Dance and Skylark (21 page)

“‘E's caught up in the wades,” said the woman downstream, who from her position on the high bank was able to observe Mr. Handiman's activities as well as those of her own champion.

“I says to 'im,” went on the girl upstream, continuing her epic of the Works' Canteen, “stop fiddling, I says; and 'e says, real nasty now, You'd fiddle if you was tryin' to git 'olt of a sack of titers wivart no thin' to git 'olt of it by.”

Mr. Handiman disentangled the slimy lily stem and re-baited his hook. (“‘E's puttin' on a wairm now,” said the woman downstream.) He cast it out as far as he could, followed the quill float with his rod-point as it sailed down on the stream, checked it just short of the brandy-bottles, and cast out once more. He summoned all his skill of hand and eye, and all the experience of nearly fifty years to his aid; but in his heart he knew that he had no chance. A dove-grey cloud suddenly obscured the sun and the wind got up, making the long cast more difficult than ever, blowing in his line towards the shore, and laying the float flat on the water where little wavelets broke over it. The yellow lanceolate leaves of last season spun down off the single willow-tree, formed a scum on the slack water, or
swirled in the eddies until they were drowned. Sinking, they flashed dull-bronze like the sides of a shoal of phantom fishes, mocking him. It began to rain.

That short sharp thunderstorm was the weather's last prank of all; but it struck the town, like a whiplash of the departing devil's tail, at the very moment when the Mayor was opening the Festival and when the semi-finalist Beauty Queens, ten minutes late, were getting out of the car which had brought them from the Town Hall. Only Mr. Gurney's umbrella, the only umbrella in the Pleasure Gardens, saved them from a drenching. As he conducted them on to the platform their Maids of Honour, looking very uncourtly with borrowed mackintoshes over their heads, hinted in whispers at terrible happenings on the Town Hall stairs: Virginia had accidentally trodden on Edna's dress, practically tearing it off her back, Edna had called her a clumsy bitch, Virginia had slapped Edna's face, and Edna, provoked beyond endurance, had seized Virginia by the hair. Whatever truth there was in these stories, there could be no doubt that both girls were extremely angry; and they looked correspondingly beautiful. As they reached the platform and stood before Polly the scud passed and the sun came out again; and Stephen, not yet quite sober, thought they looked like Pallas and Aphrodite called before the Cloud-Gatherer to account for a dispute between them. Edna, a sweet disorder in her dress, her long yellow hair in disarray, might indeed have risen shining from the foam; Virginia, usually so placid, was animated by ill-temper, she was Athene of the flashing eyes. If he had not known that
nothing went on inside her head but an endless repetition of the names of film-stars alternating with Pi (fig.) K2 tog., Stephen could easily have imagined an owl sitting upon her shoulder.

The Mayor, by a stroke of genius, had just introduced Polly as “Mr. Polycarpos Gabrielides, the well-known impresario from the United States”; nor was this very far from the truth, for did he not own six strip-tease dancers and a duck-billed platypus? Wearing his extraordinary hat, he looked as if he might possess a controlling interest in half the theatres of New York and all the studios of Hollywood as well. In considerable awe, therefore, Virginia and Edna ranged themselves on either side of the Mayor and heard him say: “Our distinguished visitor will now perform the judgment of Paris.”

And Polly, confronted by those flushed and dishevelled goddesses, confused as much by their beauty as by the half-bottle of Bourbon he had drunk in the train, nevertheless rose to the occasion to make a better and wiser judgment than the son of Priam had done. He said nothing, but bent down and plucked from the bank of flowers which decorated the platform a red rose; then, from the other side of the platform, he took a white one. He held them both up before the expectant crowd.

“Mr. Mayor,” he said, “I've been hearing from Mr. Tasker about your little old battle, which happened in 1471; I sure don't want to start another in 1951, so I guess you gotta have two Beauty Queens.”

He handed the red rose to Edna and the white rose to Virginia.

“The Queen of Lancaster,” he said, “and the Queen of York.”

The crowd cheered so loudly that the fishermen three miles up the river could hear them, and wondered what it was all about.

