Dance and Skylark Read online

  “You wait till the Festival visitors begin to arrive,” beamed the Vicar. “Then they’ll sell like hot cakes. Ah, thank you”—as Stephen took a pound out of the tobacco-tin which served as a till— “I can’t deny that it will come in handy, just at the moment. Boys like mine are very expensive. Besides, I’m saving up for an anemometer.”

  “I beg your pardon—a what?”

  “An instrument for measuring the velocity of the wind.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “And by the way, I’ve got some good news for you,” added the Vicar, pulling up the skirt of his cassock in order to pocket the pound note, “some very good news indeed. I’ve been looking at my long-range weather-charts, and there’s an extremely promising fine-weather area building up in the Atlantic. It’s going to be fine for the Festival!” He patted Stephen on the shoulder and went out, calling back from the doorway: “I’ll see you at the Committee Meeting this afternoon.” The wind billowed out his shabby cassock and, as he hurried across the street on his short legs, he looked rather like a plump blackbird. But it was an illusory plumpness, Stephen knew, like that of a bird’s puffed-out feathers on a cold day, for the old man half-starved himself on a stipend of three hundred and fifty a year out of which he had to maintain his large and dilapidated Vicarage. He had been selling his library piecemeal ever since Stephen had taken over the bookshop. Most of it, alas, still occupied Stephen’s shelves.

  Climbing up the step-ladder again, painfully because his shrapnel-shattered knee was contradicting the Vicar’s weather forecast, Stephen resumed his self-imposed task of taking stock. He hated this annual formality, which assumed the shape of a prolonged inquest upon all his follies—why on earth had he paid fifteen shillings for that deplorable set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, why had he failed to notice that the Byron first edition lacked a fly-leaf, why had he allowed a tearful widow to persuade him to buy no less than five copies of her late husband’s uninspired work on Liverworts and Mosses? Like shabby and faintly disreputable acquaintances whom one avoids if one can, the same books turned up at every stocktaking, the old bound Punches, the inevitable Longfellows, the Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott. They would be with him, he thought, until the end of his days.

  For the rest, stocktaking only served to prove on paper what he already knew: that he was losing money. Immediately after the war, when there were still a few American soldiers about, he had made a substantial profit; for the G.I.s having bought up everything in the town from beer to bicycles could find nothing else to spend their money on save books. But the profits of those fat years had been eaten up by the subsequent lean ones. His war gratuity had gone too, and all he had left was the small capital sum left him by his father. He had seriously thought of giving up the bookshop, and trying to get a job in a library, when Councillor Noakes had suggested that he should organise the town’s Festival and produce the Pageant, for which service the Committee had voted him a hundred and fifty pounds. “Perfect arrangement all round,” said Councillor Noakes. “We use your back shop as an office, find you a Secretary, and pay you a fee. Visitors flock to the town, good for trade, fill your shop with customers, everything hunky-dory.” But already Stephen was beginning to doubt whether it was going to work out like that. For one thing he knew little about producing; the sum of his experience was A Midsummer Night’s Dream at school, some musical shows in the Army, and a Boy Scouts’ Pageant at the very thought of which he blushed still, for the script had been written by a local Lady Bountiful who fancied herself as a versifier and must on no account be displeased. Her inspiration had reached its climax in a scene on a desert island, when the principal character standing beside an unfurled Union Jack suddenly exclaimed:

  “What is that voice which I have heard before?

  It is my mother, washed up on the shore.”

  The repetition of this couplet, at ten rehearsals and three performances, had caused Stephen the most acute embarrassment; and he was by no means certain that something of the kind might not occur again, for the names of Odo and Dodo were ominous indeed.

  Moreover, he had discovered that he was not merely expected to produce the Pageant, but to cast it, advertise it, oversee the dressmakers, hire the horses, engage the programme sellers, arrange the box-office, sell the tickets, and do everything else which was necessary; and to help him in this tremendous task the Mayor had wished upon him the extraordinary girl whose typewriter in the back room now tittuped in a series of short bursts with long pauses in between: like a Lewis gun, he thought, operated by some gallant but incompetent defender of an outflanked salient, continually jamming itself, repeatedly cleared so that it could fire another few rounds, but doomed irrevocably to silence in the end.

