Dance and Skylark (6 page)

He knew that he could not do it. In a moment of self-revelation he saw himself as he was, well-meaning and timid and ineffectual, a faint-hearted dabbler alike in books and living. He had only been brave and competent once, and that was when he had Polly beside him—Polly laughing at the sizzle of bullets from the hidden ambush even as he cried “Get your head down!” and then suddenly toppling forward with a grunt. Stephen had lobbed three grenades one after another into the blackness of the wood, dragged Polly into the truck, and driven away. It had not occurred to him even that he had done well until Polly, returned from hospital, had thanked him for saving his life; and they had got rather drunk together on some wine that tasted like resin.

Three days later the news of Germany's capitulation came through on the wireless, and they got drunk again. It was a particularly exhilarating experience to drink with Polly, who when he was at the top of the world somehow managed to carry his companions there with him. He and Stephen danced down the village street with the whole population of sixty at their heels, and Polly kissed all the women, including an old crone who was said to be a hundred and hadn't been kissed, she croaked, for seventy years. Then Polly climbed a chimney, the tallest in the place, and unfurled a Stars and Stripes at the top of it; for although his father had been a carpet dealer from Salonika he was an American citizen, whose home was in New Orleans. He made a long speech in Greek, and another in English, and sang some scandalous songs in both languages, and danced a hornpipe on the top of the chimney before he could be
persuaded to come down. Then they went back to the Headquarters and drank some more wine; and Polly, swaying in the doorway, took a grenade out of his pocket and very slowly, almost thoughtfully, pulled out the pin. “Must have a bang, Stevie. …” In a world of bangs he always wanted another. But the baseball player's pitch for once in a way failed to come off; the grenade hit the telephone wire in front of the Headquarters, and fell to earth within ten yards of Stephen. He was lucky indeed to lose no more than his knee-cap and half his shin.

Yet oddly enough he bore Polly no ill-will; indeed it was impossible to feel resentment against such a man. Somehow it cheered him up, now, simply to remember Polly, to remember his hip-swinging walk, his slow wide grin, his laughing dark eyes which spoke of the Mediterranean even while his mouth drawled of New Orleans. And the extraordinary hats he wore, a match for Mr. Churchill's—once he had gone out on patrol in a ridiculous little baseball cap, perched with the peak pointing skyward on top of the big prognathous head which had caused Stephen to nickname him the Piltdown Man; and the five Bulgarian prisoners he brought back in the morning had seemed more alarmed by his cap than by his tommy-gun.

Indeed there was nobody in the world like Polly! Nobody, surely, who could do so many things so well— from driving a truck at fifty along the side of a precipice to handling a boat in a rough sea; from climbing a mountain to riding a half-wild horse; from singing songs to making love! And in this latter respect he was indeed unique, for
he had not only made love to all the eligible young women in a valley forty miles long (the population, though small, was widely scattered), but he had done so in spite of an embarrassing idiosyncrasy at the memory of which Stephen nearly laughed aloud. Whenever Polly experienced the least premonitory stirrings of passion he sneezed; sometimes indeed the sneeze came first, and gave him early warning that yet another affair of the heart was on the way. “I bin to a psychiatrist about it, Stevie,” he confessed gravely; “but the guy said there was nothing to be done. I reckon it's something like hay-fever; but you can't get inoculated against dames.” And after all, it didn't really matter, he added with a grin; for when the dames got wise to it they'd naturally take a violent fit of sneezing as an exceptional compliment.

Nevertheless, this singularity of Polly's had once nearly cost him his life. During the time of the troubles with Elas he happened to be courting a Communist schoolmistress who lived in a village held by bandits. At considerable risk he visited her under cover of darkness, entering her parents' house by means of an open window. At a tender moment he was assailed by such a paroxysm of sneezing that, according to him, the whole house was shaken by it, her father woke up, the guards were aroused, and he found himself in the same awkward predicament as Samson at Gaza. He went one better than Samson, however, for instead of carrying away the doors of the gate he fought his way out with the protesting girl slung over his shoulder; and taking her to a place of safety he was able as he put it to unconvert her from Communism in no time.

