Dance and Skylark (14 page)

The row of girls at the bench had their backs to John and their silhouettes made a curious frieze against the open door; and because of the certainty in his mind that the factory couldn't carry on much longer he stood and stared at this familiar sight, thinking that he would remember it with absurd affection in the years to come: a score or so of backs, some shapeless, some shapely, bent over the long bench like housewives over the wash-tub; handkerchiefs tied round their bobbing heads; sleeves rolled up, french chalk powdering the bare arms; the balloons swelling and collapsing; the hiss of the air going into them, the faint
sigh as it went out. How often, on his way through the shop, had he paused at the bottom of the shaky stairs and listened to these women chattering like a flock of starlings! For their perpetual gossip was indeed a sort of murmuration, which from time to time broke out into shrill squeaks and cries when the flock was startled (or pretended to be) by one of Mrs. Greening's outrageous tales. They were a pretty mixed lot— “his sluts,” as his wife called them. Ruth, at the end of the row, had had two illegitimates and looked as if she were going to have another; Mrs. Hawkes had been bound over to keep the peace with her next-door neighbour; Mrs. Townshend was regularly drunk on Saturday nights; the lame girl, Doris, had been convicted of shop-lifting; the two seventeen-year-olds next to Edna daubed their faces with rouge and their eyes with mascara so that they looked like tarts and set out down the main road each night in search of lorry-drivers.

But these also, like the ammonia smell and the fog of french chalk, had become part of John's background. They were his people, and he would miss them too when the final bust-up came.

He went up the stairs to the packing-room and at the top he paused again. For the sound which came from the bench now was more rhythmical than the usual bandying of gossip and dirty stories. Raggedly and untunefully the women were singing. Their feet were cold in the leaky cheap gumboots, they were on half-pay, next week they might be out of a job; so they sang. It was the latest silly catch from America, with a trivial tune and moronic words:

     
I'll do anything for you,
     Anything you ask me to …

but somehow it moved him that they should sing at all in such circumstances and he was reminded of his soldiers singing, in all the wettest, dreariest, darkest moments of the war.

On The morning of what Faith called Balloon Monday she saw the mare's-tails in the sky and, being more weather-wise than the Vicar, knew that her hoped-for blow was on the way. And sure enough in the late afternoon a dry north-easter came tearing out of the streaky blue, giving long manes to the little white horses which pranced over the flooded fields and kicking the spray high over the main road; so that the crowds who were walking out from the town along that narrow causeway said it was “just like the seaside” and felt exhilarated by the sprinkling of spume.

By six o'clock there must have been more than two hundred people on the haycock-shaped hill overlooking the town; and at least another hundred were making their way there. “Sound the trumpet, Runcorn, sound the trumpet!” the Mayor had said; and so the
Intelligencer
on Saturday had carried a leading article in Mr. Runcorn's most extravagant style calling for volunteers to let off
twenty thousand balloons. The composition had presented no difficulty to him, for he had simply looked up “Mont-golfier” in the Encyclopaedia and then referred to the old files of his paper to see if its founder and first editor had had anything to say about the ascent of the first balloon in 1783. It was unthinkable that so significant an event should have escaped the notice of the argus-eyed
Intelligencer;
nor, indeed, had it done so. “We are told,” wrote Mr. Runcorn, “that a sheep, a cock and a duck were the unwilling and far from intrepid aeronauts, launched into the empyrean in the nacelle of the Messieurs Montgolfier's revolutionary contraption. But the balloons which our townspeople will cast to the winds from the birch-clad eminence on Monday evening will bear a less ponderable cargo—nothing but our eager hopes for the success of the venture upon which we have set our hearts …” and so on to the tune of nearly two columns.

