Dance and Skylark by John Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

of Dame Joanna (it was practically the only thing he wasn’t responsible for) so he allowed his wayward mind to stray again, and like a homing bird it flew straight to the olive-groves.
    Lately he had often caught himself looking back upon his year in Greece as if it were an experience in a frame, a sort of illuminated picture, or a theatrical interlude played within the arch of a proscenium. It glowed in his memorywith an unnatural brightness; the sky was a painted cyclorama, extravagantly blue, the snow was whiter than white, the glaucous olives seemed carved in relief on tawny hillsides, the anemones were projected in technicolor on to emerald alpine meadows. Against this incandescent background moved figures larger than life, and in particular one figure, gigantic among giants, that of his friend and companion Polycarpos. Huge and heroic, laughing at the sky, a bottle of wine in one hand, a grenade in the other, Polly stood outside their headquarters on VE-day. “Let’s have a good bang,” he said, “to celebrate. …”
    Suddenly the Mayor’s voice (“Our ’ome-made Pageant, our ’ome-made ’istory”) brought Stephen back to the present with a jerk. There was an argument going on about the vexed question of an extra episode, and Mr. Gurney had just remarked that in his humble opinion the town had been going from bad to worse for three centuries, and that the trivial doings of its wretched population during this period were of no conceivable interest to anybody. The Mayor ignored this and proceeded to make a suggestion of his own. He was not, he said, like Councillor Noakes a literary man; he was not like Mr. Gurney a scholard. But Pageants were meant for ordinary chaps, and what could appeal more to ordinary chaps than the paragraph he had chanced upon in the
Intelligencer
only last week under the heading “Seventy-Five Years Ago”? He fumbled in his pocket for the cutting, put on his spectacles, and solemnly declaimed the following passage from Mr. Runcorn’s predecessor’s extraordinary prose:
    â€œLast Saturday upon our hallowed greensward thewielders of the willow included among their number one whose fame resounds far beyond the confines of this his native county, nay, throughout the whole civilised world. In the course of scoring 172 Dr. W. G. Grace kept the leather-chasers on the run for nearly two hours ere his seemingly impregnable citadel fell; and towards the close of his innings he smote the spheroid three times in succession into the willow-girt river. …”
    The Mayor looked up.
    â€œI don’t know,” he said modestly, “whether you’d call that ’istory?”
    There was a murmur of applause. Everybody seemed delighted with the idea except Lance, who was appalled at the prospect of having to write a Chorus about cricket, and Stephen, whose already enormous cast would be increased by twenty-two. “Mr. Tasker will see to it, then,” said the Mayor, flushed with triumph. “No doubt the Cricket Club will co-operate. And now it only remains for me to thank you for your attendance and to say how safe we feel our arrangements all are in Mr. Tasker’s capable hands. …” He got up to go.
    Stephen had scarcely taken three steps to ease his throbbing knee before the furry lady was on to him, babbling of chinchillas. Why did it seem so much worse, he wondered, to wear your own rabbits than to eat them? She terrified him, and mumbling some excuse, he made his escape from her, hurrying down the stairs although all the nerves in his left leg seemed to be dancing an infernal jig together. At the bottom of the stairs something like panic overtook him as there flooded into his mind the full realisation of whatlay ahead: W. G. Grace and chinchillas superadded to Odo and Dodo and the Beauty Queens. He had an impulse to turn back, intercept the Mayor, and hand in his resignation on the spot; but he lacked the