Dance and Skylark (15 page)

“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!

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 liking 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!”

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.

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.