Dance and Skylark (22 page)

“You wants to git 'ome quick, dearie,” she said solicitously. “At your age with them wet trarsiz.”

Beaming from one to another of his new-found friends, Mr. Handiman loved them all.

With His notebook on his knee, Lance sat on the river bank just above the weir, and tried to compose on behalf of the Beauty Queens an address to their Loyal Subjects. “Such a lark!” Edna had said. “It's going to be printed in the
Intelligencer
. Do let Lance make it up, Virginia; he'll do it ever so nice.” And Virginia, whose literary accomplishments were limited to knitting-patterns, gladly agreed, only reminding Lance that the purpose of the
Address was to ask people to donate to various local charities. Lance had protested:

“Don't you think ‘give' would sound better?”

Virginia shook her head.

“‘Donate' is nacer, Ay think.” And Edna, to Lance's distress, had agreed. “‘Donate' sounds more
grand
somehow. And Virginia works in the
Intelligencer
office. She ought to know.”

So Lance scribbled, with a little smile: “And we appeal to our faithful subjects to donate generously to the Hospital Comforts, the Old Folks' Golden Hour, and the Vicar's Organ Fund. …” There didn't seem to be much more to say, so he chewed his pencil and stared at the river below the weir, where every now and then a salmon leapt or wriggled up through the white foam at the edge of the waterfall. When the Dress Rehearsal was over Robin would surely be out here with his illicit gaff, poised stock-still like a heron at the edge of the salmon-ladder. Lance strongly suspected that Robin made more money by poaching salmon than he earned by selling his pictures.

After the Carnival Procession he and Robin had taken the two Beauty Queens to the Red Lion for a drink, to celebrate their joint accession to the Throne. “Thank you, Ay will hev a half paint,” Virginia had said; and she had turned to Edna who sat beside her in the corner of the bar and added precisely: “Ay think, don't you, that paints are rather vulgar?” But Edna obviously didn't think so, for she accepted from Robin a big pewter tankard of beer, behind which she giggled irrepressibly. Watching Virginia
sipping her shandy, as daintily as a sparrow drinking from a puddle, Lance was reminded of a curious phrase used by a monk of Gloucester many hundreds of years ago. He had discovered it in one of those calf-bound books of sermons in his father's library. The jovial priest, preaching apparently at Christmas-time, had accused certain members of his congregation of being “covetous of unbuxomness.” That, thought Lance, described Virginia exactly. She raised her head after every little sip, just like a bird, to let the fizzy shandy trickle down her delicate throat, and meanwhile she glanced with disapproval at the tankard of beer which Edna cuddled to her bosom as if she cherished it. Poor, dear Virginia: she couldn't help it, but she was covetous of unbuxomness, and that was why Robin had given her such a perfunctory kiss on the cheek when they said good night in the empty courtyard of the Red Lion—for Robin had to go to the Dress Rehearsal, and the Beauty Queens, like all royalty, had now become the slaves of their people, and were about to set out on a three-hours' tour of all the surrounding villages. Left alone, Lance had wandered along the bank of the Bloody Meadow until he came to the weir, where he sat down to watch the sunset and the jumping salmon.

“May the sun shine upon our brief reign …” he wrote; but already his mind was wandering away from the Beauty Queens' Address, and the elusive rhythms which were always tormenting him began to play through it like the wind in an aspen-tree. Dusk was falling over the river, inexpressibly beautiful, inexpressibly sad, bringing with it those intimations of mortality to which only the very
young can afford to give heed. It will still be here, all this, he thought, in a hundred years' time: the murmurous water, the white mist swirling over it, the greeny-blue sky, Sirius blinking over the distant hills, the small moon coming up behind the melancholy willows; and I shall not be aware of it. The midge-hunting bats will dart and squeal, and the lovely bright salmon leap like spears thrown by Poseidon; and I shall not see them. On this very bank, young girls like Edna will walk beside young men like me; and I shall know nothing of their heart-beats and their heart-aches. O tenuous, transient, beautiful world, thought Lance, how brief, how brief, and how it will hurt to leave it!

