by Hugh Walpole
Maradick was crushed against the old lady with the basket; for an instant, a movement in the crowd flung him forward and he caught at the basket to steady himself. Really, it was too ridiculous! His hat had fallen to the back of his head, he was hot and perspiring, and he wanted to fling off his overcoat, but his hands were pressed to his sides. Mechanically his feet were keeping time with the drum, and suddenly he laughed. An old man in front of him was crushed sideways between two stalwart youths, and every now and again he struggled to escape, making pathetic little movements with his hands and then sinking back again, resigned. His old, wrinkled face, with a crooked nose and an expression of timid anxiety, seemed to Maradick infinitely diverting. “By Jove,” he cried, “look at that fellow!” But Tony was excited beyond measure.
He was crushed against Maradick, his cap balancing ridiculously on the back of his head; his mouth was smiling and his feet were beating time. “Isn’t it a rag? I say, isn’t it? Such fun! Oh, I beg your pardon, I’m afraid that I stepped on you. But there is a crowd, isn’t there? It’s really awfully hard to help it. Oh! let me pick it up for you — a cucumber, you said? Oh, there it is, rolled right away under that man there.” “Oh thank you, if you wouldn’t mind!” “No, it’s none the worse, missis. I say, Maradick, aren’t they decent; the people, I mean?”
And then suddenly they were off. The red coat of the town-crier waved in the wind and the drum moved.
For a moment a curious silence fell on the crowd. Before, there had been Babel — a very ocean of voices mingled with cries and horns and the blaring of penny whistles — you could scarcely hear yourself speak. But now there was silence. The drum beat came clearly through the air — one, two, one, two — and then, with a shout the silence was broken and the procession moved.
There was a sudden linking of arms down the line and Tony put his through Maradick’s. With feet in line they passed down the square, bending forward, then back; at one moment the old woman’s basket jumped suddenly into Maradick’s stomach, then he was pushed from behind. He felt that his cap was wobbling and he took it off, and, holding it tightly to his chest, passed on bareheaded.
At the turning of the corner the pace became faster. The beat of the drum, heard faintly through the noise of the crowd, was now “two, three, two, three.” “Come along, come along, it’s time to move, I’m tired of standing still!”
A delirium seemed to seize the front lines, and it passed like a flame down the ranks. Faster, faster. For heaven’s sake, faster! People were singing, a strange tune that seemed to have no words but only a crescendo of sound, a murmur that rose to a hum and then to a scream, and then sank again back into the wind and the beat of the drum.
They had left the market-place and were struggling, pressing, down the narrow street that led to the bay. Some one in front broke into a kind of dance-step. One, two, three, then forward bending almost double, your head down, then one, two, three, and your body back again, a leg in air, your head flung behind. It was the dance, the dance!
The spirit was upon them, the drum had given the word, and the whole company danced down the hill, over the cobbles. One, two, three, bend, one, two, three, back, leg in air! “Oh, but I can’t!” Maradick was panting. He could not stop, for they were pressing close behind him. The old woman had lost all sense of decorum. She waved her basket in the air, and from its depths came the scream of the hen. Tony’s arm was tight through his, and Tony was dancing. One, two, three, and everyone bent together. One, two, three, legs were in the air. Faces were flushed with excitement, hands were clenched, and the tune rose and fell. For an instant Maradick resisted. He must get out of it; he tried to draw his arm away. It was held in a vice and Tony was too excited to listen, and then propriety, years, tradition went hustling to the winds and he was dancing as the others. He shouted wildly, he waved his cap in the air; then he caught the tune and shouted it with the others.
A strange hallucination came upon him that he was some one else, that he, as Maradick, did not exist. Epsom was a lie and the office in town a delusion. The years seemed to step off his back, like Pilgrim’s pack, and so, shouting and singing, he danced down the street.
They reached the bottom of the hill and turned the corner along the path that led by the bay. The sea lay motionless at their feet, the path of the moon stretching to the horizon.
