Dance and Skylark (11 page)

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.”

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 Germans, 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.

When he returned with the notes John had said seriously: “You may have saved the factory, Dad,” and then had laughed:

“You old
miser \
You oughtn't to keep so much money in the shop, with all these spivs and cosh-boys about. You ought to pay it into the Bank regularly.”

These words had mocked him for three days.
You ought to pay it into the Bank regularly
. For it was only a matter of time before somebody else said that—Mr. Tasker, or Noakes, or even the Mayor; and what then?

At one moment, yesterday, he had actually resolved to go to the Mayor and confess; and the resolution had lifted a cloud off his mind, until he realised that he could not do so without incriminating John. For who would believe that John had not known where the money came from? To confess would be to bring John's precarious house-of-cards tumbling about him; and about his wife and two kids as well. It was unthinkable that he should ruin John.

So there was nothing for it; he must carry his shame about with him for a fortnight and hope, like all the wretched and foolish little men who ran away with the funds of slate clubs, that “something would turn up” before he was found out. For now he was of their fellowship. He thought and felt as they did. He made the same feeble excuses to himself: I wasn't really dishonest, I meant to pay it back. He was blood-brother now to that poor weak creature Watkins who had spent the Christmas share-out money belonging to the Black Bear Goose Club and got six months in gaol. Watkins had meant to pay it back too, and perhaps he would have done so if the right dog had won on his last, desperate evening.

The Bloody Meadow formed an island in the loop of the
two rivers and was joined to the town by an old stone bridge. It was a huge field, nearly a mile across, and it generally took Mr. Handiman two hours to walk all the way round it. But he walked more quickly to-day, because he spent less time talking to his friends on the bank, those easy-going fellows whom he secretly envied. He asked them the usual question: “Any luck?” but he hardly listened to their usual excuses, that the sun was too bright, the water too clear, the wind too strong, or the fish off the feed. In his own favourite fishing place, a cow-drink between two willows, he found Robin baiting his hook with something out of a jar which Mr. Handiman could have sworn was illicit salmon-roe; for Robin rarely indulged in any lawful form of angling. However, he hadn't caught anything (or if he had he wouldn't admit it) and was obviously disinclined to say what he was fishing for. Instead he asked: “How are the Festival bookings going? Is the money beginning to roll in?” at which Mr. Handiman's heart gave a terrible bound, though he was able after a moment's pause to answer quite calmly:

“Very slow, Mr. Robin, very slow indeed.”

He hurried away. This was another nightmare which he shared with the slate-club secretaries: the suspicion of being suspected. Even the most casual pleasantry—
Is the money beginning to roll in?
—took on a frightening significance.

Yesterday when Virginia had handed him her day's takings—only five pounds seventeen and sixpence—she had said jokingly: “Don't spend it all at once, Mr. Handiman,” and for a second he had imagined that she knew and was trying to tell him so. When he realised that she couldn't
know—for he had the only key to the safe—he had felt the damp cold sweat on his forehead, and heard the surging in his ears, just the same as that time after a bout of 'flu when he had fainted in chapel and was coming to afterwards.

Such experiences, thought Mr. Handiman wretchedly, were part of his punishment. And it was part of his punishment too that even his beloved river gave him no joy this afternoon. The beauty was tarnished, the magic gone, he took no pleasure in the gobbling ducks and the tight, bright buds of the brandy-bottles. All along the bank, spaced out at intervals of about ten yards, were new wooden pegs, consecutively numbered; and these displeased him, for they were a reminder that on Saturday week, for ten miles upstream and five miles down, the river would be lined with thousands of anglers from Birmingham and the Black Country, taking part in the first big angling competition of the year. Mr. Handiman, because he had fished there since boyhood, felt that he had a proprietary right to the banks of the Bloody Meadow, and he disapproved of these spectacular fishing matches to which the contestants came in noisy charabancs, bringing with them their wives and girls. There were umpires every mile or so along the pitch, who started the match with pistol shots as if it were a race, and bookies, even, ran along the banks taking bets, on the result. The women sometimes put on. paper hats, which they seemed to think were necessary to the enjoyment of a day in the country, and when they had gone they left behind them a distasteful debris of stout and pop bottles, cigarette packets, newspapers and partly-nibbled sandwiches. The whole thing shocked Mr. Handiman profoundly, and
he looked upon it as an almost blasphemous parody of his cherished sport; it pained him as it would pain a member of the M.C.C. to see the cricketers at Lord's going out to field in comic hats and false noses. For “Study to be quiet,” Izaak Walton had said; and he had recommended his innocent recreation especially to contemplative men. What would he have thought of the screeching wenches in paper hats and the drinking that went on in the pubs afterwards— he who had declared, “I had rather be a civil, well-governed, well-grounded temperate poor angler than a drunken lord; but I hope there is none such”? What would he have thought of the bookies, and the betting, and the elaborate precautions against cheating, who hardly ever failed to speak in the same breath of “anglers, honest men”?

Oh, dear, there I go again, thought poor Mr. Handiman, wishing that
The Compleat Angler
hadn't laid such emphasis upon honesty. Stephen Tasker had once shown him a copy with Walton's own handwriting on the fly-leaf (it was one of the very few rare books Stephen had ever had in his shop) and the inscription so plainly written in faded brown ink was simply, “
For my friend Honest Will lies, Iz. WA”
How right and proper, he had thought at the time; for surely all Izaak's good friends must have been as honest as the day. He had felt absurdly proud, as he handled the book reverently, that the man who wrote it had been an ironmonger like himself.