Page 25 of Crome Yellow


  CHAPTER XXV.

  "I hope you all realise," said Henry Wimbush during dinner, "that nextMonday is Bank Holiday, and that you will all be expected to help in theFair."

  "Heavens!" cried Anne. "The Fair--I had forgotten all about it. What anightmare! Couldn't you put a stop to it, Uncle Henry?"

  Mr. Wimbush sighed and shook his head. "Alas," he said, "I fear Icannot. I should have liked to put an end to it years ago; but theclaims of Charity are strong."

  "It's not charity we want," Anne murmured rebelliously; "it's justice."

  "Besides," Mr. Wimbush went on, "the Fair has become an institution. Letme see, it must be twenty-two years since we started it. It was a modestaffair then. Now..." he made a sweeping movement with his hand and wassilent.

  It spoke highly for Mr. Wimbush's public spirit that he still continuedto tolerate the Fair. Beginning as a sort of glorified churchbazaar, Crome's yearly Charity Fair had grown into a noisy thing ofmerry-go-rounds, cocoanut shies, and miscellaneous side shows--a realgenuine fair on the grand scale. It was the local St. Bartholomew, andthe people of all the neighbouring villages, with even a contingent fromthe county town, flocked into the park for their Bank Holiday amusement.The local hospital profited handsomely, and it was this fact alone whichprevented Mr. Wimbush, to whom the Fair was a cause of recurrent andnever-diminishing agony, from putting a stop to the nuisance whichyearly desecrated his park and garden.

  "I've made all the arrangements already," Henry Wimbush went on. "Someof the larger marquees will be put up to-morrow. The swings and themerry-go-round arrive on Sunday."

  "So there's no escape," said Anne, turning to the rest of the party."You'll all have to do something. As a special favour you're allowedto choose your slavery. My job is the tea tent, as usual, AuntPriscilla..."

  "My dear," said Mrs. Wimbush, interrupting her, "I have more importantthings to think about than the Fair. But you need have no doubt that Ishall do my best when Monday comes to encourage the villagers."

  "That's splendid," said Anne. "Aunt Priscilla will encourage thevillagers. What will you do, Mary?"

  "I won't do anything where I have to stand by and watch other peopleeat."

  "Then you'll look after the children's sports."

  "All right," Mary agreed. "I'll look after the children's sports."

  "And Mr. Scogan?"

  Mr. Scogan reflected. "May I be allowed to tell fortunes?" he asked atlast. "I think I should be good at telling fortunes."

  "But you can't tell fortunes in that costume!"

  "Can't I?" Mr. Scogan surveyed himself.

  "You'll have to be dressed up. Do you still persist?"

  "I'm ready to suffer all indignities."

  "Good!" said Anne; and turning to Gombauld, "You must be our lightningartist," she said. "'Your portrait for a shilling in five minutes.'"

  "It's a pity I'm not Ivor," said Gombauld, with a laugh. "I could throwin a picture of their Auras for an extra sixpence."

  Mary flushed. "Nothing is to be gained," she said severely, "by speakingwith levity of serious subjects. And, after all, whatever your personalviews may be, psychical research is a perfectly serious subject."

  "And what about Denis?"

  Denis made a deprecating gesture. "I have no accomplishments," he said,"I'll just be one of those men who wear a thing in their buttonholes andgo about telling people which is the way to tea and not to walk on thegrass."

  "No, no," said Anne. "That won't do. You must do something more thanthat."

  "But what? All the good jobs are taken, and I can do nothing but lisp innumbers."

  "Well, then, you must lisp," concluded Anne. "You must write a poem forthe occasion--an 'Ode on Bank Holiday.' We'll print it on Uncle Henry'spress and sell it at twopence a copy."

  "Sixpence," Denis protested. "It'll be worth sixpence."

  Anne shook her head. "Twopence," she repeated firmly. "Nobody will paymore than twopence."

  "And now there's Jenny," said Mr Wimbush. "Jenny," he said, raising hisvoice, "what will you do?"

  Denis thought of suggesting that she might draw caricatures at sixpencean execution, but decided it would be wiser to go on feigning ignoranceof her talent. His mind reverted to the red notebook. Could it really betrue that he looked like that?

  "What will I do," Jenny echoed, "what will I do?" She frownedthoughtfully for a moment; then her face brightened and she smiled."When I was young," she said, "I learnt to play the drums."

  "The drums?"

  Jenny nodded, and, in proof of her assertion, agitated her knifeand fork, like a pair of drumsticks, over her plate. "If there's anyopportunity of playing the drums..." she began.

  "But of course," said Anne, "there's any amount of opportunity. We'llput you down definitely for the drums. That's the lot," she added.

  "And a very good lot too," said Gombauld. "I look forward to my BankHoliday. It ought to be gay."

  "It ought indeed," Mr Scogan assented. "But you may rest assured that itwon't be. No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment."

  "Come, come," protested Gombauld. "My holiday at Crome isn't being adisappointment."

