England am I, Phyllis Jones continued, facing the audience,
Now weak and small
A child, as all may see . . .
Her words peppered the audience as with a shower of hard little stones. Mrs. Manresa in the very centre smiled; but she felt as if her skin cracked when she smiled. There was a vast vacancy between her, the singing villagers and the piping child.
Chuff, chuff, chuff, went the machine like a corn-cutter on a hot day.
The villagers were singing, but half their words were blown away.
Cutting the roads . . . up to the hill top . . . we climbed. Down in the valley . . . sow, wild boar, hog, rhinoceros, reindeer . . . Dug ourselves in to the hill top . . . Ground roots between stones . . . Ground corn . . . till we too . . . lay under g — r — o — u — n — d . . .
The words petered away. Chuff, chuff, chuff, the machine ticked. Then at last the machine ground out a tune!
Armed against fate
The valiant Rhoderick
Armed and valiant
Bold and blatant
Firm elatant
See the warriors — here they come . . .
The pompous popular tune brayed and blared. Miss La Trobe watched from behind the tree. Muscles loosened; ice cracked. The stout lady in the middle began to beat time with her hand on her chair. Mrs. Manresa was humming:
My home is at Windsor, close to the Inn.
Royal George is the name of the pub.
And boys you’ll believe me,
I don’t want no asking . . .
She was afloat on the stream of the melody. Radiating royalty, complacency, good humour, the wild child was Queen of the festival. The play had begun.
But there was an interruption. “O,” Miss La Trobe growled behind her tree, “the torture of these interruptions!”
“Sorry I’m so late,” said Mrs. Swithin. She pushed her way through the chairs to a seat beside her brother.
“What’s it all about? I’ve missed the prologue. England? That little girl? Now she’s gone . . .”
Phyllis had slipped off her mat.
“And who’s this?” asked Mrs. Swithin.
It was Hilda, the carpenter’s daughter. She now stood where England had stood.
“O, England’s grown . . .” Miss La Trobe prompted her.
“O, England’s grown a girl now,” Hilda sang out
(“What a lovely voice!” someone exclaimed)
With roses in her hair,
Wild roses, red roses,
She roams the lanes and chooses
A garland for her hair.
“A cushion? Thank you so much,” said Mrs. Swithin, stuffing the cushion behind her back. Then she leant forward.
“That’s England in the time of Chaucer, I take it. She’s been maying, nutting. She has flowers in her hair . . . But those passing behind her—” she pointed. “The Canterbury pilgrims? Look!”
All the time the villagers were passing in and out between the trees. They were singing; but only a word or two was audible “. . . wore ruts in the grass . . . built the house in the lane . . .” The wind blew away the connecting words of their chant, and then, as they reached the tree at the end they sang:
“To the shrine of the Saint . . . to the tomb . . . lovers . . . believers . . . we come . . .”
They grouped themselves together.
Then there was a rustle and an interruption. Chairs were drawn back. Isa looked behind her. Mr. and Mrs. Rupert Haines, detained by a breakdown on the road, had arrived. He was sitting to the right, several rows back, the man in grey.
Meanwhile the pilgrims, having done their homage to the tomb, were, it appeared, tossing hay on their rakes,
I kissed a girl and let her go,
Another did I tumble,
In the straw and in the hay . . .
— that was what they were singing, as they scooped and tossed the invisible hay, when she looked round again.
“Scenes from English history,” Mrs. Manresa explained to Mrs. Swithin. She spoke in a loud cheerful voice, as if the old lady were deaf. “Merry England.”
She clapped energetically.
The singers scampered away into the bushes. The tune stopped. Chuff, chuff, chuff, the machine ticked. Mrs. Manresa looked at her programme. It would take till midnight unless they skipped. Early Briton; Plantagenets; Tudors; Stuarts — she ticked them off, but probably she had forgotten a reign or two.
“Ambitious, ain’t it?” she said to Bartholomew, while they waited. Chuff, chuff, chuff went the machine. Could they talk? Could they move? No, for the play was going on. Yet the stage was empty; only the cows moved in the meadows; only the tick of the gramophone needle was heard. The tick, tick, tick seemed to hold them together, tranced. Nothing whatsoever appeared on the stage.
“I’d no notion we looked so nice,” Mrs. Swithin whispered to William. Hadn’t she? The children; the pilgrims; behind the pilgrims the trees, and behind them the fields — the beauty of the visible world took his breath away. Tick, tick, tick the machine continued.
“Marking time,” said old Oliver beneath his breath.
“Which don’t exist for us,” Lucy murmured. “We’ve only the present.”
“Isn’t that enough?” William asked himself. Beauty — isn’t that enough? But here Isa fidgetted. Her bare brown arms went nervously to her head. She half turned in her seat. “No, not for us, who’ve the future,” she seemed to say. The future disturbing our present. Who was she looking for? William, turning, following her eyes, saw only a man in grey.
The ticking stopped. A dance tune was put on the machine. In time to it, Isa hummed: “What do I ask? To fly away, from night and day, and issue where — no partings are — but eye meets eye — and . . . O,” she cried aloud: “Look at her!”
