The rehearsal in the afternoon was a success, though tiring to all who
took part in it.
Gladys, useless as housemaid or cook, showed that there was something
she could do really well when she was turned into a messenger. Released
quite unexpectedly from duties she detested, she sped joyfully round
the village, summoning performers to the mouth of the cave at three
o'clock. Her excited account of the ladies and gentlemen who had come
from London to organise the pageant, roused fresh interest in an affair
which the people were beginning to find a little tiresome.
Gladys did more than summon the performers. She summoned everyone
else too, insisting that the whole village should turn out. She even
gave, in the name of the vicar, a totally unauthorised order to the
schoolmaster that the children should be released an hour before the
proper time. The schoolmaster knew quite well that the vicar had sent
no such message; and would have acted without authority if he had;
but he wanted to see the rehearsal himself, so he pretended to believe
Gladys. In this he showed not only self-indulgence but wisdom. It was
doubtful whether he could have kept the children in school if he had
wanted to.
Mrs. Eames's arrangements had been carefully made, and the great scene
thoroughly thought out. Old Bunce's boat, representing the lugger, lay
a hundred yards off the mouth of the cave. At the oars sat eight of the
steadiest and most reliable men in the village, chosen to be the crew
of the lugger on the day of the performance. With these men there was
no trouble at all. They took the business seriously and were ready to
do exactly as Mrs. Eames bade them. They sat, over their outstretched
oars, ready to pull to the shore the moment the signal was given.
Tommy Whittle and his mentally deficient brother were the signallers.
At the actual performance they were to light a flare on top of the
church tower. At rehearsal they merely waved a flag from the churchyard
wall. The lighting of flares in broad daylight would have been
foolishly wasteful, and they could not get into the tower, even for
purposes of rehearsal, because the vicar kept all the church doors
locked. Their part was clear, and Tommy thoroughly understood it. His
brother, in spite of his feebleness of mind, was quite capable of doing
what he was told. Indeed he was more likely to obey orders literally
and swiftly than a man who could think for himself; which shows that it
is a mistake to develop the intelligence of soldiers, trade unionists,
the rank and file of political parties, and others who depend on
discipline for their efficiency.
On the green beside the boat haven, where the nets were dried and
the geese paraded, it was arranged that eight pack horses should
stand ready to be loaded with smuggled goods. Each horse was to be in
charge of two girls. This was perhaps not strictly in accordance with
historical precedent, but Mrs. Eames felt that some female parts were
required and the holding of the heads of pack horses seemed the most
suitable thing for girls to do. Only one horse could be secured for the
rehearsals, so the sixteen girls took it in turn to hold the creature.
On the occasion of the great rehearsal summoned by Gladys the whole
sixteen girls turned out and argued fiercely, each pair alleging that
it was their turn to hold the horse. Mrs. Eames's first duty, when
she came down with her party from the vicarage, was to settle this
dispute, a very difficult thing, for the mothers of the girls were
all there eager to support their daughters' cause. This made a total
of twenty-eight women (four mothers had two daughters each), who
all talked at once and loudly. Perhaps only Mrs. Eames among living
Englishwomen could have talked down so many competitors. The horse
itself, an elderly wise beast, strolled about the green, nibbling at
the grass. It would have been there when wanted even if no girl had
held its head. Village maidens, when intent on claiming their rights,
are voluble. Their mothers, having had more practice, talk even more
and faster. All, mothers and daughters, talked at once. Sir Evelyn,
who walked with Mrs. Eames at the head of the party from the vicarage,
looked hopelessly at the turmoil. Jimmy and the two girls stopped at
the edge of the green, waiting to see how Mrs. Eames would deal with
the situation. Her plan was simple. She talked faster, louder and with
shorter pauses for breath than anyone else. One by one the girls were
battered into silence by a hailstorm of words. One by one their mothers
gave up the unequal contest. Then Mrs. Eames selected two girls to hold
the horse, and, by way of compensation for disappointment, promised
that a little later Mary Lambert would teach them all the proper way to
do it, the way proper to the occasion, the way horses are held on the
stage.
"Miss Lambert," said Mrs. Eames, "is a real actress, and she knows all
about pageants and exactly how things ought to be done. As soon as the
rehearsal is over you shall all come back here and she'll show you."
Mary Lambert had never held a horse in her life on or off the stage.
She said so to Mrs. Eames in an appealing whisper.
"Or if she doesn't teach you that," said Mrs. Eames, "she'll teach you
something else quite as nice. But you must keep quiet now and let me
get on with the rehearsal. What will you teach them, Mary?"