Stephen was still chuckling to himself at Polly's adventures when he arrived at his shop; and the boisterous memories had dispelled most of his gloom. But when he thought again of Odo and Dodo and W. G. and the chinchillas, he wished, oh, he wished, that he had Polly's company in this desperate affair, for then surely all would be well. On the spur of the moment he pulled out his notecase and hunted through it for Polly's address; and when he found it he went into the back shop where Miss Pargetter was sitting very prim and still at her typewriter and told her:

“Put one of those Festival folders in an envelope, please, and send it by airmail to this address. I'll write a letter to go with it.” Then he spelt out the address to her very slowly:
Mr. Polycarpos Gabrielides
, 1256
Esplanade Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A
.

He went back into the front shop to write his letter. He had got as far as “My knee is still a better weather-forecaster than the Met used to be” (and was wondering whether it was quite fair to Polly to mention his knee at all) when he was aware of Miss Pargetter standing at his side with her notebook held out in that helpless and appealing attitude which she adopted when she was Stuck.

“Polly-something,” said Miss Pargetter abruptly. “I can't remember whether it ends with us or os.”

“Polycarpos,” said Stephen, spelling it again.

“Yes, Mr. Tasker.”

“It means ‘many-seeded,'” added Stephen. “What a funny name.”

“Yes; but apt. By the way,” said Stephen, “I don't suppose you sold any books?”

“I'm afraid there was only one customer all the afternoon.”

“That's above the average,” said Stephen.

“He wanted something to read in a bus. I sold him these.” Miss Pargetter stared for a long time at her notebook. “I put down the titles in shorthand for practice,” she said. “
The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry
—and, oh, yes, I've got it,
Meditations on Death and Eternity.”

“If you sold those books,” said Stephen, “you could sell anything.”

“Yes, but—I'm afraid I knocked sixpence off
Death and Eternity”
Miss Pargetter still looked as solemn as an owl. “I felt sure you wouldn't mind. He was a Scottish Minister,” she said, “and rather poor.”

There Was a long sultry spell, as May melted into June ; the close sticky nights were shot with sheet-lightning, and black thunderstorms punctuated the scorching days. The Vicar announced that his promised fine-weather system was building up slowly. Nevertheless, some of the storms were heavy, and in one twenty-four-hour period he had the satisfaction of registering no less than .62 inches of rain on his gauge. The Vicar always did record more rain than any other observer within a hundred miles; and on the charts at the Air Ministry the neighbourhood was shown as a pocket of exceptional rainfall and pointed out to students as a remarkable phenomenon, due perhaps to the effect of the nearby hills. But it is possible that the true cause was to be sought in the mischief of the choir boys who under cover of darkness would play an exceedingly naughty trick as they went home through the Vicar's garden after a late practice.

The thundery and electric atmosphere got on everybody's nerves, and as the days went by Stephen had a sense of mounting tension. Disaster was in the air, and its premonitory
rumblings were as plain to him as those of the circumambient storms. The first rehearsal had been a ludicrous failure, for owing to a typing mistake in Miss Pargetter's circular to the performers—she had put “Thursday” instead of “Tuesday”—half the company failed to turn up. The rehearsal therefore became a sort of Tactical Exercise Without Troops; but even so tenuous an affair resulted in five separate and distinct quarrels among the leading actors. In addition, Odo and Dodo, complaining perhaps with reason that their parts were not sufficiently spectacular, had resigned from the company; they would be knights or nothing, and there were not enough horses to go round. A savage rainstorm had finally drenched everybody before they went home.

Stephen had other troubles too. Lance's choruses had turned out to be incomprehensible to anybody but their author, and in order to persuade him to rewrite them it had been necessary to apply the ultimate sanction to which, alas, young poets are singularly vulnerable: the Committee had withheld his fee. The Wardrobe Mistress threatened to throw her hand in because she couldn't; understand Robin's designs. The men who were building the grandstand went on strike. Mr. Gurney and Councillor Noakes were like two old tomcats snarling at each other in dreadful undertones every time they met. And the Beauty Queens, it was rumoured, had had a row in public at a local dance.

