The deliberations of this multitude, as it seemed to him, followed a course as tortuous as that of the town’s own river. They meandered, they ran in circles, they tied themselves in knots; unpredictable cat’s-paws of wind rippled them and uncharted currents stirred their depths. A proposal to insure against rain had just given the Vicar an excuse to deliver a considerable sermon on the subject of anticyclones. Stephen, who had heard it several times before, let his mind wander away while the voice of the Vicar bumbled on and a distant cuckoo mocked the whole proceedings through the open window.

His thoughts went back through time and space to a spring morning in 1944, that had been full of unseen cuckoos too, and to an olive-grove in Thessaly. The occasion was the only one in his life when he had been really important; and his importance was due to the fact that a crumpled parachute lay in folds at his feet and he held a tommy-gun in his hands. Until that moment he had been a very ordinary person: in peace-time a history master at second-rate prep schools eking out his miserable pay by conducting archæological tours to Greece every summer holidays, in war-time a clerkly intelligence officer, one more dogsbody among all the dogsbodies on the swollen staff at Cairo. Then, quite suddenly, he had been translated—there was no other word for it—into a sort of Prometheus; for he brought fire from heaven, in the shape of grenades and mortar shells, to the men who had fought for years with old rifles and their bare hands. For thirteen months he had lived like an Olympian; until on VE-day a bone-shaking lorry had carried him back to Athens with a shattered knee, back to the ordinariness of hospital, demobilisation, unsuccessful bookselling, and small-town Committee Meetings at which the subject under discussion at the moment was, of all things, horse-manure.

“A dollop of muck,” Mr. Handiman was saying, “from the Council’s stables would do ’em a world of good.”

Nearly two years ago, when the Festival was first mooted, Mr. Handiman the ironmonger had received a poetic inspiration, although at the time he was fishing with maggots for eels. Born of the sunshine and the buttercups, it had concerned flowers: let every cottage garden at Festival-time put on a special display, let every street corner blossom its welcome to the visitors from afar! When he began to elaborate this pretty notion, his thoughts naturally turned to roses, red roses and white, the favours of Lancaster and York. The ancient borough should be embowered in roses! The Council, in a mood of midsummer madness, had approved the idea and passed a resolution asking every gardener to plant roses where they could be seen from the streets. More daring still, it had even voted a halfpenny rate as a contribution towards the cost. The imaginative gesture had earned the town a good deal of free publicity, including a neatly-turned fourth leader in The Times; and the only protests had come from Miss Foulkes, who wrote to Mr. Runcorn pointing out that the workers couldn’t eat roses, and from Mr. Gurney, who unkindly drew attention to the fact that Councillor Noakes was in business as a nurseryman and florist.

But now Mr. Handiman’s innocent suggestion about a free dollop of muck for the roses seemed to cause some embarrassment to the Mayor, who at last had to admit that Councillor Noakes regularly took away the horse-manure “under a long-standing arrangement.” Stephen was aware of deep currents stirring as Mr. Gurney demanded “What does he pay for it?” and Councillor Noakes shouted “I protest!” The argument went on for quite a long time, with the Mayor patiently explaining that there were only two old horses which pulled the dust-carts “so the amount involved is really very small,” and Mr. Gurney muttering something about “wheels within wheels.”

“The next item on the agenda,” said the Mayor swiftly, “is headed ‘Sideshows.’” And at once there rose up a large lady in furs and feathers who observed—and Stephen could hardly believe his ears—that she was the President of the Fur and Feather League, and what about an exhibition of chinchilla rabbits? During the subsequent silence Stephen took pleasure in watching the expression on Lance’s face; for the young poet, whose bright new world was brimming over with fascinating absurdities, was delighting in the discovery of a new one, and had plainly taken the furry lady to his heart. He stared at her in an ecstasy of wonder, oblivious of Robin, who had a simpler sense of fun and was poking him in the ribs with a pencil.

“I’m not absolutely certain,” murmured the Mayor, “although of course we want to encourage all local activities, whether rabbits … But perhaps you’ll have a word with Mr. Tasker about it afterwards?” And with a kindly glance at Stephen he passed on to the next item, which concerned the unveiling of a statue of Dame Joanna, poetess and prioress, in the Pleasure Gardens.

Stephen, who had been growing steadily more apprehensive about the Festival for several weeks, felt that the prospect of a rabbit show justified his worst fears. Already it had been decided that the Women’s Institute would be allowed to tell fortunes, that the Rowing Club should bring Bloody Mary ashore in a decorated barge, and that the Master of Foxhounds should gallop with his pack past the grandstand tally-hoing an imaginary fox. “What am I but a hack?” Stephen asked himself miserably. “The Town Hack, and a poor, ineffectual, useless one at that?” He was sick and tired of the whole business already; it could end only in ridicule, of which he would be the principal butt. There would be four more of these dreadful Committee Meetings before the Festival achieved its consummation in farce or shame or a ghastly mixture of the two; and this one was by no means over. His knee was hurting so badly that he was quite unable to concentrate on the proceedings; but fortunately he had no responsibility for the statue of Dame Joanna (it was practically the only thing he wasn’t responsible for) so he allowed his wayward mind to stray again, and like a homing bird it flew straight to the olive-groves.

Lately he had often caught himself looking back upon his year in Greece as if it were an experience in a frame, a sort of illuminated picture, or a theatrical interlude played within the arch of a proscenium. It glowed in his memory with an unnatural brightness; the sky was a painted cyclorama, extravagantly blue, the snow was whiter than white, the glaucous olives seemed carved in relief on tawny hillsides, the anemones were projected in technicolor on to emerald alpine meadows. Against this incandescent background moved figures larger than life, and in particular one figure, gigantic among giants, that of his friend and companion Polycarpos. Huge and heroic, laughing at the sky, a bottle of wine in one hand, a grenade in the other, Polly stood outside their headquarters on VE-day. “Let’s have a good bang,” he said, “to celebrate.