  "Isn't it?" Anne turned an ingenuous mask towards him.

  "No, it isn't," he answered.

  "I'm delighted to hear it."

  "It's in the very nature of things," Mr. Scogan went on; "our holidayscan't help being disappointments. Reflect for a moment. What is aholiday? The ideal, the Platonic Holiday of Holidays is surely acomplete and absolute change. You agree with me in my definition?" Mr.Scogan glanced from face to face round the table; his sharp nose movedin a series of rapid jerks through all the points of the compass. Therewas no sign of dissent; he continued: "A complete and absolute change;very well. But isn't a complete and absolute change precisely the thingwe can never have--never, in the very nature of things?" Mr. Scoganonce more looked rapidly about him. "Of course it is. As ourselves, asspecimens of Homo Sapiens, as members of a society, how can we hope tohave anything like an absolute change? We are tied down by the frightfullimitation of our human faculties, by the notions which society imposeson us through our fatal suggestibility, by our own personalities. Forus, a complete holiday is out of the question. Some of us strugglemanfully to take one, but we never succeed, if I may be allowed toexpress myself metaphorically, we never succeed in getting farther thanSouthend."

  "You're depressing," said Anne.

  "I mean to be," Mr. Scogan replied, and, expanding the fingers of hisright hand, he went on: "Look at me, for example. What sort of a holidaycan I take? In endowing me with passions and faculties Nature has beenhorribly niggardly. The full range of human potentialities is inany case distressingly limited; my range is a limitation within alimitation. Out of the ten octaves that make up the human instrument,I can compass perhaps two. Thus, while I may have a certain amountof intelligence, I have no aesthetic sense; while I possess themathematical faculty, I am wholly without the religious emotions; whileI am naturally addicted to venery, I have little ambition and am notat all avaricious. Education has further limited my scope. Having beenbrought up in society, I am impregnated with its laws; not only shouldI be afraid of taking a holiday from them, I should also feel it painfulto try to do so. In a word, I have a conscience as well as a fear ofgaol. Yes, I know it by experience. How often have I tried to takeholidays, to get away from myself, my own boring nature, my insufferablemental surroundings!" Mr. Scogan sighed. "But always withoutsuccess," he added, "always without success. In my youth I was alwaysstriving--how hard!--to feel religiously and aesthetically. Here, saidI to myself, are two tremendously important and exciting emotions. Lifewould be richer, warmer, brighter, altogether more amusing, if I couldfeel them. I try to feel them. I read the works of the mystics. Theyseemed to me nothing but the most deplorable claptrap--as indeed theyalways must to anyone who does not feel the same emotion as the authorsfelt when they were writing. For it is the emotion that matters. Thewritten work is simply an attempt to express emotion, which
is in itselfinexpressible, in terms of intellect and logic. The mystic objectifiesa rich feeling in the pit of the stomach into a cosmology. For othermystics that cosmology is a symbol of the rich feeling. For theunreligious it is a symbol of nothing, and so appears merely grotesque.A melancholy fact! But I divagate." Mr. Scogan checked himself. "So muchfor the religious emotion. As for the aesthetic--I was at even greaterpains to cultivate that. I have looked at all the right works of artin every part of Europe. There was a time when, I venture to believe,I knew more about Taddeo da Poggibonsi, more about the cryptic Amicodi Taddeo, even than Henry does. To-day, I am happy to say, I haveforgotten most of the knowledge I then so laboriously acquired; butwithout vanity I can assert that it was prodigious. I don't pretend, ofcourse, to know anything about nigger sculpture or the later seventeenthcentury in Italy; but about all the periods that were fashionable before1900 I am, or was, omniscient. Yes, I repeat it, omniscient. But didthat fact make me any more appreciative of art in general? It did not.Confronted by a picture, of which I could tell you all the known andpresumed history--the date when it was painted, the character of thepainter, the influences that had gone to make it what it was--I feltnone of that strange excitement and exaltation which is, as I aminformed by those who do feel it, the true aesthetic emotion. I feltnothing but a certain interest in the subject of the picture; or moreoften, when the subject was hackneyed and religious, I felt nothing buta great weariness of spirit. Nevertheless, I must have gone on lookingat pictures for ten years before I would honestly admit to myself thatthey merely bored me. Since then I have given up all attempts to takea holiday. I go on cultivating my old stale daily self in the resignedspirit with which a bank clerk performs from ten till six his dailytask. A holiday, indeed! I'm sorry for you, Gombauld, if you still lookforward to having a holiday."

  Gombauld shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps," he said, "my standardsaren't as elevated as yours. But personally I found the war quite asthorough a holiday from all the ordinary decencies and sanities, all thecommon emotions and preoccupations, as I ever want to have."

  "Yes," Mr. Scogan thoughtfully agreed. "Yes, the war was certainlysomething of a holiday. It was a step beyond Southend; it wasWeston-super-Mare; it was almost Ilfracombe."