  She was a farmer’s daughter, to whose father no doubt the Mayor had been under some heavy obligation; and her shorthand and typing were self-taught. She had sat in the back room for five days now, placid, self-possessed, apparently incompetent, and quite unresponsive to Stephen’s kindly attempts at conversation about such subjects as saddle-back pigs and shorthorn cows. “Yes, Mr. Tasker,” she said demurely; and sat so still in the straight-backed chair that Stephen became most foolishly embarrassed and made an excuse to go into the front shop. Only her wide blue eyes were continually in motion, making examination, as if they were amusing curiosities, of her shorthand, the typewriter, the book-lined room, and himself. She was beginning to get on Stephen’s nerves.

  TitumtitumtitumtitumtitUM, went the typewriter, like a line of bad blank verse, and suddenly stopped. No doubt the letter “t” had become tangled up with the letter “y” and Miss Pargetter was staring wide-eyed at the interesting phenomenon. At that moment the shop window was darkened again and there fell on to the sunlit floor of the shop a shambling, flapping, curiously corvine shadow. Corvine too was Mr. Gurney’s exclamation when he opened the door and saw Stephen on top of the steps.

  “Quark!” he said, like a suddenly-alarmed bird. “What you doing?”

  As usual he carried an umbrella, although it was a cloudless day, and as usual he carried it like a rifleman, at the trail. His shadow lay across the floor like that of a hunchbacked giant with a spear.

  “I’m stocktaking,” said Stephen.

  “Quark!” Mr. Gurney was horrified. “What you want to do that for?”

  “I do it every year.”

  “Make any money?” grinned Mr. Gurney.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Foolish, foolish,” said Mr. Gurney, clicking his tongue. “Let sleeping dogs lie. If you find you’ve made a loss you’ll start worrying, and if you show a profit the Income Tax will have it sure as nuts. Beware the Jabberwock, my boy; beware the Income Tax. I never take stock.”

  Stephen wasn’t surprised. Mr. Gurney, who kept the antique furniture shop next door, observed none of the conventions of retail trade. He opened when he felt like it and shut when he became bored. If the conversation, manners or faces of his customers displeased him, he compensated himself for having to put up with their company by doubling his prices. On the other hand, if he liked the look of a person he was apt to knock off twenty-five per cent. Since almost every article in his shop was skilfully faked he could afford to do this. From time to time he would “dodge out,” as he put it, for a drink, sticking up in his window a peculiarly discouraging notice which said Back in half an hour; and often, like Mr. Handiman the ironmonger, he would take himself off for the whole day, leaving no apology at all.

  “What’s all this about an extra episode?” he said, while Stephen sat on the top of the ladder, fascinated by a bird’s-eye view of Mr. Gurney’s enormous jowl bulging out over a butterfly collar.

  “Well, the Committee feels that we can’t just stop at Charles the Second. Something must have happened, even in this place, since then.”

  “A great many things have happened,” said Mr. Gurney. “People have been born, have loved, married, had children, hated, dreamed, cheated, thieved, prospered, and st
arved; and in due course have died wondering what it was all about. But that, Noakes tells me, is not History.” Mr. Gurney bore an ancient grudge against Councillor Noakes, of which the origin was lost in obscurity. “History, according to him, consists of Battles, Kings and Queens.”

  “And Odo and Dodo,” said Stephen, “and Dame Joanna. By the way, I shall have to know a bit more about that lady. Apparently she was our only local poet, but what did she write?”

  “Reams,” said Mr. Gurney, “and all in practically undecipherable manuscript at the Bodleian. Most of it is extremely coarse.”

  “But she was a Prioress!”

  “There are suggestions that her nunnery was not everything that it should be.”

  “Look here,” said Stephen, “how am I expected to produce an episode in which somebody founds a nunnery which is not everything that it should be?”

  “That’s your headache,” said Mr. Gurney cheerfully. “My job is simply to give you the facts.” And with that he was gone. His grotesque shadow lifted itself like a cumbrous bird off the worn carpet on the floor and flapped away. “Remember what 1 said about the Income Tax!” he squawked from the door. “Beware the Jabberwock, my boy!” He waved his umbrella in valediction, and then the sunshine flooded back into the small square room.

