The Dancing Druids

Chapter Twelve

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‘ “Ha!” thought she as she looked at it through the window. ‘Cannot I prevent the sun rising?” ’

Ibid. (The Fisherman and His Wife)

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Now what?’ said Laura, full of pleasurable excitement as the car drove on towards the farm. ‘What do you think we ought to do?’ she added, elucidating this query.

‘Return, one of us, and suborn that old man with the barrow,’ said Gascoigne readily. ‘We shall find out what he knows of the people from Slepe Rock, and perhaps he can tell us what the ice is to be used for, although I should rather think he can’t. Pull up round the next bend, anyway, and I’ll go back, and see what I can find out.’

‘Both of us will go back,’ said O’Hara firmly.

‘But you may be recognized, and that would hardly do.’

‘It can’t be helped. You stay here,’ added O’Hara to Laura, ‘and be ready to help us make a dash for it if anybody chooses to be annoyed. Good-bye. We will see you later.’

‘You’ll see me sooner,’ retorted Laura. ‘What do you think I am? If there’s going to be any fun I’m all for being in the thick of it. None of this women and children business with me! I’m a lot older than either of you, and, furthermore, I’m Mrs. Croc.’s accredited representative. Besides…’

‘All right, then,’ said O’Hara, hastily. ‘If you feel like that about it, I think you’d better come. What do you say, Gerry? Shall we take her with us?’

The handsome Gascoigne assumed a reproachful expression, but did not voice his sentiments, and the car was reversed as far as the nearest gate. Here Laura turned it, and the three were soon near the house with the four dead trees.

‘This is about as far as we should go, I think, before we get out and walk,’ suggested Laura.

‘And now,’ said Gascoigne, when they were almost opposite the gate, ‘you two had better stand by, I think, whilst I contact our aged friend. He won’t talk to three of us at once.’

This seemed a reasonable suggestion, and therefore O’Hara and Laura remained under cover of some bushes whilst Gascoigne walked up to the gate. By good luck the aged gardener was not more than ten yards away. He was standing on the brickwork of a tiny culvert which carried the weedy drive across a brook, and was gazing into the water and scratching his mossy-looking thigh.

‘That there old water-rat,’ he said, without turning his head, ‘do be rousing his whiskers at all of us. Catch a holt of him I don’t somehow seem to, seemingly.’

‘Tough luck,’ said Gascoigne, joining the ancient man, putting his hands in his trouser pockets and peering sympathetically into the ditch.

‘Live under that arch, he do, and laugh his way through against all of us,’ the old man continued. ‘And my fowls fattening, and him with his eye on ’em like he had on the chicks last August twelvemonth, was a Sunday night, as I remember.’

‘I suppose that was before the new owners took over?’ said Gascoigne. ‘I mean, they haven’t always been here, have they?’

‘New owners?’ The old man spat. ‘Tenants, um be, not owners. Film people. Money and no sense. Ice by the cartload for their drinks. If beer wants ice, must be funny beer, says I. And if sperrits wants ice, give me water. Neither Englishmen nor Yankees, them don’t be.’ Upon saying this, he turned his head and gave Gascoigne a long look.

‘I suppose they have lots of visitors,’ remarked the young man, kicking a stone from the culvert into the ditch.

‘Not so many. Secret proceshesses, they says. Trade rivals, they says. Keep out, they says. Well, there y’are. Mr. Concaverty, round at the lodge, he has his orders, and, being in their service already, before they comes here, no doubt he carries ’em out. But this old water-rat, drat him, ain’t nobody’s business but mine. Mr. Concaverty, he don’t keep fowls. He don’t know this old water-rat like I do.’

He picked up a bit of stick, and, stepping from the culvert on to the bank of the ditch, poked industriously and with considerable vigour underneath the arch. Gascoigne waited a moment or two. Then he said gently, but with a persistence which Laura would have approved:

‘What about some beer that’s not iced?’

By way of answer, the old man took off his cap and held it up. Gascoigne dropped half a crown into it. The old man scooped up the coin, bit it, nodded indulgently, said that that was a bit of all right, and ambled off.

‘Concaverty!’ said Laura, as soon as Gascoigne had told the others the gist of the conversation. ‘We must get to him before the old man gets round there. And, this time, it had better be me! We don’t want them comparing notes, and thinking you’ve been snooping, although, of course, you have.’

‘Do you think…?’ began O’Hara. But Laura insisted that her idea was the right one, and Gascoigne was inclined to agree.