The cheering reminded Mr. Handiman that he was playing truant from the opening ceremony; and he wondered if anybody had noticed that the Festival Treasurer was missing. It didn't matter much if they had; for the whole story of his embezzlement was bound to be known by Monday. John had told him last night that the Argentine man had failed to pay and that the balloon factory would probably have to go into liquidation; and in his innocence John had offered to pay back the hundred and fifty pounds at the rate of five pounds a week. He still didn't know where the money had come from; he supposed, no doubt, that it was part of Mr. Handiman's private hoard, or the accumulated takings of the shop—though if the shop took ten pounds in a week it was lucky! To-morrow after chapel, thought Mr. Handiman wretchedly, he would go and see the Mayor. He would make his confession, and then they could do what they liked with him. All last week, like a fish on a hook, he had felt his panic gradually draining away as a sort of hopeless resignation took its place. His entry for the Fishing Match had been, as it were, a final desperate wriggle; but it could not save him from the consequences of his folly. Number Two-eight-nine had filled a whole basket with roach; and Mr. Handiman's creel was still empty. There was only a quarter of an hour to go.

He still cast out his line more or less automatically, let the float go downstream as far as the lilies, wound in, and cast again; but he no longer had the slightest hope of catching anything, and he was concerned less with fishing than with a detailed examination of his sins.

Not the least of these, he decided, was his lack of humility in entering for the competition at all. Why should he imagine that he was a better fisherman than these thousand-odd experts from all over the Midlands, and why should he think that he could achieve more with his cheap coarse tackle than they with their dressed silk lines and gut-casts as fine as hairs, with their beautifully-balanced rods and their reels of shining aluminium? Conceit, just wicked conceit. He had set himself above other people and that was a terrible sin, almost as bad as embezzlement; and he was being very properly punished for it now. He had set himself above Mr. Lance and Edna, when he found them in the grass, thinking their dalliance wicked, whereas his own wickedness was so much greater; he set himself above the people who drank in pubs and the people who gambled; and he set himself above these men from Birmingham who worked in factories and perhaps lived in slums, and looked forward to their single day's outing for months on end. It positively served him right, thought Mr. Handiman, to have drawn one of the worst positions on the river; and he hung his head in shame.

As he did so his attention was attracted by a tiny commotion in the muddy water at his feet; and peering down he saw a very small frog hopping about there. Now
The Compleat Angler
, which he knew by heart, has a famous
passage about the use of frogs as bait; and it jumped at once into Mr. Handiman's memory.

“Put your hook into his mouth, which you may easily do from the middle of April till August, and then the frog's mouth grows up, and he continues so for at least six months without eating, but is sustained none but He whose name is Wonderful knows how: I say, put your hook through his mouth and out at his gills; and then with a fine needle and silk sew the upper part of his leg to the arming-wire of your hook; and in so doing use him as if you loved him, that he may live the longer.”

Glancing downstream at the single willow-tree, it occurred to Mr. Handiman that if by any chance a chub
did
He beneath it, a frog, dapped down on the swift current, would be the most tempting bait for it; and this frog, being about two inches long and the colour of a yellowing leaf, was one which he felt sure no chub could resist. He therefore bent down and scooped it up in his hand, and using it as if he loved it gently ran the hook through its lips. (“‘E's puttin' on another wairm,” announced the lady downstream.) Then he pulled a dozen yards of line off his clicking wooden reel, coiled them carefully at his feet, swung the rod two or three times to get the feel of it, and let go. The frog shot out over the river, beyond the gravelly ledge, beyond the first patch of brandy-bottles, beyond the second, and fell with a little plop into the very place he had aimed at, where the longest branch of the willow-tree dipped towards the water. There it swam and flopped about on the surface, while an eddy, as Mr. Handiman had foreseen, carried it
in towards the bank, right underneath the overhanging bough.

“'E in't got no float,” said the downstream lady. “ 'Is float must of come off in the ay-er.”

Very gently, with small sharp flicks of his rod-point, Mr. Handiman began to draw in the frog towards him. It was now or never, because soon it would be caught up among the brandy-bottles, when he would almost certainly lose it.

He had forgotten all about his sins; he had even forgotten that he was taking part in a fishing match. The only things he thought about were the eddies under the willow-tree, the little splashes made by the frog, the situation of his line so precariously resting on the flat leaves of the water-lilies.