The tune was wilder and wilder; the dance had done its work, and enough marriages were in the making to fill the church for a year of Sundays. There was no surprise at the presence of Tony and Maradick. This was an occasion in which no one was responsible for their actions, and if gentlemen chose to join, well, there was nothing very much to wonder at.
To Tony it seemed the moment of his life. This was what he had been born to do, to dance madly round the town. It seemed to signify comradeship, good fellowship, the true equality. It was the old Greek spirit come to life again; that spirit of which he had spoken to Alice — something that Homer had known and something that Whitman had preached. And so up the hill! madly capering, gesticulating, shouting. Some one is down, but no one stops. He is left to pick himself up and come limping after. Mr. Trefusis the butcher had been for a twelvemonth at war with Mr. Curtis the stationer, now they are arm in arm, both absurdly stout; the collar of Mr. Curtis is burst at the neck, but they are friends once more. Mrs. Graham, laundress, had insulted Miss Penny, dressmaker, four months ago, and they had not spoken since; now, with bonnets awry and buttons bursting down the back, it is a case of “Mary” and “Agnes” once again.
Oh! the drum knew its work.
And then it was suddenly over. The top of the hill completed the circle and the market was reached again. The drum beat a frantic tattoo on the steps of the Town Hall, the crowd surged madly round the square, and then suddenly the screams died away, a last feeble beat was heard, and there was silence. People leaned breathlessly against any support that might be there and thought suddenly of the disorder of their dress. Everyone was perhaps a little sheepish, and some had the air of those who had suddenly awaked from sleep.
Maradick came speedily to his senses. He did not know what he had been doing, but it had all been very foolish. He straightened his tie, put on his cap, wiped his forehead, and drew his arm from Tony’s. He was very thankful that there was no one there who knew him. What would his clerks have said had they seen him? Fancy the office-boy! And then the Epsom people. Just fancy! Louie, Mrs. Martin Fraser, old Tom Craddock. Maradick, James Maradick dancing wildly down the street with an old woman. It was incredible!
But there was still that strange, half-conscious feeling that it had not been Maradick at all, or, at any rate, some strange, curious Maradick whose existence until to-night had never been expected. It was not the Maradick of Epsom and the City. And then the Admonitus Locorum, perched gaily on his shoulder, laughed hilariously and winked at the Tower.
Tony was excited as he had never been before, and was talking eagerly to an old deaf man who had managed to keep up with the company but was sadly exhausted by the doing of it.
“My last,” sighed the old man between gasps for breath. “Don’t ‘ee tell me, young feller, I shan’t see another.”
“Nonsense,” Tony waved his arms in the air, “why, you’re quite young still. You’re a fisherman, aren’t you? How splendid. I’d give anything to be a fisherman. I’ll come down and watch you sometimes and you must come up and have tea.”
At this point Maradick intervened.
“I say, let’s get out of this, it’s so hot. Come away from the crowd.” He pulled Tony by the arm.
“All right.” Tony shook the old man by the hand. “Good-bye, I’ll come and watch you fish one morning. By Jove, it is hot! but what fun! Where shall we go?”
“I propose bed,” said Maradick, rather grimly. He felt suddenly out of sympathy with the whole thing. It was as though some outside power had slipped the real Maradick, the Maradick of business and disillusioned forty, back into his proper place again. The crowd became something
common and even disgusting. He glanced round to assure himself that no one who mattered had been witness of his antics as he called them; he felt a little annoyed with Tony for leading him into it. It all arose, after all, from that first indiscreet departure from the hotel. He now felt that an immediate return to his rooms was the only secure method of retreat. The dance stood before him as some horrible indiscretion indulged in by some irresponsible and unauthorised part of him. How could he! The ludicrous skinny neck of the shrieking hen pointed the moral of the whole affair. He felt that he had, most horribly, let himself down.
