Free Gazooka by Gwyn Thomas Page A

easily negotiable. They commandeered a hearse. An unbelievable number of them managed to clamber aboard and they began their journey with that erratic reciter, Theo Morgan the Monologue, at the wheel and keeping his head bent in comical sorrow until the hearse hit the kerb and jerked a couple of the Dixies on to the roadway. Some gazooka players fell in behind and struck up with a funeral hymn so magical in its scope for sensuous harmony it had caused many a mourner to forget the body. Mayer the Layer came out of his house full of fury at the sight of his burglared yard but he had to follow behind saying not a word because he had taken a vow never to interfere in any way with the singing of that particular hymn because it had sent up the figures for funeral attendance a hundred per cent. Mayer even joined in loudly in the lower register. He had always said that had it not been for the excluding nature of his trade he could have done something as a baritone.
    And with every yard advanced by that strange cortège a candle on its windowsill was extinguished by a housewife eager not to waste the tallow on an empty midnight and wishful not to seem to mock the Sons of Dixie in their hour of hollowness.
    That memory made us all the more anxious as we watched Cynlais and his followers practise up on the flat moorland. It seemed that Cynlais’ hour had come. The toreador role lifted him on to a plane of joyful release, and once the slower bands men had been persuaded that with this move into Spain ‘Colonel Bogey’ would be definitely out of place the musical side of it went well. Festus Phelps the Fancy created a bit of confusion during the early stages of preparation. Festus’ attitude to the bands had been becoming steadily more antic as his power and influence as artistic adviser had increased. He had been delighted when Cynlais and his band had decided to become bullfighters because he had read many books about the bulls and rather fancied that he himself had the shape and style to have done well at this exercise. He felt this all the more keenly because a few years before Silcox and a group of fanciers at the Institute had told Phelps that he had the shape and look of Carpentier. He had one fight. He went into the ring, superbly handsome but totally inept in the use of his hands and attended by two of the least aware voters in Meadow Prospect who were to be his seconds. They believed that Festus would win by grace of footwork and they were still massaging Festus’ feet when the first bell went. The opponent’s opening view of Festus was a figure falling on his face for no reason that he could see. He helped Festus to his feet and set to work. Festus was in the ring twenty seconds, but that was only because the referee was a slow counter even when not doing it over the form of a man as prone and still as Festus was at that moment. Since then Festus had felt that in a sport like bullfighting he would find the right field for the passion and solitariness he knew to be his, without having the clumsy folly of his fellow men clogging the pipes of his talent every whipstitch. So he tackled his advisory job with the Meadow Prospect Matadors like a crusader.
    At a full meeting of the bandsmen at the Institute he explained to them the main movements of the bullfight, comparing them with the phases of a symphony to which he applied the proper Italian terms. Then he told them about the moment of truth, the moment at which the bullfighter faces the bull with a tension of courage that makes life imperishably resonant, when he slaps death’s both cheeks and dares it to try on him any of the infamous betrayals whereby it had made shoddy and shuffling fools of the whole race of men. Festus, on the platform, looked right into death’s eyes, taking a little time off now and then to throw looks of freezing contempt at the bandsmen whom he saw as the sweating, treacherous, contumelious ticket holders in the sun and