Dance and Skylark (3 page)

“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 starved; 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.

“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.

He now burst into the room, greeted Mr. Runcorn, and rushed across to shake Miss Smith's hand and congratulate her upon her success. Her mouth was full of antiseptic
lozenges, so she said nothing, but fluttered her eyelids at him and gave him what she believed to be an enigmatic smile. “Really, Runcorn,” he said, “you're a lucky dog, you know: sitting in here all day with nothing to do but stare at a Beauty Queen! Poor me, I've just come from the Council and now I'm off to a Festival Committee.”

He threw himself into the visitor's chair opposite Mr. Runcorn's desk.

“Frankly, I'm worried about the Festival. There seems no interest, no real enthusiasm at all. I say to them, ‘Let's relive our glorious 'istory,' and they only shrug their shoulders. I tell 'em it'll help to earn dollars for the country, and they just don't care. What they don't realise is that the foreign visitors will put money into
their
pockets—”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Runcorn sepulchrally, “that there
will
be some foreign visitors?”

“Swarms of 'em, don't you worry. With money to burn. That's the line for you to take, if you don't mind me making the suggestion. Visitors from all over the world!”

Mr. Runcorn nodded without enthusiasm and made a note on his blotting-pad: “
Viators and peripatetics from other climes”

“I'm relying on you,” added the Mayor, “to lift them out of their apathy. Rouse 'em, Runcorn, rouse 'em!”

“It isn't apathy alone,” said Mr. Runcorn, picking up a typewritten letter off his desk. “It's active opposition. Read this.”

The letter began:

“We the undersigned workers wish to protest against the
diversion of valuable man-hours and material, at this critical moment in our history
…” It went on for nearly three pages and bore twelve signatures, the first of which was “Enid Foulkes.”

“That's bad,” said the Mayor, shaking his head. “That's a blow beneath the belt, that is.”

“They're all employed at the balloon factory,” said Mr. Runcorn.

“I wish nobody any harm,” sighed the Mayor, “but do you know, if I owned the balloon factory, I'd be almost tempted to
purge
that Enid Foulkes.” He was about to hand back the letter to Mr. Runcorn when he hesitated.

“I suppose it wouldn't be possibles——”

“Yes?”

“Just this once——”

“Yes?”

He became aware of the eyes of Mr. Runcorn, like those of an immensely old lizard, unblinking and cold.

“To tuck it away,” he stammered.

“Yes?”

“On an inside page.”

There was a long silence during which it seemed as if the shades of five sea-green incorruptibles, Mr. Runcorn's predecessors in the editorial chair, were gathered behind him where he sat hunched at his desk, as still as a lizard on a rock. The Mayor dropped the letter on the desk.