter of the shape of the formas. Unless it had a very long thin tail.”

  “Well, that’s fine! It has a very short, fat tail. And how much would it cost, d’you reckon, to make a balloon like that, supposing I ordered a hundred thousand?”

  “Twelve and six a gross,” replied Miss Foulkes promptly, quoting verbatim from the stock letter which she typed almost every day. “Two and a half per cent discount for cash on delivery. There would be a small extra charge for the special forma, and, of course, an additional charge for anything fancy, such as a squeak.”

  “Duck-billed platypuses don’t squeak.”

  “Don’t they?” she said gravely, looking up at Polly who towered immensely above her. Equally gravely he shook his head; and suddenly there flickered about Miss Foulkes’ thin little mouth the shadow of a smile. Stephen had never seen her smile before, and it transformed her. He had the impression of a tight-budded flower opening to the sun. While he was watching this phenomenon, he became aware of another. Polly was saying “No, lady, there ain’t no squeak in platypuses,” when he began to search his pockets frantically for a handkerchief. Long before he found one he was shaken by a huge and explosive sneeze. It was followed rapidly by a second and a third, and Miss Foulkes kindly proffered her tiny piece of pale-blue lawn. Speechless with sneezing, Polly shook his head; and indeed if he had put Miss Foulkes’ handkerchief to his nose it would have been like placing a car’s windscreen in the path of an armour-piercing shell. Finding his own handkerchief at last, he shook it in the air to open it, displaying about two square yards of bright yellow silk decorated with a design representing the Dance of the Seven Veils. With the aid of this flag of truce, as it seemed when he waved it, he smothered the next sneeze and achieved a moment’s respite, during which he had time to gasp:

  “Hay fever. It’s a Nailergy,” before the next paroxysm overtook him and shook his enormous frame as if he were a great oak defying the equinoctial gales.

 
Miss Foulkes stared up at him with the astonishment of one who gazes for the first time upon Niagara, Vesuvius or the Victoria Falls.

  IV

  Next Morning was Sunday, and the Mayor and Corporation in their robes of office processed from the Town Hall to the Abbey beneath a cloudless sky. The Vicar preached his Festival Sermon on a text from Ecclesiastes: “A pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.” Having endured this discourse on meteorology, which lasted for three-quarters of an hour, Stephen went back to his office, where he found Faith trying to get “Trunks” on the telephone.

  “What’s the trouble now?” he asked her.

  “Prevalence of donkeys. They broke out of their paddock in the night and ate all the flowers in the Pleasure Gardens! Isn’t it awful! And they’ve been grazing on the snapdragons in the Vicar’s border; and they’ve eaten down all the Bishop delphiniums and the Russell lupins to the quick, his wife says. But I thought we might as well turn it to good account and get some pub. out of it; and it’ll make a good story for the Daily Mirror”

  Stephen had promised to meet Polly at the Red Lion where he was putting up, so he left Faith to her telephoning and made his way up the street. He got to the Red Lion ten minutes before opening time, but Florrie was already tidying up the bar, so he went in and sat down to wait for the stroke of twelve.

  “You can have a pint now if you like,” said Florrie surprisingly, for the Red Lion, under the management of Old Screwnose, was usually very strict about Licensing Hours.