But perhaps such a highfalutin encouragement had been hardly necessary after all; for as Faith had said, “people love letting off balloons,” and to take part in the release of twenty thousand of them was an experience which was unlikely to befall anybody more than once in a lifetime. Besides, ever since what Mr. Runcorn called the Inundation, popular enthusiasm for the Festival had been gathering momentum; for the difference of opinion between the pros and the antis had been like a neighbours' quarrel, which brooks no interference from outsiders, and the sudden intervention of the elements had had exactly the same effect as the arrival of the policeman. Both parties had united to meet the new challenge. Mr. Runcorn, coming from church on Sunday
morning, had made the unusual gesture of shaking Stephen by the hand. “I have my finger on the pulse of the town. I am gratified to tell you that it is quickening, Mr. Tasker, it is quickening surprisillgly.”

So, with no shortage of volunteers, the strange ceremony began promptly at six and continued without a hitch for nearly four hours. Stephen had at first been doubtful whether it would be possible to release so many balloons in so short a time; but for once in a way Faith's uncertain mathematics did not let him down. John Handiman had provided eight hydrogen cylinders and fitted them up on the lee side of the birch-wood. It took just five seconds to inflate each balloon and make a knot in the rubber mouthpiece; so they went off at the rate of about a hundred a minute. They were in five different colours, blue, pink, green, yellow, and white, and each was overprinted with a caption about the Festival and the symbol of a formalised rose. Streaming away in batches on the strong wind they looked like a flurry of flower-petals blown off by a summer gale; and then as they mounted into the blue-and-white sky, spiralling, somersaulting and chasing each other while the fickle air-currents whirled them along, they reminded one of butterflies on a ma ting-flight, when the males pursue the females until both vanish from sight in the unattainable heaven.

It was a pretty spectacle, and worth a poem, thought Lance, as he watched a little cluster of coloured specks hardly bigger than the Pleiades melting into the luminous blue. His head was always full of words and phrases, and the lines which ran through it now came from
Adonais:
“Life,
like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity.” It hurt your eyes to look for too long into that white radiance, tie blinked them, and looked at Edna instead.

Edna, obviously, had decided that sending off balloons was the jolliest game in the world; a lark indeed. Every time she released one she indulged in a little jump or skip in order to give hers a better start than its fellows. Her giggles succeeded one another like the merry cascade of a mountain stream tumbling down from waterfall to waterfall. Lance thought she looked like a dancing Maenad. How eagerly the little lustful eyes of the sileni and the satyrs would watch her from the edge of the birch-brake, on what light feet would she lead them up hill and down dale in the chase that could have only one ending:

The ivy falls from the Bacchanal's hair
Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes;
The wild vine slipping down leaves bare
Her bright breast shortening into sighs. …

Lance reluctantly withdrew his gaze from her as he became aware of his father standing beside him. The Vicar in his wind-fluttered cassock presented an incongruous figure, for he held a big bunch of balloons in each hand. “If I could paint that picture,” thought Lance, “I should title it simply ‘Church Fête' and it would somehow stand for all the nice silly homeliness of the Church of England !” The Vicar boomed cheerfully: “I feel like Noah loosing his dove. Go, each of you, and find an Ararat !” It seemed
to please his fancy to set off his balloons in flocks of seven or eight at a time, and to watch them for as long as possible to see which outclimbed the others. Mr. Oxford and his friend Timms had had the same idea, and were now making quite a good thing out of backing their fancy against anybody who cared to risk half a crown. “Two to one the blue!” shouted Mr. Oxford. Fives the pink, fives the yellow, the green's gone down in the water! “Five to one bar one, five to one bar!” He was in excellent spirits, for he had just won a pound off Sir Almeric, who had come down on horseback from his manor to watch the proceedings though apparently he did not think it compatible with his dignity to take part.

“Put it on the bill,” drawled Sir Almeric, standing up in his stirrups and peering into the sky, “and give me fours in half-dollars against the yellow. It's a bad starter, but I like its action. I reckon it'll stay.”

Little Mr. Handiman was listening with disapproval. “They'd bet on anything, Mr. Lance,” he whispered. “It isn't right, to my mind, to treat money so casual in front of folks who haven't, some of them, got much to bless themselves with.” And he shook his head sadly. He was so globular, thought Lance, that he looked rather like a balloon himself. Fill him with hydrogen and he'd surely fly away, over the flooded meadows, over the roof-tops, over the Abbey tower!