‘We must get what we can,’ he said gloomily.

All three young people were conscious of a feeling of slight flatness. If the inmates of the house with the four dead trees were film people, all idiosyncrasies on their part immediately lost any tendency to seem dramatic, improbable, lethal or, in fact, at all exciting, and it was a deflated although outwardly debonair Laura who marched up to the lodge and enquired for Mr. Concaverty.

An older woman opened the door, and one whom Laura again did not fail to recognize. It was the caretaker from O’Hara’s mysterious farm. Laura, who was not altogether unprepared for this, since some connection between that farm and the house with the four dead trees by this time could be taken for granted, smiled naturally and asked for a bucket of water. She needed it, she said, for the car.

The woman supplied it without a word. Laura thanked her, took the bucket of water to where she had left her friends, set it down and told them the news.

‘I don’t see how to ask again for Concaverty,’ she added. It proved unnecessary to do so, however, for, when she returned the empty pail and made a remark upon the weather, the woman asked curiously:

‘What did you want with Mr. Concaverty?’

‘Actually, to know whether my friends—a man and his son—a boy of about sixteen—have left the house yet. We know they came, but don’t know how long they intended to stay.’

‘Oh, them!’ said the woman. She looked at Laura curiously. ‘Ain’t you the young lady I put on the way to Little Dorsett? Would these here be friends of yours, then?’

‘Well, we are staying at the same hotel in Slepe, and hoped to meet them for tea,’ explained Laura, seizing upon the first excuse that came into her head.

‘You’ll not see them at tea to-day,“ said the woman decidedly. ’They’re to stay a night or two to see the Druids dance. It’s the great night around these parts, and, films or no films, everybody, so they tells me, goes up at midnight to see it.’

‘The Druids? How queer,’ said Laura, racking her brain for some means of prolonging the conversation, but finding none that she thought it would be wise to employ.

‘Oh, there’s things queerer than that,’ said the woman, ‘and I would advise you to keep clear of them.’ She lowered her voice to a confidential huskiness, and added, ‘And this Mr. Concaverty, too. You’re a real young lady, you are, and not for the likes of him, though he pays my wages.’

She shut the door on these words, and Laura walked back to the others.

‘I’ve put my foot in it,’ she said gloomily. ‘I’ve made her suspicious, I think.’ She recounted the conversation. O’Hara whistled. Gascoigne said:

‘We’ll see the Druids dance, too. That must be on the ninth of September. But, I think, not you, Laura dear. This sounds to me like men’s work.’

‘Sez you!’ retorted Laura with her usual force and inelegance. ‘And let’s drive on. I want to think, and I think better in a vehicle that’s moving.’

The first result of her thinking was a letter to Mrs. Bradley which she sent to the house in Kensington, knowing that it would be forwarded at once if Mrs. Bradley were not at home.

‘Essential to see Druids dance,’ wrote Laura with telegraphic brevity. ‘Don’t write back to say not. Mind made up. Should appreciate blessing on enterprise, and will promise to duck if guns brought into play. Hope you are well. Come back soon. Deep doings at Slepe Rock re man and stone-slinging kid. Regards. Laura.’

Mrs. Bradley received this missive whilst she was at breakfast on the following morning.

‘Dear, dear!’ she observed to her maid Célestine who was removing the plate which had held Mrs. Bradley’s egg on toast. ‘What do you think Miss Menzies is up to now?’

‘That passes comprehension,’ said Célestine, whose attitude to Laura was one of the amused admiration of a human being for a young and lively elephant. ‘That one, she has of the most surprising stomach.’

‘And we, as we get older, have no stomach at all, surprising or otherwise,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘Ah, well! Tell Henri I shall be in to lunch and that there will be two gentlemen as well… my son Ferdinand, in fact, and the Assistant Commissioner of police. Will the butcher have offal, do you think?’

‘It will be surprising if not,’ replied Célestine with vigour. ‘Again, Henri has a chicken. It is from America, that land of the loan. It is frozen, like all the assets. I speak of the chicken, you understand.’

Mrs. Bradley cackled. Lunch consisted of very good giblet soup, some poached turbot, chicken en casserole and devilled pigs’ liver on toast.

‘It is for the gentlemen, this lunch,’ said Célestine, sniffing slightly. ‘Ladies are less appetizing.’

