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“That’s why Ernie wouldn’t clear the thistles,” Dame Alice muttered.
“Oh, dear!” Dulcie said, “aren’t they queer? Why not say so? I ask you.” She stared dimly at the jigging blackamoor. “All the same,” she said, “this can’t be Ernie. He’s the Fool now. Who is it, Sam? The boy?”
“Impossible to tell in that rig,” said the Rector. “I would have thought from his exuberance that it was Ernie.”
“Here come the rest of the Sons.”
There were four of them dressed exactly like the Whiffler. They ran out into the torchlight and joined him. They left their swords by Dr. Utterly and with the Whiffler performed the Mardian Morris. Thump and jingle: down came their boots with a strike at the frozen earth. They danced without flourish but with the sort of concentration that amounts to style. When they finished there was a round of applause, sounding desultory in the open courtyard.
They took off their pads of bells. The Whiffler threaded a scarlet cord through the tip of his sword. His brothers, whose swords were already adorned with these cords, took them up in their black hands. They waited in a strange rococo group against the snow. The fiddler’s tune changed. Now came “Crack,” the Hobby-Horse, and the Betty. Side by side they pranced. The Betty was a man-woman, black-faced, masculine to the waist and below the waist fantastically feminine. Its great hooped skirt hung from the armpits and spread like a bell-tent to the ground. On the head was a hat, half topper, half floral toque. There was a man’s glove on the right hand and a woman’s on the left, a boot on the left foot, a slipper on the right.
“Really,” the Rector said, “how Ralph can contrive to make such an appalling-looking object of himself, I do not know.”
“Here comes ‘Crack.’ ”
“You don’t need to tell us who’s comin’, Dulcie,” Dame Alice said irritably. “We can see.”
“I always like ‘Crack,’ ” Dulcie said serenely.
The iron head, so much more resembling that of a fantastic bird than a horse, snapped its jaws. Beneath it the great canvas drum dipped and swayed. Its skirts left a trail of hot tar on the ground. The rat-like tail stuck up through the top of the drum and twitched busily.
“Crack” darted at the onlookers. The girls screamed unconvincingly and clutched each other. They ran into the arms of their boy friends and out again. Some of the boys held their girls firm and let the swinging canvas daub them with tar. Some of the girls, affecting not to notice how close “Crack” had come, allowed themselves to be tarred. They then put up a great show of indignation and astonishment. It was the age-old pantomime of courtship.
“Oh, do look, Aunt Akky! He’s chasing the Campion girl and she’s really ru
Camilla was indeed ru
Camilla looked for some way of escape. Torchlight played over a solid wall of faces that were split with laughter.
“No!” shouted Camilla. “No!”
The thing came thundering after her. She ran blindly and as fast as she could across the courtyard and straight into the arms of Ralph Stayne in his preposterous disguise.
“It’s all right, my darling,” Ralph said. “Here I am.” Camilla clung to him, panting and half crying.
“Oh, I see,” said Dulcie Mardian, watching.
“You don’t see anythin’ of the sort,” snapped her great-aunt. “Does she, Sam?”
“I hope not,” said the Rector worriedly.
“Here’s the Fool,” said Dulcie, entirely unperturbed.
The Fool came out of the shadows at a slow jog-trot. On his appearance “Crack” stopped his horseplay and moved up to the near exit. The Betty released a flustered Camilla.
“Aunt Akky, do look at the German woman —”
“Shut up, Dulcie. I’m watchin’ the Fool.”
The Fool, who is also the Father, jogged quietly round the courtyard. He wore wide pantaloons tied in at the ankle and a loose tunic, He wore also his cap fashioned from a flayed rabbit with the head above his mask and the ears flopping. He carried a bladder on a stick. His head was masked. The mask was an old one, very roughly made from a painted bag that covered his head and was gathered and tied under his chin. It had holes cut for eyes and was painted with a great dolorous grin.
Dr. Otterly had stopped fiddling. The Fool made his round in silence. He trotted in contracting circles, a course that brought him finally to the dolmen. This he struck three times with the bladder. All his movements were quite undramatic and without any sense, as Camilla noted, of style. But they were not ineffectual. When he had completed his course, the Five Sons ran into the centre of the courtyard. “Crack” re-appeared through the back exit. The Fool waited beside the dolmen.
Then Dr. Otterly, after a warning scrape, broke with a flourish into the second dance: the Sword Dance of the Five Sons.
Against the snow and flames and sparks they made a fine picture, all black-faced and black-handed, down-beating with their feet as if the ground was a drum for their dancing. They made their ring of steel, each holding another’s sword by its red ribbon, and they wove their knot and held it up before the Fool, who peered at it as if it were a looking-glass. “Crack” edged closer. Then the Fool made his undramatic gesture and broke the knot.
“Ernie’s doing quite well,” said the Rector.
The dance and its sequel were twice repeated. On the first repetition, the Fool made as if he wrote something and then offered what he had written to his Sons. On the second repetition, “Crack” and the Betty came forward. They stood to left and right of the Fool, who, this time, was behind the Mardian dolmen. The Sons, in front of it, again held up their knot of locked swords. The Fool leant across the stone and put his head within the knot. The Hobby-Horse moved in behind him and stood motionless, looking, in that flickering light, like some monstrous idol. The fiddling stopped dead. The onlookers were very still. Beyond the wall the bonfire crackled.
Then the Sons drew their swords suddenly with a great crash. Horridly the rabbit’s head dropped on the stone. A girl in the crowd screamed. The Fool slithered down behind the stone and was hidden.
“Really,” Dulcie said, “it makes one feel quite odd, don’t you think, Aunt Akky?”
A kind of interlude followed. The Betty went round with an object like a ladle into which everybody dropped a coin.
“Where’s it goin’?” Dame Alice asked.
“The belfry roof, this year,” the Rector replied and such is the comfortable attitude of the Church towards the remnants of fertility ritual-dancing in England that neither he nor anybody else thought this at all remarkable.
Ralph, uplifted perhaps by his encounter with Camilla, completed his collection and began a spirited impromptu. He flirted his vast crinoline and made up to several yokels in his audience. He chucked one under the chin, tried to get another to dance with him and threw his crinoline over a third. He was a natural comedian and his antics raised a great roar of laughter. With an elaborate pantomime, laying his finger on his lips, he tiptoed up behind the Whiffler, who stood swinging his sword by its red ribbon. Suddenly Ralph snatched it away. The Hobby-Horse, who was behind the dolmen, gave a shrill squeak and went off. The Betty ran and the Whiffler gave chase. These two grotesques darted here and there, disappeared behind piles of stones and flickered uncertainly through the torchlight. Ralph gave a series of falsetto screams, dodged and feinted and finally hid behind a broken-down buttress near the rear entrance. The Whiffler plunged past him and out into the dark. One of the remaining Sons now came forward and danced a short formal solo with great exactness and spirit.