On the first of June, according to plan, a pink nettlerash of posters had broken out all over the town. Designed by Robin, they were somewhat impressionistic, and seemed to represent a crowd of knights and ladies in a blurry snow-storm
of red and white roses—pretty enough when you looked at them closely, but on the hoardings they might have been advertisements for strawberry ice-cream. During the night following their appearance somebody plastered a second lot of posters side by side with them. These declared in bold scarlet lettering:

WE DON'T WANT FESTIVALS WE WANT HOUSES, WORK AND WAGES

and were generally attributed to the machinations of Miss Foulkes.

All that morning Stephen's inadequate office in the back shop was overcrowded with Councillors and members of the Committee who had looked in to discuss this atrocity. He now had two telephones, which went continually as well-meaning people rang up to tell him about the posters or to ask him what he was going to do about them. Councillor Noakes, fleshy and perspiring, fussed around as usual, got in everybody's way, and frequently and unnecessarily patted Miss Pargetter on the shoulder, who in her summer dress was the only cool and placid person in the room. At last Stephen could stand it no longer, and making the excuse that he must personally inspect the outrage he escaped from the shop and followed in the footsteps of Mr. Gurney, who had just “dodged out”
(Back in half an hour)
to have his mid-morning drink at the Red Lion.

Even in the sleepy High Street one could not help being aware of conflict, frayed tempers, and a population at odds
among themselves. Wherever two passers-by had paused to have a word together, or a small group stood gossiping outside a shop, it was ten to one they were disputing either about the Festival or about the Beauty Queens. No longer had the Mayor any reason to complain of apathy. “Rouse 'em, Runcorn, rouse 'em,” he had said; and Mr. Runcorn had responded with a colourful leader about “the verdant meadow, known as Sanguinary, encompassed by umbrageous trees.” It had finished neatly with a quotation from Shakespeare: “This green plot shall be our stage.” Probably hardly anybody had bothered to read it, but the unpredictable citizens had roused themselves with a vengeance. Unfortunately theirs was not exactly the enthusiastic awakening the Mayor had looked forward to; it was more like the resentful agitation of ants in a suddenly disturbed anthill.

Half-way up the street Stephen found the Inspector of Police, with two of his men, scraping the offending posters off the walls. This pompous and lugubrious individual, whose unsuitable name was Heyhoe, hinted to Stephen that although he was doing his duty he didn't hold with the Festival either. “I looks around me,” he said, “and what do I see but trouble, trouble everywhere?” He was, however, already on the track of the culprits, for he had searched the balloon factory “from floor to ceiling” and at last had discovered a paste-pot. The paste, he said, in the tone of one speaking of bloodstains, was
still wet
. He had impounded the pot in case it should be required as an exhibit in court.

Next Stephen called at Mr. Handiman's shop, which had recently been opened as the Festival Booking Office with Virginia in charge. She had been lent to the Committee by Mr. Runcorn, an act of self-sacrifice more apparent than real; and now she dreamed her day-dreams over an immaculate seating-plan, as virginal as herself, that had not so far a single X in any of its multitudinous squares. It was Councillor Noakes who had urged that a Beauty Queen would be the very person to sell tickets; but Stephen had his doubts when he entered the shop and Virginia did not even look up from the sheet of paper on which, in round schoolgirlish characters, she was copying something from a magazine.

He coughed, and she came to earth from the dizzy heights of stardom, fluttering her eyelids at him.

“Not very busy yet,” he said.

“Ay'm not expecting a rush till nearer the tame.”

He glanced over her shoulder at the sheet of paper and read: K2 tog, PI, K2 …

“It's a pettern,” she explained, “for a twin-set.”

“Oh, I see.” Glancing out of the window, from which Mr. Handiman had at last removed the unseasonable skates, Stephen became aware of a square poster stuck on the outside of the pane, next to Robin's oblong one.

“Good Lord, look at that!” he said.

It was quite easy to read the big letters backwards: WE DON'T WANT FESTIVALS. …

“Well, Ay never !” was all Virginia said.