  Stephen once more turned his attention to the top shelf, where all his worst bargains stood in a row, skied there like second-rate pictures in an Art Gallery because it was inconceivable that anybody should buy them. He heaved down Jacob’s Law Dictionary in two volumes, price one guinea, and noticed that the ghostly mouse, which nobody ever heard or saw, had been nibbling the edge of the leather binding. The beast was untrappable, since it unnaturally preferred old calf to cheese.

  The damaged books certainly weren’t worth a guinea now, so Stephen marked them down to ten-and-six, more as a gesture than in any hope that they would sell. Next to them stood Macaulay’s History of England in eight scrubby volumes, all with broken spines, and then came The Art of the Farrier Improv’d in All its Parts with some Original Observations concerning The Thrush in Horses, and then Annals of My Village, by the author of Select Female Biographies and The Conchologist’s Companion: a versatile writer, thought Stephen, if a dull one. From each of the books, as he pulled them out of the shelf and opened them one by one, a year’s accumulation of dust rose up, drifted away on the draught, and formed eddying nebulae which were caught in a slanting shaft of light from the window. He became aware that Miss Pargetter, who always walked as softly as a cat, had emerged from the back shop and was standing beneath him gazing up at the swirling dust-particles with large inquisitive eyes.

  “It reminds me,” she observed quietly, “of the Universe according to Sir James Jeans.”

  Stephen was so astonished that he nearly dropped The Art of the Farrier upon her head; for until this moment he had entertained some doubts whether she could even read.

  “I bet there are millions of germs there,” she added. “You can get awful diseases from second-hand books. When I was at school I caught measles from David Copper-field. A girl had accidentally brought it out of the san.”

  “You can get more dangerous things than diseases from books,” said Stephen. “You can get ideas.”

  “Yes, Mr. Tasker.” She relapsed into her formal manner, and stood at the foot of the ladder, gauche, disinterested and immobile, with her shorthand notebook open in her hand.

  “I couldn’t read my notes,” she said. (She never apologised for anything.) “The Earl of Somerset laid, and then there’s a squiggle.”

  “The Earl of Somerset laid?”

  “Yes, laid a what?” said Miss Pargetter patiently.

  “Does it look like ’egg’?”

  She studied her book without smiling, and at last said: “No.”

  “Then try ’ambush.’”

  “Yes, Mr. Tasker.” Softly as a cat, she went towards the back room. Stephen called out to her:

  “I’ve got to go to a Committee Meeting this afternoon. You’ll look after the shop?”

  “Yes, Mr. Tasker.”

  “The prices are all marked plainly inside the front covers.”

  “Yes, Mr. Tasker.”

  “I don’t suppose anybody will come in, though,” said Stephen. He put the Annals of My Village back on the shelf and jotted down its price in his notebook. TitumtitumtitUM went the typewriter, like a brief despairing fusillade. Then silence returned. The Earl of Somerset had laid an ambush; and Miss Pargetter was stuck again.

  III

  “Meanwhile Our maidens,” wrote Mr. Runcorn, “emulous in pulchritude,” and looked across his office, as if for inspiration, at the impeccable profile of Miss Smith who sat at her little desk in the far corner of the room. But he was old and desiccated, and the broad smooth brow, the grave eyes, the slightly-parted lips and the faultless permanent wave (free to finalists) held no inspiration for him. Indeed it struck him as more than a little unseemly that the Weekly Intelligencer should number a potential Beauty Queen among its staff; and he recollected the words which he had spoken, only ten years ago, to a cub reporter who came to the office in ankle-length plus-fours: “In our profession, we do not unduly draw attention to ourselves, Mr. Cole.” The plus-fours had been bad enough; but a Beauty Queen was unheard of. Nothing of the kind had ever happened in the office before, and the files of the paper, which was one of the oldest in the United Kingdom, went back to 1772. Nor had the style of its leading articles changed much since then; for Mr. Runcorn was a practised exponent of the art of circumlocution, which he had learned from his ancient predecessor nearly fifty years ago. His mentor, in turn, had picked it up from his predecessor; and thus the laboured, elaborate and somewhat facetious prose which distinguished the Intelligencer from any other newspaper had been handed down through an apostolic succession of editors from the original founder: a turgid stream flowing direct from its muddy source. That first editor, when he wished to imply that the champion beast at Christmas market had been slaughtered by the town’s leading butcher, used to write that it had “made the acquaintance of the pole-axe at the hands of our chief practitioner of the executioner’s trade.” Mr. Runcorn still used the same phrase in his Christmas number, merely substituting “humane killer” for “pole-axe” out of deference to the R.S.P.C.A.

