Mrs Pentatuke ignored him. She was listening intently as if to some far distant but immensely significant sound. The other woman made one of her hands into a claw and cackled a little self-consciously.
The man moved nearer to Mrs Pentatuke. She remained preoccupied, her head half-turned away, absolutely still. He leaned forward and sniffed carefully once, twice, three times, then looked at the woman in the woollen drawers and nodded over his shoulder to indicate Mrs Pentatuke.
“Flying tonight, is she?”
The fat woman scowled. “Don’t be sarcastic,” she said. She waddled away towards the fire.
The man shrugged and helped himself to a drink. Mrs Pentatuke remained in an attitude of entranced abstraction. The man raised the family-sized coffee cup in which he had ladled up his liquor.
“Hell fetch the Synod,” he murmured with the rapidity of established habit, then, more feelingly: “And boil the Unreverend William Harness in cat vomit and give Bertha Pollock the whistling piles!”
“Hush!” whispered Mrs Pentatuke, snatching off her glasses to hear better.
There reached them, above the panting of the fire-leaping celebrants and the flat, monotonous accompaniment of the “Handkerchief Dance”, a strange lowing noise. It was rather like the plaint of a great bull, far off but full of menace.
The sound ceased for several seconds, then came again. This time, seemingly, from a slightly nearer point. It was hot quite a bellow, yet more urgent than a moan.
Mrs Pentatuke replaced her spectacles and pressed her hands together.
“The Master!”
Adjudging her now almost cataleptic with expectancy, the man beside her reached out with his free hand and, without interrupting the steady downing of his drink, amiably patted and lifted those parts of her person that seemed to him most deserving of commendation. Mrs Pentatuke offered no objection; but nor did she in the slightest degree respond. After a while, he turned his back on her and took another cupful of liquor. This he drank in large, hurried swallows as if in anticipation of imminent drought. He did not appear to enjoy it much.
Three or four others staggered up to the improvised bar. They leaned hands on knees long enough to regain their breath and then, chattering and giggling in admiration of the novelties among the cups, jugs and goblets, snatched their own choices and filled them at the bucket.
One was a Toby jug in the likeness of a winking clergyman with an enormous strawberry nose. Another represented a huge frog; a third, a lady with one breast too many and a head too few. At the bottom of a fourth there lurked to astound the unaware toper a beautifully executed glazed earthenware dog’s turd, very lifelike.
“A hundred and sixty-nine!” Mrs Pentatuke suddenly called out.
“Thirteen and thirteen and thirteen!” cried a man with a pernickety, high-pitched voice. He wore a deep helmet of dark felt, rather like a woman’s cloche hat, to which small horns had been stitched. The helmet was pulled down to mask the upper part of his face and was pierced with eye holes.
“And ten thirteens again!” added a bouncy, chinless woman with pince-nez and a habit of good-humouredly emphasizing everything she said by hugging whoever happened to be nearest to hand. Her sole garment, a short fur coat, undulated glossily over several gallons of friendly bosom.
“A coven of covens!”
This neatly expressed summary of their arithmetic was contributed by the woman who had sorted out the pot frog. Whilst not underdressed so radically as her companions, she presented an appearance that in its own special way was much more alarming. Buttoned boots protruded from beneath a black skirt that draped the narrow, bony-looking figure from waist to ankles. The upper part of her body was encased in an archaic black corset, from which the thin, very white shoulders and arms emerged like potato shoots. A black straw toque hat of the kind considered de rigueur by Victorian widows, was perched upon her head. Of her face, nothing could be seen, for drawn down all round the toque and knotted beneath the woman’s chin was a black veil of so close and opaque a weave that only where it was stretched tightly against the skin could an underlying pallor be discerned. The most curious, and disconcerting, thing about this veil was the woman’s election to drink directly through it, rather than raise it above her mouth. There resulted the impression of a frog trying to nuzzle its way into a black tent.
Some more dancers arrived for refreshment. There now was a decidedly festive air about the assembly.
A woman with a big, loose straw hat tipped over one eye and a pullover tied about her middle seized the bearded and masked man and charged him round and round in a private, frantic waltz.
Mrs Pentatuke’s earlier companion, the woman who had taken amiss the remark about flying, was back again; she and the recorder player, now partly undressed and presumably enjoying an intermission, had the pot of savoury-smelling ointment between them and were rubbing each other vigorously and with squeals of gratification.
A series of painfully ruptured harmonics, repeated persistently, proclaimed that the recorder had fallen into less instructed hands. The drum, too, was being much abused somewhere.
Mrs Pentatuke helped herself to more drink. The level in the bucket had fallen by several inches. She drained the mug in two eager gulps and pushed away the scraggy man in shorts who had blundered into her and was short-sightedly scrutinizing her beads, which he fed through his fingers like ticker-tape.
From much nearer than before and at greater volume came repetition of the bellowing sound.
Mrs Pentatuke stared into the dark and thrust out her arms.
“Master! Apollyon!”
Those near her fell silent. All looked towards the source of the noise, which, a few seconds later, was repeated. It sounded very like a foghorn.
One of the other women called tipsily: “Coo-ee!”
The bearded man frowned at her and made a quick gesture of prohibition with his hand. Then he got down on his knees.
So did the woman with the squint. She swayed slightly and steadied herself by squatting back on the heels of her thick shoes.
The horn boomed again. Somewhere a woman was weeping and laughing in turns. The dancing had stopped altogether. Every now and then the glow of the fire embers was blotted out as somebody moved cautiously past. Men and women seemed to be feeling their way to form a crescent-shaped assembly with the invisible horn blower at its focal point.
“Asmodeus!” A man’s voice, loud but plummily genteel like that of a bank manager playing a robber in amateur dramatics.
“Asmodeus!” “Asmodeus!” Some of the chorus sounded uncomfortably self-conscious, but others—mostly women—vied in the expression of fervour.