Mrs. Bradley cordially agreed. She herself looked very far from appetizing in a sage-green costume and a bright red blouse, an heirloom brooch of vast proportions whose only virtue was that it did at least conceal some of the blouse, stout shoes with crêpe rubber soles, knitted stockings and a rakish diamond clip on the side of her shining black hair.

‘What devilment now, Beatrice?’ enquired the Assistant Commissioner, finishing off Mrs. Bradley’s satisfying lunch with a glass of her equally satisfying brandy. ‘And where did you get this?’ He held up his glass. ‘Not bad!’

‘Imported under licence from the government,’ Mrs. Bradley replied with a smirk.

‘Oh, rot! Where did you get it?’

‘Henri has friends.’

‘I bet he has! Yes, I’ll have one more. And some more coffee? Thank you very much. Now, then, what’s all this about a cat with nine lives in Dorset?’

Mrs. Bradley told him at some length, whilst her saturnine son Ferdinand listened without offering a word.

‘But you can’t prove anything?’ the Assistant Commissioner suggested.

‘Not at present. But the chief point is that I don’t want this young O’Hara murdered.’

Ferdinand grunted (a sound which his mother correctly interpreted), and the Assistant Commissioner added:

‘All right. We’ll keep an eye on him for you. Don’t let your Miss Menzies get into trouble. Lots of peculiar happenings since the war.’

‘This may well have begun before the war,’ Mrs. Bradley pointed out.

‘Interesting,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, stealing Jove’s thunder without a second thought. ‘Ah, well! More brandy? Thank you, I think perhaps I will. Ferdinand owes us something over this last case of his, so I’ll take it out on you. The woman always pays. How true that is!’

‘Well, I suppose I had better go back,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘I don’t know what mischief Laura will get into if I am not there to prevent her.’

‘The thing is,’ said Laura earnestly to her escort, ‘that we have to take up our positions early enough. It’s no good to get there after they do. The thing is, how are we to dodge this Con person at the hotel?’

‘The best plan by far,’ said O’Hara, ‘is to lay him out before we start. I will undertake to do that.’

Laura and his cousin Gascoigne gazed at him in surprised admiration. He continued, calmly :

‘It should be easy enough. A sock full of sand, which sand I can collect from the beach, a strategic point, a minute of co-operation from you, Gerry, to help move him into an inconspicuous position, and from you, Miss Laura, to divert the attention of that unprepossessing infant…’

‘Sisyphus?’ said Laura, who had contrived to learn that this was the boy’s second name, and who was fascinated by this baptismal error.

‘Right. Let us work out the details. I think perhaps that passage which leads to the lounge. Then we could plant him outside those French doors at the side…’

‘Good idea!’ said Laura, always the apostle of violence.

The business in hand having been despatched successfully and the victim having been put out to grass by Gascoigne and O’Hara, the three uninvited witnesses set out by car for the circle of standing stones.

‘How did you manage the kid?’ asked Gascoigne; for to Laura had been delegated this share in the responsibility of the attack.

‘I didn’t. He’s been sick all the evening.’

‘How come?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s genuine all right. The head waiter told me. They had to have the doctor. A bit of luck for us, but tough on the poor little thug.’

‘Yes, quite. Not that I love the little beast. I expect he’s got food poisoning. I thought myself that the rabbit stew at lunch was just a bit off, didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t have it,’ said Laura. ‘I had cold.’

‘Wise woman. However, two double whiskies kept the bunny in place so far as I was concerned. Kids are less fortunate in their access to these obvious remedies.’

‘He’s not such a bad kid,’ said Laura, with female untruthfulness.

The car held the main road for about seven miles and then swung left and south again across the open country. The hills began to gather in, and the gloom deepened. It was nine by Laura’s wristwatch as they by-passed Cuchester, and nearly half-past by the time they approached, up the straight and sand-surfaced avenue, the house with the four dead trees.

Over the little bridge and past the lodge went the car, and then the narrow road dropped downwards past the golf-course until it took the lane to the farm.

‘Where do we park?’ enquired Laura, slowing as they reached the little wood.

‘Among the trees. Can’t very well drive into the farmyard,’ O’Hara responded. ‘Edge gradually over to your right. Your headlights will show you the opening.’

Doubtfully Laura obeyed, fearful of crashing into tree-trunks, but O’Hara’s topographical sense proved to be flawless, for a kind of mossy passage opened among the trees and she was able to take the car bumpily but with safety off the road.

