Dame Ceres first to break the earth with plough the manner found;
She first made corn and stover soft to grow upon the ground;
She first made laws…
Their eyes dart nervously from side to side. Their strange voices, imperfectly synchronised, are buffeted by the breeze; words blow and slip away. Carrefax conducts them from his seat, urging them to speak louder. Ceres/Amelia waves her hand vaguely in the direction of the pitchfork-wielding extras and they pull from their farmers’ robes golden confetti which they toss into the air; it billows up and flashes brightly, carrying far across the lawn. The audience “aahh!”s.
“Melissas,” Carrefax explains, to no one in particular. “Honey-silk harvest.”
“Dame Ceres looks like Mrs. Carrefax,” a random lady murmurs.
It’s true: Amelia’s hair is thick and brown. She has a languid look. Serge turns his head towards his mother, but his eye is caught by Widsun next to her, who’s making hand signs. He’s not using the vigorous language that his mother and Bodner sign in, but more surreptitious signals formed by simply opening and closing the fist that rests across his lap in bursts either long or short. His eyes are pointed at the stage, but his hand is facing Sophie, who’s kneeling six or seven yards away from him at her own post just off stage left, behind an array of phials and bottles lined up in a box (she gave up playing on-stage roles two years ago to take up the post of stage and special-effects manager), and using the same barely perceptible Morse to signal back at him.
Little round Giles is sent out from behind the sheet now, as a chubby Cupid whose bow-free hand is held firmly by his stage-mother Venus, in reality his older sister Charity. In a weird voice that seems to buzz, she starts charitably goading him, suggesting that while the powers on earth obey his “mighty hand” (chuckles from audience), he should expand his sphere of influence into the underworld and thus “advance thy empire.”
“That’s Bismarck talking to the Kaiser,” Widsun mumbles to Carrefax without breaking off his signals to his daughter.
Giles/Cupid takes a wooden, rubber-suction-pad-tipped arrow from a quiver slung across his shoulder; his sister/mother helps him place it in his bow and draw the string back. His hands fall away but hers have got the object firmly: with an elastic pyongg the arrow flies out, arcing above the Mulberry Lawn’s far edge and dropping out of sight among the undergrowth beside the stream.
“Now death itself’s infected by desire,” Carrefax explains.
There’s a pause. Performers and audience both look in the direction of the arrow, as though expecting something to emerge from where it fell. After a few seconds’ silence a sheep’s bleat carries to the lawn from Arcady Field. Everyone laughs.
“Let’s hope it didn’t hit one,” a man jokes, unnecessarily.
The extras have ditched their pitchforks behind the screen-sheet and returned carrying posts strung with twigs and foliage; they plant these in a semi-circle, then, unfolding a round, green silk lying at their feet, create the semblance of a pond. Sophie creeps in to give the pond some shape, smoothing its edges into place before slinking back to her post. The chorus chant:
Near Enna walls there stands a lake; Pergusa is the name.
Caïster heareth not more songs of swans than doth the same.
A wood environs every side the water round about
And with his leaves as with a veil doth keep the sun-heat out.
“I’d rather he let it in,” says the same man mock-shivering, emboldened by, or perhaps trying to make amends for, his last interjection.
“How does a wood shade ‘as without fail’?” asks Widsun.
“No: ‘with a veil,’ ” Carrefax tells him. “The leaves are like a veil.”
Now it’s the heroine’s turn to enter. Bethany, a year younger than Serge, emerges from behind the sheet and glides around the stage gathering flowers from beneath other silks. The chorus continue:
While in this garden Proserpine was taking her pastime
In gathering either violets blue or lilies white as lime,
And while of maidenly desire she filled her maund and lap,
Endeavouring to outgather…
“Proserpine?” asks a lady in the second or third row.
“Persephone: her Latin name,” explains Carrefax.
Sophie’s hidden so many flowers among the silks that Bethany ’s filled maund, lap and both underarms and is basically pretty outgathered.
“Should’ve kept Bodger’s wheelbarrow at hand,” Widsun says to Carrefax.
“Dis is about to enter in his chariot,” Carrefax warns him, turning towards the second-or-third-row lady as he adds: “That’s Pluto. Hades.”
The chorus, echoing Carrefax in more metered language, announce Dis’s imminent arrival. But no Dis arrives. Tense whispers leak out from behind the sheet. The audience shuffles.
“That’s the problem with chariots,” Widsun comments to the gathering at large. “You have to crank the buggers up for ages.”
Sophie giggles, then disappears behind the sheet to see what’s happening. A few seconds later Dis is drawn out onto the lawn by human horses in a chariot whose gramophone-disc wheels and wooden pistons float above the ground as though borne on cushions of air.
“Dis must be the fellow!” Widsun announces.
Sophie squeals with laughter. Dis drives his chariot past Bethany/Proserpine and wraps his arm around her waist. She throws her flowers away, lets slip an elastic girdle she’s wearing and climbs on board, taking care to step over the pistons.
“Not all that reluctant,” another random lady, or perhaps the previous one, ventures.
Dis drives Proserpine around the stage two or three times until they come to a new silk-lake that, with a little help, emerges from the floor. This one’s bright blue and made of strips that, shaken from both ends by extras, give a passable impression of rippling water. A nymph surfaces from among these; the chorus explain that this is Cyan, and that her lake is an agglomeration of other bodies of water known as
… the Palick pools, the which from broken ground do boil
And smell of brimstone very rank…
This is Sophie’s cue to uncork one of the test tubes lying at her feet and pour its contents into a large conical flask resting beside it. Almost immediately, vapour fills the flask and oozes from its neck into the air, where the breeze catches it and paints a thin trail above the grass. Sophie picks the flask up and runs to the far side of the stage so as to be upwind of the audience. The vapour threads its way among them; it’s rank all right. They start to cough; handkerchiefs and gloves come up to noses. Gasps of “Poo!” and “Christ!” waft from the chairs. But Sophie’s not done yet. She scurries back to her effects box, uncorks another phial and pours another batch of liquid into a large crucible. Smoke pours from this. Carrying it to the centre of the stage, she sets it down in the middle of Cyan’s lake. It billows and gushes smoke, as though it had a fake bottom and concealed below it, underneath the lawn, were a whole factory of stoves and ovens. Dis, Proserpine, Cyan and the lake-rippling extras screw their eyes and wave their arms, overwhelmed. The chorus wince and stare on in alarm.
“Carry on!” shouts Carrefax. “ ‘The ground…’ ”