With no sense of foreboding whatsoever Emmy walked across the damp grass; and still no warning bell of trouble rang in her mind when she saw Mrs. Manciple emerge, looking worried, from a little knot of people clustered around the Lucky Dip.
“Oh, Mrs. Tibbett,” Violet began.
“Yes, Mrs. Manciple?” said Emmy politely. “I must congratulate you. Everything has gone off splendidly.”
“It’s that Mason boy,” said Violet. “He says it was your idea.”
“What was?” Emmy felt slightly alarmed.
From the center of the group of people Sir Claud’s voice rose in half-amused exasperation. “Mr. Mason, I really must…”
“Go on!” Frank Mason was shouting. “Go on! Take it! There’s no law against it! Go on!”
Other voices began to rise from the group, and Violet Manciple said, “Oh please, Mrs. Tibbett, he may listen to you.”
Reluctantly Emmy pushed toward the bran tub.
Sir Claud Manciple and Frank Mason were facing each other, separated only by the tub. Sir Claud looked as nearly flustered as it is possible for a leading atomic scientist to do. Clearly, Frank Mason was exhibiting a behavior pattern which deviated from the norm, and, with the inadequate facts at his disposal, Sir Claud was unable to form a reasonable hypothesis to account for it. Meanwhile, the Lucky Dip was in danger of fission.
Frank’s red hair was standing on end and his sharp face was white with anger and emotion. He was waving a five-pound note in the air, and as Emmy approached, he shouted again, “Take it! Take it!”
Around this strange couple a selection of Cregwell’s citizens were standing and staring with that impenetrable inertia which descends on the English, like a cloak of invisibility, when they wish to observe events without being personally implicated. Emmy realized, with a pang of envy, that if any of these onlookers should be appealed to by either side they would simply melt into the landscape and disappear, only to reappear to watch the fun when the threat of involvement had passed. She, however, was in a different position; she had allowed herself to be drawn into the arena.
Frank Mason saw her and was diverted. “Mrs. Tibbett, it was your idea. You must make him see sense!”
“What was my idea?”
“That my book would be in the Lucky Dip.”
“Well, yes. It occurred to me…”
“You’re right, of course. And I’ve got to get it back.”
“Mrs. Tibbett,” said Sir Claud a little desperately, “please reason with this young man. I am in charge of the Lucky Dip, and…”
“Take it!” yelled Frank, attempting to ram the five-pound note into Sir Claud’s waistcoat pocket.
“He wishes,” Sir Claud explained to Emmy, “to buy up the contents of the barrel. Five pounds at sixpence a time would give him two hundred dips, and there cannot be more than twenty objects left in the tub. In any case, everyone should be entitled to his turn…”
“You said nobody had taken out a book,” shouted Frank.
“Nobody while I’ve been in charge,” said Sir Claud with dignity. “However, I was relieved for a short spell by my niece Maud, and…”
“Oh, to hell with the lot of you!” Frank Mason had reached the breaking point. He flung the five-pound note at Sir Claud’s face and overturned the bran tub.
The bran rose into the air like a cloud, and, behind its protective cover, several villagers applauded, while others shouted disapproval. Sir Claud let out a bellow of baffled intellectual rage, and Violet moaned, “Oh dear, oh dear. I knew something like this would happen!”
“Get Maud,” said Emmy urgently to Violet.
“Get who?”
“Maud. She’ll be able to deal with this.”
“Maud? But…”
“Get her!” said Emmy fiercely.
Frank Mason, who had gone down on the ground with the barrel, arose like a loaf in a hot oven, his clothes and face whitened with bran, his hair like a red crust. He held a square, paper-wrapped package in his hand. “This is it!” he cried. A few people cheered. Frank scrabbled at the wrapping paper and tore it off. Inside was a jigsaw puzzle in a gaudy box. Frank flung it at Sir Claud with a howl of fury.
“It’s not here! Somebody did get it!”