"I'll teach them to dance," she said. "I'll teach them my Nautch Girl
dance. It's tremendously fetching and they'll be able to learn their
part quite easily. You'll be able to fit it in somewhere, won't you,
Mrs. Eames?"
Sir Evelyn protested feebly against a Nautch Girl dance in a pageant
of eighteenth century English life; but he was not allowed to say very
much. Mrs. Eames welcomed the proposal and explained just where and
when the dance could take place.
That settled the trouble on the green; but worse trouble waited at the
mouth of the cave.
All children have an instinct which enables them to know with certainty
when they will be most troublesome to their elders, and a desire,
which they make no effort to suppress, to collect together in just
that place. The Hailey Compton school children, who might have found
amusement in helping their elder sisters to hold the horse or in
watching the Whittles waving the signal flag, preferred to gather at
the mouth of the cave. Having unexpectedly escaped from school they
were full of vitality and spirits. The whole sixty of them ran rapidly
to and fro in different directions, leaped from rock to rock with
shouts of joy, and often fell, the tumbles being followed by cries of
pain.
Besides the children there were some thirty or forty village people
who had no part in the pageant gathered at the mouth of the cave. Their
number was increased by the arrival of the fourteen girls who had been
told not to hold the horse, and the whole twelve mothers. Mrs. Eames
had to deal with them as well as with the children.
Her difficulties were increased by young Jim Bunce, son of the
man chosen to be captain of the lugger. He had been given the part
of leader of the men on shore who landed the cargo. He had lost a
complicated arrangement of ropes and pulleys which he called a tackle.
This was a valuable, according to his account an indispensable, stage
property. Nothing, so he said, could be done unless the tackle was
found.
"How are us to unload the boat without we have a tackle?" he asked, and
kept on asking in a steady, emotionless monotone.
He regarded Mrs. Eames as responsible for the tackle, blamed her for
the loss and seemed to take it for granted that she either knew where
the thing was or possessed some means of finding it out. He did not
actually say so, but his tone implied that if the rehearsal and the
final performance broke down, as they would unless the tackle was
found, Mrs. Eames would have no one to blame except herself. He had
a statement which he made repeatedly and very slowly about the loss.
After the last rehearsal he had left the tackle coiled up and in good
order on top of a rock far above high-water mark just inside the cave.
From that rock it had disappeared. This must have been true, for he
repeated it at least twenty times without the smallest variation of
detail.
While Mrs. Eames appealed to the unwanted people to go away, Jimmy
Bunce appealed to her to find his tackle. While she pursued flying
children he followed her. When she caught a child he caught her and
repeated his statement. When she paused breathless after vain pursuit
of a swift child, Jimmy Bunce was at her side. Sometimes he attributed
the loss of the tackle to evilly disposed people inspired by the
devil who had entered into them. Sometimes he seemed to think that the
devil had acted personally in the matter, without using human agency.
But--whether man or devil were the culprit--he held that Mrs. Eames was
responsible.
She ought to have managed somehow to bring to naught the evil that the
craft and subtlety of the devil or man had worked against Jimmy Bunce.
If she had not done or could not do that, then the vicar, so Jimmy
hinted, ought to give up saying the Litany.
Gladys managed to add a little to Mrs. Eames's difficulties. She had
been given a responsible and important job to do. The signallers,
Whittle and his brothers, could not see how the preparations for
landing were getting on, because the churchyard wall, where they were
stationed, was just above the mouth of the cave. Someone had to run
off to the end of the beach and tell them when all was ready for the
signal to be given. Gladys undertook to do this and promised to stand
waving her arms in full view of the Whittles when the time came for the
arrival of the boat. She was eager and excited, so eager and excited
that she ran after Mrs. Eames wherever she went, asking whether her
time of action had yet come.
Mary Lambert viewed the scene with professional calm. She was
accustomed to a certain amount of confusion at early rehearsals
and felt confident that things would settle down at the end. In the
meantime she caught Mrs. Eames whenever she could and asked intelligent
and important questions. "Where," for instance, "would the spectators
be on the day of the performance?" "Where would the orchestra be
placed?" "What kind of platform would be provided for the Nautch Girl
dance?"
Mrs. Eames, one of those fortunate people who enjoy fuss, replied
to her as she replied to Jimmy Bunce and Gladys, without a sign of
irritation, though sometimes a little hurriedly.
Sir Evelyn was gloomy. It did not seem to him possible that order
would ever be achieved or the rehearsal be done. He asked himself,
not for the first time, whether he had not been a fool to mix
himself up with any undertaking managed by a woman like Mrs. Eames.