She put off all the lights except the rear light, felt in the pocket of her tweed coat to make certain that she had her torch, and the three walked out of the wood. Laura, with a curious but half-scared glance towards the dark mass of the farmhouse, followed the others up the muddy, cobbled road which ran through the cartshed, and all three were soon on the miry ascent which led towards the circle of standing stones.

‘Now for it,’ muttered Laura, wondering what her much-admired döppelganger Jo March would have made of the situation. ‘Wonder whether the Druids really dance?’

‘You can be sure they dance,’ said Gascoigne.

The going was heavy with mud, and treacherous with large, uneven stones. Twice Laura slipped and three times she tripped up, but each time her escort, closing in on either side, saved her and kept her on her feet. Considering that Laura was both tall and well-made and weighed more than eleven stone, their sense of chivalry, she felt, was over-developed.

‘Don’t bother, really,’ she said, as they saved her for the fifth time from measuring her length on the muddy field they were mounting.

‘No, don’t,’ advised a singularly rich voice from a bush on the left of the speaker.

‘Good Lord!’ esclaimed Laura. ‘Ghost of Mrs. Croc.!’

‘Not yet,’ said the reptilian, joining them like the shadow of Lady into Fox. ‘And I wouldn’t make so much noise if I were you. The vultures are gathering above on the top of the rise. I’ve just been up there to see.’

‘The Druids?’ muttered Laura. ‘Sakes alive!’

‘Their congregation, maybe, child. Now, watch, but do not make your presence known. We are in sight of mysteries, and our appearance may not be welcomed.’

‘But suppose they offer a human sacrifice or something?’ demanded Laura. ‘Or suppose one of the corpses is on view? Don’t we do anything then?’

‘My advice… indeed, my urgent request… is that you take no part in the proceedings whatsoever. We are uninvited guests, remember.’

‘Oh, all right, if you say so.’

‘I do say so. And now I am going to leave you for a while. I shall look forward to your report later,’ said Mrs. Bradley, living up to her reptilian appearance by sliding rapidly away among the bushes.

‘Well, I’m dashed!’ said Laura, with the frank surprise which her employer’s doings had still the power to arouse in her. ‘What’s the old crocodile up to now, do you suppose?’

‘We mustn’t queer her pitch, anyway,’ said O’Hara, who had conceived a warm admiration for the elderly lady. ‘So no squeals, my dear Laura, when the sacrificial knife descends!’

‘Ass!’ said Laura amiably. ‘Dry up, now, and let’s get along.’ She looked at the luminous hands of her watch. ‘Although I don’t suppose,’ she added in parenthesis, ‘that they’ll start before midnight, and it’s only a quarter past ten.

How much further, do you think, to the Stones? I’m no judge of distance in the dark.’

‘Half an hour, just about, at the rate we shall go,’ said Gascoigne. ‘Look out! I hear somebody coming!’

The three crawled into the hedge, and a man on horseback, with two others holding on to his stirrups, went slowly but noisily past them. Laura screwed up her eyes, but there was not the remotest chance of recognizing any passers-by, for, in spite of a clear sky, the night was dark, and dawn some hours away.

‘Come on!’ said Laura when the horseman was a blur against the top of the hill. Her cavaliers, nothing loth, went forward with her, and, gaining the summit, all crouched beside the broad posts of a farm gate and saw, ahead of them, a deep gold glow in the sky.

‘Not exactly carrying on their doings in secret,’ muttered Gascoigne, bearing sideways away from the dimmed headlights of a car which was grinding its way on its lowest gear from the farmyard and up the airy road.

It passed between the gateposts beside which the watchers lay crouched, and swayed unevenly southwards across the grass. The three uninvited guests, now keeping close beside a tall, sparse hawthorn hedge, and one of them, at least, thinking uneasily of cow-pats, followed in the wake of the car, and were rewarded at last by the sight of a ring of figures bearing golden torches from which occasional showers of sparks descended and splashed like rain. These torches lighted the ring of standing stones, for a neophyte bearing a torch stood beside each of the nine monoliths. A dark and considerable concourse of people formed a thick belt of darkness outside the circle of the Druids, and a murmur, rising and falling, of polite conversation could be heard.

‘Good Lord! It’s a set of mummers, or folk-lore what-nots, or something!’ said Laura in deep disgust. ‘There’s nothing here for us, and nothing to keep quiet about, either. Oh, well, let’s join the throng!’

‘Not so fast,’ said Gascoigne. ‘Keep out of it as long as we can. This is a wheel, by its shape and semblance. Look at those people going forward to form the spokes! There are sometimes wheels within wheels, and we’d better, perhaps, not forget it!’