“No, it isn't right, Mr. Lance, to my way of thinking.” Then his glance fell upon Edna and in sudden embarrassment he shuffled off.

And now Virginia, who had been kept late at the
Booking Office, came wending her way daintily up the hill, wearing a ridiculous picture hat because she knew she was going to have her photograph taken. Mr. Runcorn's photographer had been waiting for her, and he made haste before the light faded to pose the two finalists on the very summit each with a bunch of balloons held aloft. The Mayor and Stephen stood between them.

“Forward a bit, Miss Edna; back a bit, Miss Virginia,” said the photographer. “That's right, I want you looking windswept. Now, when I say Go, loose the balloons.”

But when he said Go, it was Virginia's hat that took the air. Just as the shutter clicked it sailed away, revolving rapidly like a tea-tray spun out of the hand, and because it presented so large a surface to the wind it almost kept pace with the balloons and Sir Almeric had time to shout: “Six to four the Gainsborough!” before it fell into the muddy gateway at the bottom of the hill. Faith, who was sorry for Virginia, ran to pick it up; but Edna, although she was sorry too, found a simple pleasure in watching the gyrations of the hat and was unable to suppress a giggle. Patting into place her neat permanent wave, Virginia said in accents of dangerous refinement:

“Ay don't know whay you think thet's funny.”

“Keep your hair on, ducks,” said Edna tactlessly (her own yellow curls were blown all over her face); and the Mayor, who privately thought that Beauty Queens were as tiresome as Councillors though one got less weary of their faces, saved the situation by announcing in his formal speechifying voice:

“The last batch of balloons is just going up, ladies and
gentlemen; and it only remains for me to thank you for this very fine turn-out which exemplifies, if I may say so, the magnificent public spirit that characterises our ancient town. …”

Pink, yellow, blue and green, and pearly-white like huge mistletoe berries, the balloons rose up into the paling sky; and everybody cheered as they sailed away—slowly and smoothly now, for the wind had dropped with the setting of the sun. Standing next to Stephen, Faith said in her matter-of-fact voice:

“So that's that. I wonder if it'll work?”

“Goodness knows,” he said. “But how pretty!”

The last lot of two or three dozen kept so close together that you could have covered them with an umbrella; it was as if a many-coloured flower-bed had taken wing. The crowd stood and watched them until they were lost to view; and then, curiously hushed, like people who had taken part in some ancient rite, some strange druidical act of sacrifice, they began to make their way down the slippery slope towards their homes.

The Vicar, luckily, had left before the end; so Lance was able, unnoticed, to take Edna's hand and draw her into the bosky clumps where they hid until the last of the balloonists were out of sight. Now they shared the birch-wood, which they had come to regard as their private playground, with none but Philomel. Lance quoted:

“So hote he lovede that by nightertale
He sleep namore than doth a nightingale.”

And Edna said: “You do talk silly,” and ruffled his hair.

“It's Chaucer talking silly, not me.”

“You and your poetry!” A momentary look of trouble crossed her face, wrinkling her brow like a cat's-paw of wind passing over the surface of a sunlit pool. “Lance—” she said.

“Yes?”

“We're so different, you and me. Poetry, for instance. Half the time I just don't know what you're talking about. D'you think it matters?”

“I don't suppose the nymphs knew much about poetry,” said Lance irrelevantly, “nor the yellow-skirted fays either. They certainly didn't
make
poetry; but they made poets. Like you do.”

“Go on! You don't write poems about me, I bet.”

“You
are
poetry. Your eyes are lyrics, your hair's an aubade, a song to wake lovers with in the morning; your nose is a roundelay, your chin is a triolet, your lips are couplets better than ever I could string together, your limbs are sonnets, each of them, your—”

“Get on with you!” She laughed, and the troubled look vanished; it had never been much more than the shadow of a passing cloud in April. “It's getting dark. I can see the stars through the branches. What does your father say about all these late nights?”

“Oh, he's a Wordsworthian, my father; he believes that a poet has to spend a great deal of his time worshipping Nature.”