“Somebody got what?” Maud had pushed her way into the circle.
“My book!”
“Oh, was that your book?” Maud sounded faintly amused. Frank glowered at her through his mask of bran. With enormous restraint, he said, “Yes.”
“Well, I was deputizing for Uncle Claud,” said Maud, “and Alfred from The Viking came along to take a Lucky Dip. He pulled out this book. He seemed a bit fed up.”
“Fed up? Certainly I was fed up!” Alfred’s voice, thin and indignant, came from the outskirts of the crowd. “Call that a Lucky Dip! It was all in some foreign sort of writing.”
“What d’you expect for sixpence, Alf?” queried a local wit. “James Bond?”
“What did you do with it?” shouted Frank.
“Do with it? I gave it to the jumble.”
“Jumble!”
Frank Mason made a dive into the crowd.
Maud cried, “Frank” — and went after him.
Sir Claud remarked, “The young man is mad,” but he followed, picking pieces of jigsaw off his jacket as he went.
Violet grabbed Emmy’s arm, and cried, “Stop him, Mrs. Tibbett! Lady Fenshire will be out at any moment!” And the two of them set off in pursuit. It is hardly necessary to add that the faceless crowd came trailing along behind.
Isobel Thompson was taken by surprise. The jumble, or what remained of it, was at the far end of the lawn, and with so little stock left to sell, Mrs. Thompson was not taking her guardianship of the booth very seriously. In fact, when the invasion arrived, she was having a quiet cigarette and a chat with her husband, who had just completed his afternoon round of calls and was paying his duty visit to the Fête.
The Thompsons’ first intimation that the comparative peace of the evening was shattered forever was Frank’s hunting cry of “Where is it? Where is it?” And then bedlam broke loose. The trestle table was overturned, the remaining feathered hats and decorated pots flew in all directions; Isobel Thompson screamed; Alec Thompson swore; and Violet Manciple burst into tears.
In the midst of the confusion Maud said clearly and coldly, “It’s not here, Frank. You can see that for yourself.”
“What’s the matter? What do you all want?” Isobel’s voice was a squeak of alarm and emotion.
Maud said, “Alfred brought you a book to sell…”
Isobel’s face cleared a little. “Yes, that’s right. He’d gotten it in the Lucky Dip, and he said he couldn’t make head nor tail of it, and that I could have it for jumble…”
“All in foreign writing,” added Alfred from the outskirts.
“What happened to it?” demanded Frank. Sweat was beginning to run down his face, making furrows in the bran.
“Lady Manciple bought it,” said Isobel.
“Aunt Ramona?” Maud queried.
“That’s right. She said something about it being a Manciple book. She was having her tea break. She took it with her, back into the fortune teller’s tent.”
There was a moment of bated breath, while every head turned toward the frail canvas structure embellished with golden paper stars and mysterious zodiacal signs. Then the hunt was off again in full cry.
Inside the tent Ramona had laid out a row of grubby cards and was gazing earnestly into the upturned fish bowl. It was curious, she thought to herself, how she sometimes did have an intuition about these things. Not that she subscribed to any of Aunt Dora’s ridiculous superstitions, of course. She and Claud were both devout atheists, materialists, and humanists. They believed in what they could see and hear and smell and touch. Nevertheless, playing this childish game of fortune-telling, Ramona sometimes had strange misgivings. The cards and the gold fish bowl did, more and more frequently, seem to raise images in her mind. Purely subjective, of course. Ramona wondered whether she might be imagining things as a result of guilt feelings, a consciousness of betraying her convictions by supporting so barbaric and outdated a cause as the Church Roof Restoration Fund, The church, of course, fulfilled a certain social function; she and Claud were agreed on that. But they were both convinced that as the age of scientific enlightenment dawned, the church would wither away spontaneously, her usefulness outlived and her bigoted dogmas swallowed up in the light of pure reason. Edwin, of course, would never understand this point of view, and it had given rise to many stimulating discussions within the family circle.