As the moon moved to her appointed throne and shone there resplendent and worshipable, the leader gave a long wolf howl and broke into a pantomime of dreadful activity. The horned crowd opened out into a ritual dance, stamping round him to the accompaniment of a rhythmic rattling that was continuous and unnerving. It suggested rudimentary instruments such as tambourines and ‘the bones.’ It suggested also pursuit and death and the rattle of dry reed beds. The movements and gestures of the dancers were only less frightful than those of the leader, who was a genius in horror. They had a dramatic but inexplicable compulsion. The white-faced children felt that their limbs twitched and stamped of their own accord, that they could not keep out of it. This lasted until the moon had passed over, and was reigning, gloriously independent, in her sky. Then the dancers slipped the deerskin off their heads, wearing them like capes, and whirling round they charged – as it seemed to the children – straight at them, as if they had only waited for the end of their ritual to take vengeance on the intruders. They came within a spear’s length – but passed straight on, making for the river bank. In that dreadful moment the children saw at close quarters the savage faces painted in black and white stripes, the hands painted red. They saw too, glinting in the cold light, the cause of that skeletal rattling, for every hunter wore round his neck strings of tusks, or horns, or teeth which knocked together as they swung to his movements. It was not a sound that could travel far, but the chatter of dead teeth must have come as the first warning of danger to nervous ears waking out of sleep in the marshlands.
The hunters streamed by the children, almost jostling them, but as the leaders had passed them unnoticed, so did all the rest, like a herd of animals. They boarded canoes that from the sound of it were hidden in the rushes near at hand. Their rapid paddle strokes drove through the water, where the moorhens fled with loud midnight cries, and the wild duck wheeled into flight with half-breathed clucks of alarm.
The children cautiously parted the leaves and crept out from their hiding-place. They looked down the river hoping to see the craft with its standing crew. But the moon had now met the shoal of cloud and passed behind it, so that from one moment to the next everything became dim and shadowy. A cold shudder of wind blew on the backs of their necks and ears, and rustled the balancing surface of blade and leaf along the river’s edge and across the wide meadows. They were standing at midnight, alone, under a sky that was there before either earth or moon had been, and would be there long after. In this agonizing second of revelation that all passes, the bark of a disturbed heron caused them to clutch each other, and jerked loose their tongues.
‘Where can we go?’ asked Ida. ‘Where is there for us to go to, now?’
‘I suppose we could just look in that – that wattle … place,’ said Ping, for once hesitant.
‘We’ve got the busman hermit for company. He’s been wherever this is, once,’ said Oskar. ‘I mean whenever this is. But I don’t want to go on the river. It’s too much. We are really displaced now.’ Yet they turned instinctively towards the house – ‘that wattle place’, as Ping called it. Because where else? Above its obscure silhouette the cloud was outlined with silver on its upper edge, where suddenly a dazzling diamond white segment appeared, and the moon came out. She dropped the cloud from about her, and round and brilliant as a singing note she hung in the centre of the sky.
Under her lovely light Green Knowe was revealed again, gentle, heavy and dreaming, with its carefully spaced bushes and trees standing in their known positions enriched with moonlight on their heads and shadows like the folds of Cinderella’s ball dress behind them.
The children gasped with joy and relief, and slowly, taking in, holding, and keeping what they saw, they moved towards home. They all three slept in one bed that night. Because, as Oskar had said, it was too much. As Ping wriggled himself into the little space allotted to him between Ida and Oskar, his last words were: ‘They had as many beads as Miss Sybilla.’ And he laughed to himself.
*
‘AUNT MAUD,’ said Ida (by arrangement with the others), as she helped herself to cereals, ‘have there ever been wickerwork cathedrals? I mean, in the Stone Age.’ She spoke casually, as one might ask: ‘Did they eat honey?’
Dr Biggin put a spoonful in her mouth while she turned over a page, and then answered rather mouthily: ‘There are some still, in places like Borneo and the Persian Gulf. Or were till the other day. Nowadays civilization moves so fast you can’t travel fast enough to keep up with it. The only thing anyone can say for certain is, it was there yesterday, if they haven’t pulled it down since.’
‘Oh! Might they be as big as this house?’
‘They couldn’t be as big, but they might look it, because of being so much bigger than anything else around. They look the biggest house you can think of. And they are, because you couldn’t possibly make anything bigger out of the material.’
‘Oh!’ said Ida again meekly. ‘Thank you.’
‘Do Stone Age people worship the moon?’ she ventured again a little later on.
‘Eh? How should I know! Very probably. Goddess of the Chase and patroness of fishes.’
Miss Sybilla burst unexpectedly into the discussion. Rattling her beads with excitement and looking rather pink, she recited:
Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun has gone to sleep,
Seated on thy silver chair
State in wonted splendour keep.
She smacked her lips.
Oskar and Ping looked at her as at an oracle.
‘Seated on thy silver chair,’ repeated Ping softly. And Oskar continued: ‘State in wonted splendour keep.’
