Dance and Skylark (2 page)

So Lance, as he walked along the towpath with his hands in his pockets and his head in the air, made the discovery that he was in love; not with one girl or even with two, but with the whole blessed lot. For when his thoughts dwelt for a moment upon the tawny-haired barmaid who had been the immediate cause of his removal from Oxford University (for the proctors had been waiting for him beneath when he lowered himself from her bedroom window like Romeo upon a rope) he could scarcely deny that he was in love with her too. And when he allowed his fancy to play about the girl in the Festival Office, he had to admit that although she couldn't spell and appeared to be witless there was nevertheless something fey and secret about her which could easily win a man's heart. Astonished by this revelation, and as if to test further the huge catholicity of his taste, he even permitted himself to consider the claims of Miss Foulkes, a waspish redhead who was said to be a member of the Communist Party and whose lively opposition to the Festival was causing considerable embarrassment to the Mayor. Lance had once danced with Miss Foulkes at the annual beanfeast of the Tennis Club; upon that occasion their conversation had been confined to the subject of Dialectical Materialism. And yet he could not be absolutely sure, upon this bright May morning, that the multitudinous freckles upon her nose had actually displeased
him nor that there had not passed through his mind a momentary speculation whether her rather pretty mouth could be put to better purpose than repeating the dogmas of Karl Marx.

The fact of the matter was that Lance was in love with Life. Being a poet, he was naturally a kind of Pantheist; and being young he was a Pan-amorist as well. As he strode through the buttercups which gilded his shoes, and sang to himself some improvised and exceedingly improper verses about Odo and Dodo, his heart felt as if it would burst with an overflowing and comprehensive love of Virginia and ladies'-smocks and Edna and marshmallows and barmaids and buttercups and of the kingfisher which suddenly shot like an azure arrow out of a hollow tree and with its beautiful darting swiftness took his breath away.

Tirra-lirra by the river sang Sir Lancelot.

Poised On top of the step-ladder, Stephen looked down upon his box-shaped front shop, the black cat rippling and purring in the window, the Rowlandson prints above the fireplace, the table littered with the unsorted and probably unsaleable books which he'd bought yesterday at an auction, the glass-fronted bookcase which contained his few first editions. Because he had never considered the shop from this angle before he felt curiously aloof; the
ladder was a point of vantage from which he surveyed not merely his private world but the past five years he had spent in it. It didn't seem so long since he'd put up that rather foolish motto above the shelves, a tag out of his little Latin which steadily became less: QUOD PETIS HIC EST. It was foolish because hardly any of his customers understood it and in any case it wasn't true. What they sought was only occasionally and by fortunate chance to be found in those short inadequate shelves. “Have you got an up-to-date book on metallurgy, please?” “I want something on spiders, suitable for a boy.” “Anything about embroidery.” “Do you happen to have the
Poetical Works of Ossian?
” Or Councillor Noakes whispering furtively: “
I want you to get me a little book on Flagellation.”
If Stephen had learned anything during his five years as a bookseller, it was that the frontiers of the human mind were immeasurable, and that people were like ants questing hopelessly within that vast wilderness. But what diverse and diverting ants they were! It was an odd paradox, thought Stephen, that the experience of keeping a bookshop had taught him less about Letters than it had taught him about Life.

The glass-fronted door of the shop was suddenly darkened and from his high perch he looked down upon a bald and shining pate. The old gentleman who owned it clutched to the bosom of his black cassock a bundle of books in shabby green bindings, and Stephen laid a bet with himself that the books were by Dickens, that they were believed to be first editions, that half the plates were missing and that the other half were foxed.

The old gentleman looked up.

“Ah, there you are! I've brought you a few old books. They're not Theology this time, you'll be glad to hear.”

Stephen came down the ladder. “I was cleaning out some cupboards,” the Vicar went on, “and really, nowadays, one simply hasn't got room—”

Stephen had known, too, that the explanation would run like that: there was always so little room, there was never so little money. As he glanced at the damp-stained title-pages, the Vicar said:

“They're first editions, at least I've always understood so.”

“Yes, they're the first bound editions,” Stephen explained patiently; “but I'm afraid they're not very rare. You see, most of these books first came out in parts, and collectors like to have them in the original state, with the paper-wrappers and the advertisements all complete. I'm afraid—”

“You can't make an offer for them?” The Vicar was rubbing his old rheumaticky fingers where the thin string had cut them.

“Well …” Stephen began to tie up the bundle, and as he did so he felt his absurd weakness getting the better of him, his uncontrollable impulse of compassion. “Well, of course, they
might
sell.” Angry with himself, he added almost roughly: “Perhaps I could give you a pound for the lot.”

“You and I never argue,” said the Vicar brightly. “A willing buyer and a willing seller can always do a deal. I should hardly have troubled you, but expenses have been
rather heavy lately. That boy of mine—you heard he was —er—sent down? Some foolish escapade; I didn't inquire into it. Boys will be boys. Have you managed to sell many copies of his book?”

“Poetry is a bit difficult.” And indeed, out of the fifty copies of that slim volume which Stephen had bought in another of his moments of compassionate folly, there were still forty-seven left. It was called
La Vie est Vaine
, and needless to say the Vicar had paid for its private publication. His printer had certainly cheated him, for the arty pink wrappers were fading to dirty orange and the bindings were springing, so that each of the little books had begun to open like a flower in the sun.

“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.