“Yes, bed,” he said. “We’ve fooled enough.” But for Tony the evening was by no means over. The dance had been merely the symbol of a new order of things. It was the physical expression of something that he had been feeling so strangely, so beautifully, during these last few days. He had called it by so many names — Sincerity, Simplicity, Beauty, the Classical Spirit, the Heroic Age — but none of these names had served, for it was made up of all these things, and, nevertheless, was none of them alone. He had wondered at this new impulse, almost, indeed, new knowledge; and yet scarcely new, because he felt as if he had known it all, the impulse and the vitality and the simplicity of it, some long time before.
And now that dance had made things clearer for him. It was something that he had done in other places, with other persons, many hundreds, nay, thousands of years ago; he had found his place in the golden chain that encircled the world. And so, of course, he did not wish to go back. He would never go back; he would never go to sleep again, and so he told Maradick.
“Well, I shall go,” said Maradick, and he led the way out of the crowd. Then Tony felt that he had been rude. After all, he had persuaded Maradick to come, and it was rather discourteous now to allow him to return alone.
“Perhaps,” he said regretfully, “it would be better. But it is such a splendid night, and one doesn’t get the chance of a game like that very often.”
“No,” said Maradick, “perhaps it’s as well. I don’t know what led me; and now I’m hot, dusty, beastly!”
“I say a drink,” said Tony. They had passed out of the market-place and were turning up the corner of the crooked street to their right. A little inn, the “Red Guard,” still showed light in its windows. The door flung open and two men came out, and, with them, the noise of other voices. Late though the hour was, trade was still being driven; it was the night of the year and all rules might be broken with impunity.
Maradick and Tony entered.
The doorway was low and the passage through which they passed thick with smoke and heavy with the smell of beer. The floor was rough and uneven, and the hissing gas, mistily hanging in obscure distance, was utterly insufficient. They groped their way, and at last, guided by voices, found the door of the taproom. This was very full indeed, and the air might have been cut with a knife. Somewhere in the smoky haze there was a song that gained, now and again, at chorus point, a ready assistance from the room at large.
Tony was delighted. “Why, it’s Shelley’s Inn!” he cried. “Oh! you know! where he had the bacon,” and he quoted: “‘. . . A Windsor chair, at a small round beechen table in a little dark room with a well-sanded floor.’ It’s just as though I’d been here before. What ripping chaps!”
There was a small table in a corner by the door, and they sat down and called for beer. The smoke was so thick that it was almost as though they had the room to themselves. Heads and boots and long sinewy arms appeared through the clouds and vanished again. Every now and again the opening of the door would send the smoke in whirling eddies down the room and the horizon would clear; then, in a moment, there was mist again.
“‘What would Miss Warne say?’” quoted Tony. “You know, it’s what Elizabeth Westbrook was always saying, the sister of Harriet; but poets bore you, don’t they? Only it’s a Shelley night somehow. He would have danced like anything. Isn’t this beer splendid? We must come here again.”
But Maradick was ill at ease. His great overwhelming desire was to get back, speedily, secretly, securely. He hated this smelly, smoky tavern. He had never been to such a place in his life, and he didn’t know why he had ever suffered Tony to lead him there. He was rather annoyed with Tony, to tell the truth. His perpetual enthusiasm was a trifle wearisome and he had advanced in his acquaintanceship with a rapidity that Maradick’s caution somewhat resented. And then there was a lack of scale that was a little humiliating. Maradick had started that evening with the air of one who confers a favour; now he felt that he was flung, in Tony’s brain, into the same basket with the old fisherman, the landlord of the “Red Guard,” and the other jovial fellows in the room. They were all “delightful,” “charming,” “the best company”; there was, he felt resentfully, no discrimination. The whole evening had been, perhaps, a mistake, and for the future he would be more careful.
And then suddenly he noticed that some one was sitting at their little table. It was strange that he had not seen him before, for the table was small and they were near the door. But he had been absorbed in his thoughts and his eyes had been turned away. A little man in brown sat at his side, quite silently, his eyes fixed on the window; he did not seem to have noticed their presence. His age might have been anything between forty and fifty, but he had a prosperous air as of one who had found life a pleasant affair and anything but a problem; a gentleman, Maradick concluded.