So the three went to ground and then gradually crept nearer to the Druids. The ceremony proper, they gathered, had not begun, for a man beside the tallest of the stones was in earnest consultation with three others, and there was still a murmur of conversation among the crowd, although the ranks of those forming the spokes (or, as Laura thought, the rays of the sun), were now completed and still.

‘I should think they’d begin community singing soon,’ muttered O’Hara into Laura’s left ear. She hushed him. They were all three lying now in the shallow ditch which bordered the stone circle, and, as the crowd was thin on this side, they were able to see what went on, although their view was impeded comparatively often by the movements of the (presumably) invited guests nearer the stones.

Suddenly there sounded the blast of a horn. It came from far away, in the direction of the round barrows which O’Hara and Gascoigne had noticed on their first visit to the neighbourhood by daylight.

‘The horns of Elfland,’ said Laura, slightly rearing herself. With a brotherly pressure on her skull, Gascoigne forced her head down again. The note of the horn was repeated from the opposite side of the hill. There was silence from the crowd. The torches burnt smokily, and shrouded some of their holders from view. The air became acrid, and the silence of the onlookers was broken by spasmodic coughing. The horns called and answered again, and then, from various points on the hillside, coloured bands of light began to play across the circle of the stones. The coloured bands wavered and shifted at first, then they were laid upon the ground to form segments of a circle. A horrible greyish colour lay to the west, and to the south-south-west a brilliant green changed to blue-green, and met a deadly white light at full south. To the east the ground was purple, and from north-east towards north-north-east it shifted in bands of light with an effect of dark blots on a white ground very dazzling to the eyes of the watchers. To the extreme north, and round to the north-west, there was a deep and awe-inspiring darkness made intense by the brightness of the lights. The effect was crude but somewhat frightening. The faces of the people looked ghastly.

‘Talk of a Witches’ Sabbath!’ muttered Laura.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ said O’Hara suddenly, ‘if they’re trying to raise the devil! I have read of these colours in that orientation before. It is the Celtic circle of good and bad luck they have there. I wonder, now, what they are after?’

‘Do you think they’ll go on all night?’ demanded Laura, aware that she was excited, and therefore trying to give her voice flatness and a casual tone. ‘If so, I don’t see much sense in staying. Nothing much will happen in front of all these people. We’re wasting time! It’s like the Helston Flurry on a Bank Holiday!’

As she said this, the lights went out, and a man holding a torch stepped into the centre of the circle of standing stones whilst the people forming the spokes or rays submerged themselves in the crowd. Another man joined the first. They held their torches high, and a third man stood between them with a sheet of paper in his hand from which he commenced to read.

Laura and the two young men crept closer. Nobody seemed to notice them. The reader coughed once or twice when the reek of the torches caught his throat, but he went on gallantly with the peroration, which sounded remarkably like one of the Hebrew biblical genealogies.

When he had done, the two torch-bearers flung their torches on the ground. All the other torchbearers followed suit, and then they and the spectators joined in the task of stamping them out with their feet.

Laura and her escort withdrew, for fear of being trampled on, and watched from a respectful distance but without enthusiasm.

‘I suppose that’s the dance?’ said Laura. ‘If so, I don’t call it particularly impressive, do you?’

‘It’s some crack-brained society carrying out what they imagine to have been an ancient rite,’ said Gascoigne. ‘Blessing the crops, or something, I suppose. At any rate, it’s very nearly over.’

He was right. Already many of the onlookers had ceased their leaping and stamping, and were walking in quiet groups away from the stones. The three young people remained in hiding until all the people had gone. They noticed that none of them returned by the track which led down to the farm, but they could see the tail-lights of several cars on the way which led towards the main road. The farm gates, they imagined, had all been removed for the occasion, and would be put back in the early morning.

‘Well, that seems to be that,’ said Laura, standing up and brushing vegetation from her skirt and stockings. ‘What it was all about I don’t seem to know or care. I wonder what the film people made of it? Should you think there was much to film in that? Oh, well, let’s beat it, shall we? I could do with a spot of sleep.’

But O’Hara put a hand on her elbow.

‘Never mind about sleep,’ he said quietly. ‘Listen, will you? Can you hear anything, or is it my imagination? No; I’m sure it isn’t! Let’s get into the hedge! I rather fancy that this is where the fun begins! Keep close!’