Ah, yes! But perhaps it only hurt if you were young when you left it. For delight faded with the passing of the years, as the colours in the landscape were fading now. A sunset was just another day gone; a new moon was just another month beginning. “The grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail.” Even at thirty, Lance had read somewhere, a man's ears could no longer pick up the bats' slate-pencil squealing; and although the sound was not in itself beautiful, it seemed to Lance a very tragic thought that in eight years' time he would not be able to hear it. If the physical senses were so quickly blunted, what of the emotions, the passions, the quick dreams? Did one look back from thirty with a shrug of the shoulders at the torment of twenty-two: “I had an affair with a factory girl once____I actually wrote verses about her. How odd!”

The whole of Lance's spirit cried out against such a blasphemy; the whole of his reason told him it was true.
“Then I must write it all down
now,”
he thought. “Now, before it is too late—the sunset sky, the crescent moon, the bat's swiftness, the salmon's leap, my own heart's leap every time I see her.” The wind of words blew through Lance's head, and their rhythms sang to him like the wind in an aspen-tree; and with a sense of terrible urgency he began to write. It was becoming so dark that he could hardly see what he was writing, and he scribbled his adolescent poetry all over the Beauty Queens' Address. He had no eyes now for the salmon which showed themselves among the white waters, like molten ingots of silver; he had no ears for the trumpet which summoned York and Lancaster to battle in the arena less than half a mile away. The beauty and the terror of the words possessed him; and as he wrote there ran down his spine a little shiver of the most exquisite sadness: “Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight.”

Out Of the darkness a trumpet sounded its querulous challenge, and that was a signal for the lights. The floods, for once obedient to their cue, poured broad white beams upon one half of the arena, leaving the other half in deep shadow; and the Yorkist line of battle, thus suddenly revealed, looked like a flower-border at midsummer. The heralds and trumpeters in the forefront were golden
marigolds, blue lobelias, fire-red salvias; the tabards of the knights behind them made a low hedge of scarlet and gold; and the pennons were long-stemmed blossoms waving in the wind.

“Why, Stevie,” said Polly softly, “it's
beautiful.”
And then the floods faded and a dim green spotlight like a will-o'-the-wisp in a marsh picked out the Lancastrian ambuscade, ghostly bowmen crouching behind a clump of bushes, motionless horsemen drawn up among the trees. A horse neighed, a bit jangled, and Stephen felt Polly's hand tightening on his elbow. “Oh, Stevie, d'you remember that night near Larissa? When we lay in wait for the convoy at the edge of the cork-forest? And how I had to take the bridle off my mule, because of the noise it made chewing its bit?” The pale glimmer, creeping between the willows, just touched the silvery helmets of the knights, gleamed dully on their chainmail, and in its turn faded. Now the other half of the field was floodlit; and on a great chestnut horse, groomed so that the muscles of its shoulders seemed etched like an anatomical drawing, Robin rode into the brightness. There was a rose as red as blood on the banner borne before him, and all the knights of Lancaster trotted at his heels.

Again the trumpet wailed its brazen cry into the darkness; all the lights came on at once; and the Yorkists with Sir Almeric at their head broke into a hand gallop.

Even Stephen caught his breath. Thus he had imagined it, months ago, when he had begun work on Mr. Gurney's synopsis and read for the first time an account of the battle in Fleetwood's
Chronicler:

“Edward apparailed hymselfe and all his hoost set in good array; ordeined three wards, displayed his bannars; dyd blow up the trompcts; committed his caws and qwarrel to Almighty God, to our blessed Lady his Mothar, Vyrgyn Mary, the glorious Martyr Seint George and all the Saynts, and avaunced directly upon his enemyes.”

Thus he had imagined it, stirred by those old words and by a picture in his mind of the sunlight on the helmets and the pemions waving like a border of tall flowers. But during the long weeks of preparation and rehearsal the pristine vision had faded; indeed he had lost it altogether, and now, when it so unexpectedly unfolded itself before his eyes, it almost startled him, he could scarcely believe that it had been liis. “Did / imagine this pattern of a whole garden on the move? Did J dream that shadowy ambush, half-seen, half-hinted at, like the Third Murderer in
Macbeth?”
In wonder and delight he watched the pattern changing and breaking up as bright splinters flew off to right and left of the Yorkist lines, the Bang's party with herald and pursuivant, the horsemen moving out to cover the flanks. And then suddenly it was as if a great wind had blown through the garden of flowers, scattering them and laying them low, as all the waving pennons dropped and the knights of York spurred their horses to the charge.