Miss Sybilla blushed crimson at their appreciation. ‘Don’t you know that poem, Ida?’
‘Yes, Aunt Sybilla. It goes on about Goddess excellently bright. I like it. Excellently bright sounds sharp, like scissors. As if the Moon was cutting the sky.’
‘You’ve all been sleeping with the moon on your pillows,’ said Dr Biggin. ‘You too, Sybilla. I never knew you were poetical.’
‘It was so romantic last night. It made me feel quite … What shall I say? Quite wild. I wanted to dance on the lawns.’
Dr Maud, for want of any other woman to wink at, winked at Ida. But the children were not laughing. They looked at fat Sybilla Bun and her beads, with eyes full of questioning astonishment.
*
IT IS NOT TO BE expected that every day of the holidays will be filled with such adventures. Ida, Oskar and Ping were never at a loss and never bored. Many pleasant ordinary things can be done a second time, though they are never twice alike. The really extraordinary things can never be repeated.
One day, near the end of their time, Ping came back from the village where he had been with Miss Sybilla to carry her basket for her to the bus stop. He had been away a long time, while Ida and Oskar had been kicking their heels waiting to start out until he should come back. He was very excited and could not get his news told.
‘What an age you have been,’ said Ida.
‘I know. I’ve done a lot in the time. There’s going to be a Circus at Penny Sokey.’
‘Well, we shan’t be here to go to it. Hurry up, it’s our last day on the river.’
Ping began again, refusing to budge even when pushed.
‘I saw the posters in the shop. It begins tonight, so we could go. The posters say – Ida! You are not listening.’
‘You can tell us on the way,’ said Ida walking off with Oskar full tilt towards the boathouse.
Ping caught up and danced along backward ahead of them to make them listen.
‘It’s exciting. It’s important. The poster says:
GREAT NEW STAR TURN
TERAK THE GIANT.’
‘What!’ Ida and Oskar plonked everything they were carrying and stood stock still.
‘He’s done it,’ said Ping. ‘He’s a clown. We must take Dr Biggin and let her see him. I have been helping at the shop, unloading a van ful
l of boxes. That’s why I was so long. I have got some money. They say they are short-handed, so if we all go back and help we can make enough to invite Dr Biggin to the circus as a Thank You. Then she will have to come.’
Ping was quite right in his understanding of Dr Biggin’s mind. She was not very interested in circuses except as survivals – very degenerate of course – of circuses and games long past. But she appreciated gratitude, and as the children had invited her she accepted. She was, besides, in a high good humour. Ida had been measured for the last time and had grown three-quarters of an inch. Miss Sybilla, of course, had said it was nothing to do with those silly old grass seeds. It was the Good Food the child had had and plenty of fresh air. The two ladies had wrangled and back-bitten on the subject, with the result that Miss Sybilla had refused to come to the circus, giving as her reason that she couldn’t bear to see a horrid man bullying the poor helpless tigers. Which was a funny way of looking at it but quite true. Oskar understood. The tigers stood for his fearless father, overpowered, imprisoned and angry.
They hired a second canoe to take Dr Biggin and Ida. She proved to be a powerful canoeist. As she paddled, she made wild noises, which she said she had heard savages do to keep the beat, on her voyages of exploration. Only, she said, they stood up to paddle. Oskar and Ping had been sitting in their canoe, because they thought it was to be a sedate grown-up excursion. They now accepted the challenge and stood to paddle, for of course Ping had been practising this too. Dr Biggin urged them on with short barking shouts and the two canoes raced neck and neck. It was a wonder Oskar and Ping did not take a double header into the water. Dr Biggin did not care whether they did or not, which is probably why it did not happen. They began to wish she had been with them on the river all the time. It was stimulating to be with someone who was always thinking of jungles or marshes, who when she shouted: ‘Paddle, boys!’ might be addressing pigmies or South American Indians. They felt guiltily that they had underrated her company. Ping remembered the yellow cat that had been lying along a branch over their heads and that reminded him of a tiger. He felt that if Dr Biggin had been with them, it would have been a real one.
However, after a while she roared out: ‘Take it easy, boys. I’m an old woman,’ and got out her cigarettes. Ida and the boys paddled along till they came to the wide water-meadows. At the far end they could see the roof of the Big Top, surrounded by swings, tractors, trucks and caravans of every sort.
Dr Biggin, between puffs, said she liked tents. ‘I have no doubt tents go back nearly as far as wattle. As far behind my civilized giants as they are behind us. And that’s a thought! Right back. And funny men too. As soon as there were three men, one of them was a funny man.’
‘Why are funny men always little?’ said Ida, who couldn’t keep her mouth shut any longer. ‘What if one of them was a Giant?’ Three pairs of eyes met in an electric flicker of excitement, for Maud Biggin had as yet no idea what she was to see. She merely grunted at Ida’s childishness, too foolish to need an answer. The children, however, were as pleased as if she had exclaimed: ‘I would give my eyes to see a giant just once.’ They knew she would soon grunt to a different tune.