Everyone was clapping and laughing. From behind the bushes issued Queen Elizabeth — Eliza Clark, licensed to sell tobacco. Could she be Mrs. Clark of the village shop? She was splendidly made up. Her head, pearl-hung, rose from a vast ruff. Shiny satins draped her. Sixpenny brooches glared like cats’ eyes and tigers’ eyes; pearls looked down; her cape was made of cloth of silver — in fact swabs used to scour saucepans. She looked the age in person. And when she mounted the soap box in the centre, representing perhaps a rock in the ocean, her size made her appear gigantic. She could reach a flitch of bacon or haul a tub of oil with one sweep of her arm in the shop. For a moment she stood there, eminent, dominant, on the soap box with the blue and sailing clouds behind her. The breeze had risen.
The Queen of this great land . . .
— those were the first words that could be heard above the roar of laughter and applause.
Mistress of ships and bearded men (she bawled)
Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake,
Tumbling their oranges, ingots of silver,
Cargoes of diamonds, ducats of gold,
Down on the jetty, there in the west land, —
(she pointed her fist at the blazing blue sky)
Mistress of pinnacles, spires and palaces —
(her arm swept towards the house)
For me Shakespeare sang —
(a cow mooed. A bird twittered)
The throstle, the mavis (she continued)
In the green wood, the wild wood,
Carolled and sang, praising England, the Queen,
Then there was heard too
On granite and cobble
From Windsor to Oxford
Loud laughter, low laughter
Of warrior and lover,
The fighter, the singer.
The ashen haired babe
(she stretched out her swarthy, muscular arm)
Stretched his arm in contentment
As home from the Isles came
The sea faring men. . . .
Here the wind gave a tug at her head dress. Loops of pearls made it top-heavy. She had to steady the ruffle which threatened to blow away.
“Laughter, loud laughter,”
Giles muttered. The tune on the gramophone reeled from side to side as if drunk with merriment. Mrs. Manresa began beating her foot and humming in time to it.
“Bravo! Bravo!” she cried. “There’s life in the old dog yet!” And she trolloped out the words of the song with an abandonment which, if vulgar, was a great help to the Elizabethan age. For the ruff had become unpinned and great Eliza had forgotten her lines. But the audience laughed so loud that it did not matter.
“I fear I am not in my perfect mind,” Giles muttered to the same tune. Words came to the surface — he remembered “a stricken deer in whose lean flank the world’s harsh scorn has struck its thorn. . . . Exiled from its festival, the music turned ironical. . . . A churchyard haunter at whom the owl hoots and the ivy mocks tap-tap-tapping on the pane. . . . For they are dead, and I . . . I . . . I,” he repeated, forgetting the words, and glaring at his Aunt Lucy who sat craned forward, her mouth gaping, and her bony little hands clapping.
What were they laughing at?
At Albert, the village idiot, apparently. There was no need to dress him up. There he came, acting his part to perfection. He came ambling across the grass, mopping and mowing.
I know where the tit nests, he began
In the hedgerow. I know, I know —
What don’t I know?
All your secrets, ladies,
And yours too, gentlemen . . .
He skipped along the front row of the audience, leering at each in turn. Now he was picking and plucking at Great Eliza’s skirts. She cuffed him on the ear. He tweaked her back. He was enjoying himself immensely.
“Albert having the time of his life,” Bartholomew muttered.
“Hope he don’t have a fit,” Lucy murmured.
“I know . . . I know . . .” Albert tittered, skipping round the soap box.
“The village idiot,” whispered a stout black lady — Mrs. Elmhurst — who came from a village ten miles distant where they, too, had an idiot. It wasn’t nice. Suppose he suddenly did something dreadful? There he was pinching the Queen’s skirts. She half covered her eyes, in case he did do — something dreadful.
Hoppety, jiggety, Albert resumed,
In at the window, out at the door,
What does the little bird hear? (he whistled on his fingers.)
And see! There’s a mouse. . . .
(he made as if chasing it through the grass)
Now the clock strikes!
(he stood erect, puffing out his cheeks as if he were blowing a dandelion clock)
One, two, three, four. . . .
And off he skipped, as if his turn was over.
“Glad that’s over.” said Mrs. Elmhurst, uncovering her face. “Now what comes next? A tableau. . . ?”
For helpers, issuing swiftly from the bushes, carrying hurdles, had enclosed the Queen’s throne with screens papered to represent walls. They had strewn the ground with rushes. And the pilgrims who had continued their march and their chant in the background, now gathered round the figure of Eliza on her soap box as if to form the audience at a play.
Were they about to act a play in the presence of Queen Elizabeth? Was this, perhaps, the Globe theatre?
“What does the programme say?” Mrs. Herbert Winthrop asked, raising her lorgnettes.
She mumbled through the blurred carbon sheet. Yes; it was a scene from a play.