The voice of the girl upstream came to him very shrill and clear.

“And then 'e pinched me on the arse. Right through my dress 'e did, you can see the bruises neow.”

Unmoved apparently by this extraordinary confession, her young man said cheerfully:

“Pinched you on the arse, did 'e? Toss us down that tin of wairms.”

At that moment three things happened to Mr. Handiman; he would never know which of them happened first. He heard a tremendous splash; he saw, between the leaves on the overhanging bough, a sudden swirl with a cavernous open mouth in the middle of it; he felt a kind of electric shock in the butt of his rod. He tightened, and the old greenheart top of the bamboo rod bent into the shape of a bow.

“'E's muxt up in the fleowers,” said the downstream lady. “I thought 'e'd get muxt up in them fleowers.”

But Mr. Handiman knew better. He had seen that great mouth, greyish-white, rather like an open oyster shell, which vanished from view as it closed; and now his line was jerkily cutting through the water and leaving an arrow-shaped wake behind it.
Click-click-click
like a deathwatch beetle went his wooden reel as the line was pulled off it, five yards, ten yards, fifteen, and then Mr. Handiman could see the brown spool of the reel showing, so he put his finger on the rim to check the fish's headlong run. He could feel the whole rod
kick
as he did so, the butt jabbed itself into his round little belly and remained cushioned there. But the chub's first rush was checked, and the taut line swung round in a half-circle, just missing the brandy-bottles, while Mr. Handiman reeled in a few yards of slack.

The woman downstream had at last realised that there was a fish on the end of Mr. Handiman's line; and she jigged up and down on the bank, yelling encouragement. Her cries brought Jimmy helter-skelter from his latest tour of inspection, and several of the nearby fishermen, who had already given up hope of catching anything themselves, came running to see what the commotion was about. Now they all began to give Mr. Handiman contrary advice: “Let 'im 'ave 'is 'ead!” “Kape a toight loine on 'im!” “Tike care of them wades! Moind 'e don't git into them wades!” and so on. But Mr. Handiman, who had once landed a salmon, foul-hooked in the back fin, on his old bamboo rod, took no notice of them. He knew that he
had hooked the chub well and truly—and had not Izaak Walton said, “He is one of the leather-mouthed fishes, of which a hook does scarce ever lose its hold”? He knew that his stout water-cord line would stand the strain, and he knew that after the first two or three plunges the fish would quickly tire. Only one thing was worrying him, the inadequacy of his landing-net; for the chub was the biggest he had ever seen, it must surely weigh about seven pounds and his net was neither deep nor wide enough to contain it. Nor were his neighbours' nets, which they hurried to fetch for him, any better designed to cope with this whale, this Triton, this Behemoth among chub; they were neat little collapsible things, with folding handles, and Mr. Handiman suspected that they would indeed collapse beneath the weight of his monster. So when at last he had played it out, and its steely-grey hammer-head broke the surface and was easily held there, the great mouth opening and shutting, the dorsal fin cutting through the water like a torpedo-boat's bow—then Mr. Handiman decided that the time had come for heroic measures. Raising the point of his rod, and so dragging the exhausted fish over the ledge of gravel, Mr. Handiman stepped into the water, where immediately he sank up to his knees. At that moment the fish gave a flick of its tail and a last plunge towards the brandy-bottles; and Mr. Handiman, plunging after it, seized it behind the gills. In doing so he simultaneously dropped his rod and lost his footing, but no matter, he had his fish. With the water up to his middle, he cradled it in his arms as if it were a baby; and indeed it weighed as much as most babies do when they are born. And so in
triumph Mr. Handiman waded ashore, while Jimmy performed a war-dance on the bank, the downstream woman shouted, “It's a salmon! It's a salmon! It's a bloody great salmon!” and all his rivals waved their landing-nets and cheered. They stretched down their hands to help him up the slippery bank, they fetched him a stout stick with which to crack the monster on the head, they used their own expensive rods to hook out his cheap one. In short, they were his brothers of the angle indeed—brothers and sisters of the angle, for even she whose arse had been pinched offered Mr. Handiman a thermos of hot tea to keep out the cold.