  It would be a serious breach of the rules to write of a Beauty Competition as a Beauty Competition, it would be almost as bad as describing the scarlet-coated followers of the chase as mere huntsmen, and Mr. Runcorn had already employed “pulchritude” twice; so his old eyes in search of a synonym fixed themselves upon the trim head of Miss Smith, the plucked eyebrows, the darkened lashes and the well-powdered nose.

  Miss Smith, however, deep in a brown study, was unconscious of his stare. She, too, was in search of a word, but she didn’t mind what it meant so long as it was sufficiently mellifluous and began with a V. For a long time she had been troubled about the ordinariness of her surname, which whenever she shut her eyes she was apt to see in large shining letters upon a cinema screen: “Starring Virginia Smith.” But “Smith” was clearly impossible, and since she firmly believed that her success in the semi-final had brought her one step nearer to Hollywood, the problem of a substitute now became urgent. The prize for the winner of the Beauty Competition was a film-test; thence it was but a short step to becoming a Starlet, and thence to a Star. Most of her favourite film-stars bore alliterative names, but her vocabulary was somewhat limited and she knew very few words beginning with V. “Virginia Vale” had tempted her, but she thought it sounded rather like a suburb or a telephone exchange, and now she was weighing up the respective merits of Virtue and Verity. For this purpose she shut her eyes until she could feel the long lashes tickling and watched in her imagination the familiar flickering screen with the incandescent captions: “Starring James Mason and Virginia Verity,” “Starring Virginia Virtue and Stewart Granger.” She was thus occupied when a banshee scream, rather like a railway engine’s whistle only
hoarser and more throaty, awakened her out of her daydream with a start.

  It was the voice-pipe by which the office downstairs communicated with Mr. Runcorn and vice-versa. This horrible instrument, which she felt sure was full of spit, had been a daring innovation when it was first installed about 1850; and Mr. Runcorn, who now had a telephone on his desk, nevertheless obstinately insisted that the voice-pipe should still be used for speaking between the offices. In order to work it you took a deep breath, put your lips to the mouthpiece, and blew. This produced the whistle. Thereafter you shouted your message in such a loud voice that the person below would hear you even without the aid of the instrument. Its use, in fact, was simply a convention, quite unrelated to any utilitarian end.

  With revulsion, Miss Smith put her shell-pink ear to the repellent mouthpiece and felt a scorching sirocco blowing into it, which was the spotty office boy’s breath. When it had blown itself out she wiped the mouthpiece with a tiny blue handkerchief and cautiously spoke into it, removing her lips from it very quickly lest they should be contaminated by the office boy’s reply. A wheezing noise came out of the pipe, and she shouted “Speak louder” at the top of her voice. He did so, and she was able to hear him through the worm-eaten floorboards: “The Mayor to see the Boss.” Mr. Runcorn, who had also heard although he was several yards from the voice-pipe, looked up from his writing and inclined his head. She shouted back “Send him up, please,” and the office boy’s shrill unbroken tenor came up through the floor: “Okay.”

  The Mayor was a small sandy man called John Wilkes, who invariably signed his Christian name as Jno. He was without presence, dignity or ambition, and he was always in a hurry because he was always “doing things for people.” He had been chosen as Mayor for no other reason than this: that he was kind. And because he was also humble, so that none of the Councillors had cause to be jealous of him, he looked like remaining in office until he died; for there was no great competition for the Mayoralty of the small decaying town. The little man was literally killing himself with kindness, for he could never bring himself to say no to anybody who asked him to do anything for them. He lived in a state of perpetual breathlessness.