She had forgotten that she was not going to speak again. One word had leaped out at her from the letter that Daley read.
“Bergania”—it was more than two weeks since she had seen the travelogue, yet she found she could remember the film in detail. She could see the snowy mountain range with the central jagged peak, and the fir trees running up the slope toward them. She could see the river and the spire of the church where St. Aurelia was buried, and the palace. She could see the proud king on his horse and, as clearly as if she was there, the young prince in his troublesome helmet trying to blow the plumes out of his eyes.
“Why can’t we send anybody?” said Tally yet again. “The King of Bergania is very brave; he said no to Hitler.”
“Because,” said the headmaster patiently, “we have never done folk dancing here at Delderton and it is less than a month till the festival. And there are other reasons.”
“Just because we’ve never done it doesn’t mean we can’t do it. There’s probably a book about it; there’s a book about everything. It must be very difficult to stand up to Hitler. It wasn’t just that he said no about letting the troops go through his country, but he also won’t let Hitler dig up minerals in his mountains to use for armaments. And I know people like Tod think there shouldn’t be kings, but if there are and they’re brave and resolute then surely we should show them that we’re on their side.”
“I don’t see how it would help the Berganians if we went and did folk dancing all over them,” said one of the senior girls, “especially when we haven’t any idea how to do it.”
“It’s to do with just being there,” said Tally. “They invited us so they must want us to come, and refusing would be a snub.”
She looked around the room for support but no one seemed ready to back her up. Even her own friends were silent.
“Folk dancing’s silly,” said a boy with huge spectacles. “People wind ribbons around a pole and get tangled up.”
“Or they wear idiotic clothes — trousers with bells on them and bobbles on their hats,” said Ronald Peabody.
“Only sissies do folk dancing,” came Verity’s disdainful voice.
“Really?” The deep voice came from the back of the hall. Matteo had appeared to be asleep. “You surprise me.” He uncoiled himself and moved forward to the center of the room, and the children made way for him. “You surprise me very much.”
Everybody fell silent, watching him as he turned and faced the meeting.
“You might of course call the Falanian Indians sissy. Certainly they do a folk dance before they dismember their enemies and nail them to trees. There are even bells — or rather gongs — involved, though not, if I recall, ribbons. It takes an Indian child five years to learn the steps, and they are not allowed to take part in it till they can crunch up the skull of a jaguar with their bare hands.
“And there are the leopard hunters of Nepal. They do a folk dance to prepare themselves for the chase, which includes leaping over pits of burning cinders with a firebrand in their mouth. The steps go something like this.”
And without any warning Matteo leaped high into the air, seemed almost to hang there, and came down with a bloodcurdling howl about a foot away from David Prosser, who stepped back with an agitated squeak.
“I could give you more examples,” said Matteo, “but I just wanted to make the point that whatever folk dancing is, it’s not sissy.”
Daley shook his head. That Tally wanted the school to march to the help of the Berganians was to be expected — but he had not thought that Matteo would stab him in the back.
“I suggest you set up a working party to see if it can be done. You have one week to prepare a suitable dance.”
Nothing would happen in so short a time; Daley was sure of that.
CHAPTER TEN
The Flurry Dance
Tally was right. There was a book about folk dancing, several books in fact, but they were not very helpful.
“There’s Scottish dancing and maypole dancing and morris dancing,” she said.
But Scotland was a long way from Devon and they did not feel they had a right to pretend to be Scottish, and anyway the steps were difficult.
“Maypole dancing looks nice,” said Julia. “All those ribbons.”
But Barney said that disasters happened very easily with maypole dancing. In his village the vicar at the garden fête had been completely trussed up when one of the children had taken her ribbon in the wrong direction.
“He had to be cut out in the end,” Barney said.
So that left morris dancing, which was derived from the ancient sword dances of medieval England, only instead of swords the dancers had wooden sticks — and it was danced by men.
“Well, we can’t have only boys,” said Julia. “We’d never get enough.”
They had of course consulted Armelle, but she was so horrified at the idea of a dance that did not come spontaneously from inside the soul that she was not helpful at all.
“It says here that they hit each other with the sticks — they’re called staves — at least they bang them together and they flap at each other with handkerchiefs,” said Tally, looking at the book. “And they have bells on their ankles, rows and rows of bells, and more bells tied around their knees so that their trousers look baggy.”
“And they wear hats with flowers sewn onto them. There’s one dance called the Helston Flurry Dance, which is danced in Cornwall. Flurry means flowers,” said Tod. “It’s not exactly a morris dance, but it’s that kind of thing.”
He had at first wanted to have nothing to do with the trip to Bergania. The king who had said no to Hitler might be brave but he was still a king, and all kings belonged in dungeons — preferably with their heads chopped off. But when his friends all became involved he had joined in and put in some very useful work in the library.
“I don’t want to flap with my handkerchief,” said Kit, looking even more woebegone than usual.
“There’s one person who rides a sort of hobbyhorse through the dancers,” said Barney. “The Devil, they think. Or maybe the Fool. It’s a very old dance. ‘Full of antiquity,’ it says here.”
It certainly looked old from the few pictures they could find. Not only old but exceedingly odd.
“What about the music? ” asked Borro.
They went to consult the old professor who taught music and he said it would probably have been danced to pipes and tambours but perhaps a violin would do.
“Augusta’s got a violin,” said Tally. “I remember when she came.”
So they went to find Augusta, who was eating a banana and reading a detective story, and she said she could play the violin, but she couldn’t play it well.
“I don’t really like the noithe it maketh,” she said.
But she fetched it and played a slow tune full of double stops and they thought it would do if she could play it faster and maybe learn a more jigging sort of piece as well. Taking Augusta to Bergania would be complicated because of her only being able to eat so very few things.
“But if we stock up with bananas you’ll be all right, won’t you?” said Julia, and Augusta agreed that she probably would. She was really a very good-natured girl and they were glad she had come back from Wales.
“Of course, the other groups will probably have all sorts of instruments — an orchestra even — all those Swiss and Bavarian people in lederhosen slapping their thighs will be terribly good — but we can’t compete with them. All we want is to be there,” said Tally.
“I don’t,” said Kit. “I don’t want to be there.”
“We could always alter it a bit and make a Devon version,” Tally went on. “ ‘The Delderton Flurry Dance.’ ”