And then he suddenly looked up and caught Maradick’s gaze. He smiled. It was the most charming smile that Maradick had ever seen, something that lightened not only the face but the whole room, and something incredibly young and engaging. Tony caught the infection of it and smiled too. Maradick had no idea at the time that this meeting was, in any way, to be of importance to him; but he remembered afterwards every detail of it, and especially that beautiful sudden smile, the youth and frankness in it. In other days, when the moment had assumed an almost tragic importance in the light of after events, the picture was, perhaps, the most prominent background that he possessed; the misted, entangled light struck the little dark black table, the sanded floor, the highraftered ceiling: then there were the dark spaces beyond peopled with mysterious shapes and tumultuous with a hundred voices. And finally the quiet little man in brown.
“You have been watching the festival?” he said. There was something a little foreign in the poise and balance of the sentence; the English pronunciation was perfect? but the words were a little too distinct.
Maradick looked at him again. There was, perhaps, something foreign about his face — rather sallow, and his hair was of a raven blackness.
“Yes,” said Maradick. “It was most interesting. I have never seen anything quite like it before.”
“You followed it?” he asked.
“Yes.” Maradick hesitated a little.
“Rather!” Tony broke in; “we danced as well. I never had such fun. We’re up at the hotel there; we saw the lights and were tempted to come down, but we never expected anything like that. I wish there was another night of it.”
He was leaning back in his chair, his greatcoat flung open and his cap tilted at the back of his head. The stranger looked at him with appreciation.
“I’m glad you liked it. It’s the night for our little town, but it’s been kept more or less to ourselves. People don’t know about it, which is a good thing. You needn’t tell them or it will be ruined.”
“Our town.” Then the man belonged to the place. And yet he was surely not indigenous.
“It’s not new to you?” said Maradick tentatively.
“New! Oh! dear me, no!” the man laughed. “I belong here and have for many years past. At least it has been my background, as it were. You would be surprised at the amount that the place contains.”
“Oh, one can see that,” said Tony. “It has atmosphere more than any place I ever knew — medieval, and not ashamed of it, which is unusual for England.”
“We have been almost untouched,” said the other, “by all this modern
ising that is ruining England. We are exactly as we were five hundred years ago, in spite of the hotel. For the rest, Cornwall is being ruined. Look at Pendragon, Conister, and hundreds of places. But here we have our fair and our dance and our crooked houses, and are not ashamed.”
But Maradick had no desire to continue the conversation. He suddenly realised that he was very tired, sleepy — bed was the place, and this place with its chorus of sailors and smoke. . . . He finished his beer and rose.
“I’m afraid that we must be getting back,” he said. “It’s very late. I had no intention really of remaining as late.” He suddenly felt foolish, as though the other two were laughing at him. He felt strangely irritated.
“Of course,” he said to Tony, “it’s only myself. Don’t you hurry; but old bones, you know — —” He tried to carry it off with a laugh.
“Oh! I’m coming,” said Tony. “We said we’d be back by twelve, and we’ve got five minutes. So we’ll say good night, sir.”
He held out his hand to the man in brown. The stranger took out a card-case and handed his card.
“In case you would care to see round the place — there’s a good deal that I could show you. I should be very pleased at any time if you are making a lengthy stay; I shall be here for some months now, and am entirely at your service.”
He looked at Maradick as he spoke and smiled, but it was obviously Tony for whom the invitation was meant. Maradick felt absurdly out of it.
“Oh, thank you,” said Tony, “I should be awfully glad. I think that we shall be here some time; I will certainly come if I may.”
They smiled at each other, the stranger bowed, and they were once more in the cooler air.
Under the light of the lamp Tony read the card: —
“Mr. Andreas Morelli,
19 Trevenna Street, Treliss.”
“Ah! a foreigner, as I thought,” said Tony. “What an awfully nice man. Did you ever see such a smile?”