Foreseeing reproaches afterwards, he bitterly regretted having asked
his friends to be patrons of the pageant. He sat on a rock with his
back to the turmoil and gazed out to sea. There, a hundred yards or
so from the shore, lay Bunce's laden boat. The crew sat bent over
their outstretched oars, calm and indifferent to the passing of time.
Now and then when the rising tide carried their boat eastward, they
dipped their oars, and with quiet, effortless motion regained their
position off the mouth of the cave. Sir Evelyn, smoking cigarette after
cigarette, marvelled at a patience which he could not hope to imitate.
Young Bunce left Mrs. Eames for a while and fastened on Sir Evelyn. He
was not an Ancient Mariner, and his eye was more fishy than glittering,
but he held his auditor as firmly as Coleridge's hero held his. The
tale of the lost tackle was not so long as that of the lost ship,
but Sir Evelyn had to listen to it three times and always with the
feeling--successfully conveyed also to Mrs. Eames--that he was to
blame for the disaster. Sir Evelyn tried the plan constantly adopted
by worried men. An Anglo-Saxon king gave Dane Gelt to the invaders
of the land. Modern statesmen give increasing doles to the insurgent
proletariat. Sir Evelyn gave young Bunce ten shillings with which to
buy another tackle. Bunce accepted the money, explaining as he did so
that tackles are made and not bought and that it would take at least a
week to achieve a new one. But the ten shillings was not wasted. Unlike
the ancient Dane Gelt and the modern dole, it achieved its object.
Jimmy Bunce went away. He feared that if he stayed he might be forced
to give the money back. Although tackles cannot be bought other things
can, and young Bunce wanted to keep the money if he could.
"Beth," said Jimmy, "I'm almost fed up with this."
They had been watching Mrs. Eames's efforts to get her company together
and to clear the stage of superfluous people. They had even tried to
help her. When it became clear that they were doing more harm than good
they stood on a rock above the tumult and watched again. It was after
ten minutes of this second watching that Jimmy became bored.
"Let's toddle off somewhere," he said.
"Where?" said Beth. "Back to the vicarage?"
"I suppose," said Jimmy, "that there's no chance of raising a couple of
cocktails anywhere?"
"There's James Hinton's pub. But----"
"No go. Hinton would manage it if he was there. Not a fellow in
England is better at dry Martinis than Hinton. But he's not there. He's
probably buying a dress shirt for me and a ready-made dinner jacket
from his friend Linker, so we may regard the cocktails as off."
"Would you care to look at the church?"
"No. Why should I?"
"People generally do in strange places," said Beth. "It's one of the
things that's always done."
"Can't think why. I hate churches myself."
"So do I." said Beth; "but there's nothing else to see in Hailey
Compton except---- What about exploring the cave?"
"Is there anything to explore?"
"It's supposed to go miles and miles inland," said Beth, "and nobody's
ever been to the end of it. They say it's haunted."
"Ghosts of dead smugglers! Let's go and find one."
"There won't be any if I go," said Beth. "Nothing spooky ever comes off
when I'm there. I've tried lots of times. Spiritualist séances and so
on. The beastly things work all right, so I'm told, till I come, but
then they simply dry up."
"I'm not particularly spooky myself," said Jimmy, "but we might try.
Hunting the elusive ghost would be better than standing here, even if
we don't run one to earth."
They climbed down from their rock and pushed their way among the groups
of pageant actors, unwanted spectators, and children who were beginning
to tire of running about. They scrambled over a ridge of sharp rocks
and dropped on to a broad track covered, like the beach outside, with
round white stones. The sound of the voices behind them grew fainter.
Even Mrs. Eames's voice died away. Their steps upon the rolling stones
made a hollow, growling sound which reverberated from the walls and
roof of the cave, multiplied and increased in volume.
The light grew feebler as they went on. They felt, rather than saw,
that they were ascending steeply. But the roof of the cave was still
remotely high, only dimly discernible in the gloom, and the walls were
still far apart. There were no signs of coming to the end.
Beth turned and looked round. The sea and sky were like a picture in
a frame, very distant, incredibly bright. Bunce's boat, the crew still
crouched over their oars, was plainly to be seen. The moving figures at
the entrance to the cave were silhouetted black outlines against the
background of sea and sky. Beth, in a voice which sounded strangely
deep, called Jimmy to look.
After that they saw the world outside no more. The cave bent to the
right. The light got feebler, so dim that now and then Jimmy had to
strike matches in order to be able to see what was before them. It was
plain at last that the walls were closing in, that the way was narrowed
and the roof lower than it had been.
"Getting near the end," said Jimmy. "If we're to come on a ghost of any
sort it must be now or never."