Begg said, “I’d almost forgotten the hot pitch. Queer sort of caper when you come to think of it. Chasing the lovely ladies and dabbing hot tar on ’em. Funny thing is, they don’t run away as fast as all that, either.”
“Padstow ’Oss,” observed Chris, “or so I’ve ’eard tell, catches ’em up and overlays ’em like a candle-snuff.”
“ ’Eathen licentiousness,” rejoined his father, “and no gear for us chaps, so doan’t you think of trying it on, Simmy-Dick.”
“Guiser,” Ralph said, “you’re superb. Isn’t the whole thing heathen?”
“No, it bean’t, then. It’s right and proper when it’s done proper and proper-done by us it’s going to be.”
“All the same,” Simon Begg said, “I wouldn’t mind twenty seconds under the old tar barrel with that very snappy little job you introduced to us to-night, Guiser.”
Ernie guffawed and was instantly slapped down by his father. “You hold your noise. No way to conduct yourself when the maid’s your niece. You should be all fiery hot in ’er defence.”
“Yes, indeed,” Ralph said quietly.
Begg looked curiously at him. “Sorry, old man,” he said. “No offence. Only a passing thought and all that. Let’s change the subject: when are you going to let us have that smithy, Guiser?”
“Never. And you might as well make up your mind to it. Never.”
“Obstinate old dog, isn’t he?” Begg said at large.
Dan, Chris and the twins glanced uncomfortably at their father.
Dan said, “Us chaps are favourable disposed as we’re mentioned, Simmy-Dick, but the Dad won’t listen to us, no more than to you.”
“Look, Dad,” Chris said earnestly, “it’d be in the family still. We know there’s a main road going through in the near future. We know a service station’d be a little gold mine yur on the cross-roads. We know the company’d be behind us. I’ve seen the letters that’s been wrote. We can still have the smithy. Simmy-Dick can run the servicing side on his own to begin with. Ernie can help. Look, it’s cast-iron — certain-sure.” He turned to Ralph. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
Before Ralph could answer, Ernie paused in his whiffling and suddenly roared out, “I’d let you ’ave it, Wing-Commander, sir. So I would, too.”
The Guiser opened his mouth in anger, but, before he could speak, Dan said, “We here to practice or not? Come on, chaps. One more dash at the last figure. Strike up for us, Dad.”
The five brothers moved out into the middle of the floor. The Guiser, muttering to himself, laid the fiddle across his knees and scraped a preliminary call-in.
In a moment they were at it again. Down thumped their boots striking at the floor and up bounced the clouds of dust.
And outside in the snow, tied up with scarves, her hand-woven cloak enveloping her, head and all, Mrs. Bünz peered through a little cobwebby window, ecstatically noting the steps and taking down the tunes.
Chapter III
Preparation
All through the following week snow and frost kept up their antiphonal ceremony. The two Mardians were mentioned in the press and on the air as being the coldest spots in England.
Up at the castle, Dame Alice gave some hot-tempered orders to what remained nowadays of her staff: a cook, a house parlourmaid, a cleaning woman, a truculent gardener and his boy. All of them except the boy were extremely old. Preparations were to be put in hand for the first Wednesday evening following the twenty-first of December. A sort of hot-cider punch must be brewed in the boiler house. Cakes of a traditional kind must be baked. The snow must be cleared away in the courtyard and stakes planted to which torches would subsequently be tied. A bonfire must be built. Her servants made a show of listening to Dame Alice and then set about these preparations in their own fashion. Miss Mardian sighed and may have thought all the disturbance a bit of a bore but took it, as did everybody else in the village, as a complete matter of course. “Sword Wednesday,” as the date of the Dance of the Five Sons was sometimes called, made very little more stir than Harvest Festival in the two Mardians.
Mrs. Bünz and Camilla Campion stayed on at the Green Man. Camilla was seen to speak in a friendly fashion to Mrs. Bünz, towards whom Trixie also maintained an agreeable manner. The landlord, an easy man, was understood to be glad enough of her custom, and to be charging her a pretty tidy sum for it. It was learned that her car had broken down and the roads were too bad for it to be towed to Simon Begg’s garage, an establishment that advertised itself as “Simmy-Dick’s Service Station.” It was situated at Yowford, a mile beyond East Mardian, and was believed to be doing not too well. It was common knowledge that Simon Begg wanted to convert Copse Forge into a garage and that the Guiser wouldn’t hear of it.
Evening practices continued in the barn. In the bedrooms of the pub the thumping boots, jingling bells and tripping insistences of the fiddle could be clearly heard. Mrs. Bünz had developed a strong vein of cunning. She would linger in the bar-parlour, sip her cider and write her voluminous diary. The thumps and the scraps of fiddling would tantalize her almost beyond endurance. She would wait for at least ten minutes and then stifle a yawn, excuse herself and ostensibly go upstairs to bed. She had, however, discovered a backstairs by which, a few minutes later, she would secretly descend, a perfect mountain of hand-weaving, and let herself out by a side door into a yard. From here a terribly slippery brick path led directly to the near end of the barn which the landlord used as a storeroom.
Mrs. Bünz’s spying window was partly sheltered by overhanging thatch. She had managed to clean it a little. Here, shuddering with cold and excitement, she stood, night after night, making voluminous notes with frozen fingers.
From this exercise she derived only modified rapture. Peering through the glass which was continually misted over by her breath, she looked through the storeroom and its inner doorway into the barn proper. Her view of the dancing was thus maddeningly limited. The Andersen brothers would appear in flashes. Now they would be out of her range, now momentarily within it. Sometimes the Guiser, or Dr. Utterly or the Hobby-Horse would stand in the doorway and obstruct her view. It was extremely frustrating.
She gradually discovered that there was more than one dance. There was a Morris, for which the men wore bells that jangled most provocatively, and there was also sword-dancing, which was part of a mime or play. And there was one passage of this dance-play which was always to be seen. This was when the Guiser, in his role of Fool, or Old Man, put his head in the knot of swords. The Five Sons were grouped about him, the Betty and the Hobby-Horse were close behind. At this juncture, it was clear that the Old Man spoke. There was some fragment of dialogue, miraculously preserved, perhaps, from Heaven knew what ancient source. Mrs. Bünz saw his lips move, always at the same point and always, she was certain, to the same effect. Really, she would have given anything in her power to hear what he said.
She learnt quite a lot about the dance-play. She found that, after the Guiser had acted out his mock decapitation, the Sons danced again and the Betty and Hobby-Horse improvised. Sometimes the Hobby-Horse would come prancing and shuffling into the storeroom quite close to her. It was strange to see the iron beak-like mouth snap and bite the air on the other side of the window. Sometimes the Betty would come in, and the great barrel-like dress would brush up clouds of dust from the storeroom floor. But always the Sons danced again and, at a fixed point, the Guiser rose up as if resurrected. It was on this “act,” evidently, that the whole thing ended.
After the practice they would all return to the pub. Once, Mrs. Bünz denied herself the pleasures of her peep show in order to linger as unobtrusively as possible in the bar-parlour. She hoped that, pleasantly flushed with exercise, the dancers would talk of their craft. But this ruse was a dead failure. The men at first did indeed talk, loudly and freely at the far end of the Public, but they all spoke together and Mrs. Bünz found the Andersens’ dialect exceedingly difficult. She thought that Trixie must have indicated her presence because they were all suddenly quiet. Then Trixie, always pleasant, came through and asked her if she wanted anything further that evening in such a definite sort of way that somehow even Mrs. Bünz felt impelled to get up and go. Then Mrs. Bünz had what she hoped at the time might be a stroke of luck.