When the Dress Rehearsal was over, Stephen and Polly walked back across the arena, dimly lit now that the big floods were out, in which Roundheads rubbed shoulders with Lancastrians, plumed Cavaliers strolled arm-in-arm with nuns, the girls from the Drama School fluttered about
like ghost-moths in their white muslin dresses, the bandsmen of the British Legion noisily packed up their instruments, and Sir Almeric's huntsman cracked his whip with a sound like a pistol-shot as he called together his hounds.

“It was fine, Stevie, fine!” said Polly, as excited as a schoolboy. “Three hundred actors—gee, and I boasted of six ecdysiasts!”

Even the Grand Finale, which Stephen had so much dreaded, had gone off without a hitch—instead of “heavily vanishing” the various groups had wheeled like trained soldiers to their separate exits. Indeed there had been scarcely a flaw in the whole performance; and the scenes which yesterday had seemed quite moribund had suddenly and miraculously come alive. Perhaps Robin's costumes, worn for the first time, had something to do with it; perhaps the lights, working properly at last, had helped to effect the transformation. But Stephen, most absurdly, was inclined to put it down to the presence of Polly. He was a sort of talisman, he had arrived out of the blue like a sign from Dionysus; and Stephen felt as he had done in Greece, that nothing could go wrong when Polly was there.

“They wanna
hold
that ambush,” he was saying eagerly. “Like we did at Larissa—they wanna take 'em in the flank and the rear and give 'em the works!”

“Right you are! I'll polish it up on Monday.” Polly was a born soldier, so he ought to know! But he was a born showman too, and he went on:

“Those kings or princes or whatever they was—when they're scrapping together you wanna cut your floods and just catch 'em in a spotlight, all by themselves—”

“By God, you're right again!” said Stephen. “I ought to have thought of that—”

“And, Stevie—”

“Yes?”

“You wanna put in a
bang
somewhere.”

“A bang?”

“You wanna blow something up.”

Stephen laughed. “You and your bangs!”

“Why, Stevie, you're limping!” Polly seemed to have noticed it for the first time. “I sure do feel bad about your knee. But I mean what I was saying. We gotta have a good-big-bang. That skirmish—Roundheads and Cavaliers, I never could figure out which was which—it just tails off; but if we could blow up a mine, or maybe build a little bridge across the river and send it sky-high, that'd kinda finish the scene off neat and tidy. Say, did Roundheads and Cavaliers have gunpowder?”

“Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament with it long before that!”

“Well, there you are; sure they had gunpowder; sure they could blow up a bridge. If we could get hold of two or three sticks of dynamite—”

Stephen was smiling to himself at the “we” which kept creeping into Polly's discourse—-for Polly was never content to remain a mere spectator of anything—when they reached the main exit, where a single floodlight pointed the way to the turnstiles. Through them streamed a motley crowd of players on their way home, Sir Almeric in shining armour, Bloody Mary with her folk-dancers, Dame Joanna, a bunch of assorted Elizabethans, Odo and Dodo with their eremite
mounted on a donkey chosen at random from Faith's innumerable herd. In the midst of this hotch-potch from the past stood a small stiff figure in a shabby mackintosh, looking curiously out of place and unaccountably pathetic. With the air of a Salvation Army lass in a pub, an air of heroic disapprobation, Miss Foulkes parted the crowd with her banner held up before her as if it were a shield:

WE DON'T WANT FESTIVALS
WE WANT HOUSES, WORK AND WAGES
FORGET THE DEAD PAST
JOIN THE C.P. AND LOOK TO THE
LIVING FUTURE

“Well!” said Polly, stopping dead in his tracks.

“Miss Foulkes, our only local Communist,” said Stephen.

“Stevie,” said Polly, “that sorta makes me feel homesick.”

“Homesick?”

“The little Red schoolteacher I stole from Elas was the living spit of her.”

“She works in the balloon factory.”

“Funny,” said Polly, staring hard at Miss Foulkes, who had just caught sight of him and stared stonily back, “that Reds and redheads, in the case of dames, always seem to go together. That Elas dame was a redhead; and had she got guts? I carried her half a mile slung over my shoulder, going at a smart trot, with the Elas guys taking pot-shots at my backside, and all the time she was tearing my hair
out by the roots. You'd got to hand it to her; I hid three nights in a cave, and it was like teaming up with a tigress. But when she'd worked the poison out of her system we kinda settled down; and could she cook! Stevie, I reckon I've gotten a special sort of soft spot for Red redheads. You gotta let me meet this Miss Foulkes of yours.”