Dance and Skylark (16 page)

“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.

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.

“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 yours 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.”

Councillor Noakes was delighted. “That's the way to make money!” he said. “I might even consider going in for it myself! And now you've told me that, I'm set on having the book whatever it costs me. Real hot, it must be. Talking of hot, have you ever read any of the poems of Dame Joanna?”