As they drew nearer to the Circus, a noise as savage and primitive as anyone could imagine travelled to meet them along the water. Several steam organs were playing different tunes of giant loudness. The din seemed to tear one ear away from the other. It was painful but intensely exciting. Mixed in with the strident clashing tunes, and the babel of men yelling the attractions of their swings or coconut shies, were occasional angry jungle roars and sinister cat-fight snarls. Quietly detached from all this, walking in single file towards them across the meadow was a man leading three elephants. The children thought they were coming for a drink and were delighted at getting a preview at close quarters. They paddled nearer to the elephants, but the keeper shouted and waved his arms, and Dr Biggin rapped out: ‘Lay in to the far bank!’ There they held on to the willow branches and watched while the elephants, squealing like pigs, took to the water, making as they submerged their great bodies, waves that would have capsized the canoes. This, of course, was the best jungle scene the children had ever had, and their imaginations were so fired they almost managed not to hear the din from the circus ground. The elephants lolled and rolled slowly about in the water all ways up. Sometimes nothing showed but the big rounds of their feet, sometimes the pointed domes of their foreheads or backs stuck up like rocks washed with muddy ripples, and disappeared again. Or the great island of their barrel sides divided the stream with water running off it all round as if off a hillside. Once quite near the canoe a snorkel trunk-end came up near Ida, tumbling in the air like a laughing mouth without a face, followed later by a flat wrinkled drift of sideface, out of which a small humorous eye opened, saw her, winked and submerged again, while the canoe rocked with the backwash of huge but soft displacement of water. When the keeper called, the elephants like children who obey but only just, slowly drew to the bank, squirting their backs as they waded out, then rolling in the mud again so that they had to have a second wash. They set off then in single file back to their job, frisking their comic tails and vigorously swinging their trunks. By this time crowds of children were running up from the circus ground, some luckier than others with buns to offer, which the elephants took from their hands in passing with no sign of gratitude except the smile they sucked in with the bun.
In the distance a drum began booming while a man yelled into a megaphone: ‘Walk up! Walk up!’
They hurried downstream towards the mooring place, passing the caravans and trailers, among which Oskar noticed a truck with a hooped roof of new canvas, extra high.
‘Look!’ he said, pointing. Ida and Ping, who in the excitement of the elephants and the circus in general had momentarily forgotten what they had come specially to see, gasped with a sudden rush of joy. ‘That must be his!’ From this moment they were all agog. They moored the canoe and leapt out, urging Dr Biggin to hurry. She looked at them quizzically as if to say she didn’t know they were such babies. But all she actually said, bringing out a tin from her pocket, was: ‘Have a bull’s-eye. They calm the nerves.’
They had good seats by the ring, and sat there listening to the creaking ropes and the flapping of the ornamental scallops round the tiers of the roof, and the hubbub of people coming in, until the band began to play inside and drowned everything else.
When the show opened with an inrush of clowns the children were positively sparking with excitement. One after another the clowns cart-wheeled or somersaulted in, yelling ‘Hola!’ and tripping up on their trousers. But they were all midgets or little men, and before they had run out the horses were there, plumed, reined-in, with round eyes and flaring nostrils, manoeuvring without riders, scattering sawdust and foam as they tossed and pirouetted. Next, at a steamroller’s pace, the elephants came on. They struck Ida as noble, wise, gentle and merry – intelligent enough to do anything. But all that their trainers had been able to think of was to make them stand on their heads on low wooden stools. It was a sad thing to see. Afterwards the biggest one was covered with a cloth painted like a bus. It stopped by a toy bus stop, and all the clowns clambered or sprang on to its back, clutching each other by the seat of the trousers or the ears or neckties till all were on somehow. The last, before leaping on, pulled the elephant’s tail on which was a bell, to set it in motion. It lumbered out holding a motor horn in its trunk and tooting as it went. These and other amusements, though they made the children laugh with everyone else, were not enough to quieten their fierce impatience for Terak. Ida who had done theatricals at school knew that he couldn’t have had more than a few days to rehearse in. Perhaps he would only be a side show – 5p to see the Giant. And they had no money left. It was a thought that spoiled several turns for her, including some Chinese acrobats who were sending Ping into a trance of approval as they flew through the air and landed as lightly as birds on each other’s shoulders. The horses came in again, and the
n the lions. Turn after turn and still no Terak. There was the man who stands on a rolling ball, balances a chair by one leg on his forehead and invites his lady friend in tights to climb up him and sit in it. It was all done so slowly and so carefully the children were mad with impatience.
At last the clowns ran in chattering like monkeys that are frightened, and pointing backwards to the entrance passage. The children saw Terak first, leaping to their feet, waving and shouting: ‘There he is!’ Their voices were drowned in the general clamour of surprise.
The Children of Green Knowe Collection Page 21