“About a false Duke; and a Princess disguised as a boy; then the long lost heir turns out to be the beggar, because of a mole on his cheek; and Carinthia — that’s the Duke’s daughter, only she’s been lost in a cave — falls in love with Ferdinando who had been put into a basket as a baby by an aged crone. And they marry. That’s I think what happens,” she said, looking up from the programme.
“Play out the play,” great Eliza commanded. An aged crone tottered forward.
(“Mrs. Otter of the End House,” someone murmured.)
She sat herself on a packing case, and made motions, plucking her dishevelled locks and rocking herself from side to side as if she were an aged beldame in a chimney corner.
(“The crone, who saved the rightful heir,” Mrs. Winthrop explained.)
’Twas a winter’s night (she croaked out)
I mind me that, I to whom all’s one now, summer or winter.
You say the sun shines? I believe you, Sir.
‘Oh but it’s winter, and the fog’s abroad’
All’s one to Elsbeth, summer or winter,
By the fireside, in the chimney corner, telling her beads.
I’ve cause to tell ‘em.
Each bead (she held a bead between thumb and finger)
A crime!
’Twas a winter’s night, before cockcrow,
Yet the cock did crow ere he left me —
The man with a hood on his face, and the bloody hands
And the babe in the basket.
‘Tee hee’ he mewed, as who should say ‘I want my toy’
Poor witling!
“Tee hee, tee hee!” I could not slay him!
For that, Mary in Heaven forgive me
The sins I’ve sinned before cockcrow!
Down to the creek i’ the dawn I slipped
Where the gull haunts and the heron stands
Like a stake on the edge of the marshes . . .
Who’s here?
(Three young men swaggered on to the stage and accosted her)
— “Are you come to torture me, Sirs?
There is little blood in this arm,
(she extended her skinny forearm from her ragged shift)
Saints in Heaven preserve me!
She bawled. They bawled. All together they bawled, and so loud that it was difficult to make out what they were saying: apparently it was: Did she remember concealing a child in a cradle among the rushes some twenty years previously? A babe in a basket, crone! A babe in a basket? they bawled. The wind howls and the bittern shrieks, she replied.
“There is little blood in my arm,” Isabella repeated.
That was all she heard. There was such a medley of things going on, what with the beldame’s deafness, the bawling of the youths, and the confusion of the plot that she could make nothing of it.
Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love; and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. Perhaps Miss La Trobe meant that when she cut this knot in the centre?
Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing.
But what was happening? The Prince had come.
Plucking up his sleeve, the beldame recognized the mole; and, staggering back in her chair, shrieked:
My child! My child!
Recognition followed. The young Prince (Albert Perry) was almost smothered in the withered arms of the beldame. Then suddenly he started apart.
“Look where she comes!” he cried.
They all looked where she came — Sylvia Edwards in white satin.
Who came? Isa looked. The nightingale’s song? The pearl in night’s black ear? Love embodied.
All arms were raised; all faces stared.
“Hail, sweet Carinthia!” said the Prince, sweeping his hat off. And she to him, raising her eyes:
“My love! My lord!”
“It was enough. Enough. Enough,” Isa repeated.
All else was verbiage, repetition.
The beldame meanwhile, because that was enough, had sunk back on her chair, the beads dangling from her fingers.
“Look to the beldame there — old Elsbeth’s sick!”
(They crowded round her)
Dead, Sirs!
She fell back lifeless. The crowd drew away. Peace, let her pass. She to whom all’s one now, summer or winter.
Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life. Now the priest, whose cotton wool moustache confused his utterance, stepped forward and pronounced benediction.
From the distaff of life�
��s tangled skein, unloose her hands
(They unloosed her hands)
Of her frailty, let nothing now remembered be.
Call for the robin redbreast and the wren.
And roses fall your crimson pall.
(Petals were strewn from wicker baskets)
Cover the corpse. Sleep well.
(They covered the corpse)
On you, fair Sirs (he turned to the happy couple)
Let Heaven rain benediction!
Haste ere the envying sun
Night’s curtain hath undone. Let music sound
And the free air of Heaven waft you to your slumber!
Lead on the dance!
The gramophone blared. Dukes, priests, shepherds, pilgrims and serving men took hands and danced. The idiot scampered in and out. Hands joined, heads knocking, they danced round the majestic figure of the Elizabethan age personified by Mrs. Clark, licensed to sell tobacco, on her soap box.
It was a mellay; a medley; an entrancing spectacle (to William) of dappled light and shade on half clothed, fantastically coloured, leaping, jerking, swinging legs and arms. He clapped till his palms stung.
Mrs. Manresa applauded loudly. Somehow she was the Queen; and he (Giles) was the surly hero.
“Bravo! Bravo!” she cried, and her enthusiasm made the surly hero squirm on his seat. Then the great lady in the bath chair, the lady whose marriage with the local peer had obliterated in his trashy title a name that had been a name when there were brambles and briars where the Church now stood — so indigenous was she that even her body, crippled by arthritis, resembled an uncouth, nocturnal animal, now nearly extinct — clapped and laughed loud — the sudden laughter of a startled jay.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 248
