I hope you all realise,” said Henry Wimbush during dinner, “that next
Monday is Bank Holiday, and that you will all be expected to help in the
Fair.”
“Heavens!” cried Anne. “The Fair--I had forgotten all about it. What a
nightmare! Couldn’t you put a stop to it, Uncle Henry?”
Mr. Wimbush sighed and shook his head. “Alas,” he said, “I fear I
cannot. I should have liked to put an end to it years ago; but the
claims 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. Let
me see, it must be twenty-two years since we started it. It was a modest
affair then. Now...” he made a sweeping movement with his hand and was
silent.
It spoke highly for Mr. Wimbush’s public spirit that he still continued
to tolerate the Fair. Beginning as a sort of glorified church
bazaar, Crome’s yearly Charity Fair had grown into a noisy thing of
merry-go-rounds, cocoanut shies, and miscellaneous side shows--a real
genuine fair on the grand scale. It was the local St. Bartholomew, and
the people of all the neighbouring villages, with even a contingent from
the county town, flocked into the park for their Bank Holiday amusement.
The local hospital profited handsomely, and it was this fact alone which
prevented Mr. Wimbush, to whom the Fair was a cause of recurrent and
never-diminishing agony, from putting a stop to the nuisance which
yearly desecrated his park and garden.
“I’ve made all the arrangements already,” Henry Wimbush went on. “Some
of the larger marquees will be put up to-morrow. The swings and the
merry-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 allowed
to choose your slavery. My job is the tea tent, as usual, Aunt
Priscilla...”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Wimbush, interrupting her, “I have more important
things to think about than the Fair. But you need have no doubt that I
shall do my best when Monday comes to encourage the villagers.”
“That’s splendid,” said Anne. “Aunt Priscilla will encourage the
villagers. What will you do, Mary?”
“I won’t do anything where I have to stand by and watch other people
eat.”
“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 at
last. “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 lightning
artist,” 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 throw
in a picture of their Auras for an extra sixpence.”
Mary flushed. “Nothing is to be gained,” she said severely, “by speaking
with levity of serious subjects. And, after all, whatever your personal
views 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 and
go about telling people which is the way to tea and not to walk on the
grass.”
“No, no,” said Anne. “That won’t do. You must do something more than
that.”
“But what? All the good jobs are taken, and I can do nothing but lisp in
numbers.”
“Well, then, you must lisp,” concluded Anne. “You must write a poem for
the occasion--an ‘Ode on Bank Holiday.’ We’ll print it on Uncle Henry’s
press 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 pay
more than twopence.”
“And now there’s Jenny,” said Mr Wimbush. “Jenny,” he said, raising his
voice, “what will you do?”
Denis thought of suggesting that she might draw caricatures at sixpence
an execution, but decided it would be wiser to go on feigning ignorance
of her talent. His mind reverted to the red notebook. Could it really be
true that he looked like that?
“What will I do,” Jenny echoed, “what will I do?” She frowned
thoughtfully 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 knife
and fork, like a pair of drumsticks, over her plate. “If there’s any
opportunity of playing the drums...” she began.
“But of course,” said Anne, “there’s any amount of opportunity. We’ll
put 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 Bank
Holiday. It ought to be gay.”
“It ought indeed,” Mr Scogan assented. “But you may rest assured that it
won’t be. No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment.”
“Come, come,” protested Gombauld. “My holiday at Crome isn’t being a
disappointment.”
“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 holidays
can’t help being disappointments. Reflect for a moment. What is a
holiday? The ideal, the Platonic Holiday of Holidays is surely a
complete and absolute change. You agree with me in my definition?” Mr.
Scogan glanced from face to face round the table; his sharp nose moved
in a series of rapid jerks through all the points of the compass. There
was no sign of dissent; he continued: “A complete and absolute change;
very well. But isn’t a complete and absolute change precisely the thing
we can never have--never, in the very nature of things?” Mr. Scogan
once more looked rapidly about him. “Of course it is. As ourselves, as
specimens of Homo Sapiens, as members of a society, how can we hope to
have anything like an absolute change? We are tied down by the frightful
limitation of our human faculties, by the notions which society imposes
on us through our fatal suggestibility, by our own personalities. For
us, a complete holiday is out of the question. Some of us struggle
manfully to take one, but we never succeed, if I may be allowed to
express myself metaphorically, we never succeed in getting farther than
Southend.”
“You’re depressing,” said Anne.
“I mean to be,” Mr. Scogan replied, and, expanding the fingers of his
right hand, he went on: “Look at me, for example. What sort of a holiday
can I take? In endowing me with passions and faculties Nature has been
horribly niggardly. The full range of human potentialities is in
any case distressingly limited; my range is a limitation within a
limitation. Out of the ten octaves that make up the human instrument,
I can compass perhaps two. Thus, while I may have a certain amount
of intelligence, I have no aesthetic sense; while I possess the
mathematical faculty, I am wholly without the religious emotions; while
I am naturally addicted to venery, I have little ambition and am not
at all avaricious. Education has further limited my scope. Having been
brought up in society, I am impregnated with its laws; not only should
I be afraid of taking a holiday from them, I should also feel it painful
to try to do so. In a word, I have a conscience as well as a fear of
gaol. Yes, I know it by experience. How often have I tried to take
holidays, to get away from myself, my own boring nature, my insufferable
mental surroundings!” Mr. Scogan sighed. “But always without
success,” he added, “always without success. In my youth I was always
striving--how hard!--to feel religiously and aesthetically. Here, said
I to myself, are two tremendously important and exciting emotions. Life
would be richer, warmer, brighter, altogether more amusing, if I could
feel them. I try to feel them. I read the works of the mystics. They
seemed to me nothing but the most deplorable claptrap--as indeed they
always must to anyone who does not feel the same emotion as the authors
felt when they were writing. For it is the emotion that matters. The
written work is simply an attempt to express emotion, which is in itself
inexpressible, in terms of intellect and logic. The mystic objectifies
a rich feeling in the pit of the stomach into a cosmology. For other
mystics that cosmology is a symbol of the rich feeling. For the
unreligious it is a symbol of nothing, and so appears merely grotesque.
A melancholy fact! But I divagate.” Mr. Scogan checked himself. “So much
for the religious emotion. As for the aesthetic--I was at even greater
pains to cultivate that. I have looked at all the right works of art
in every part of Europe. There was a time when, I venture to believe,
I knew more about Taddeo da Poggibonsi, more about the cryptic Amico
di Taddeo, even than Henry does. To-day, I am happy to say, I have
forgotten most of the knowledge I then so laboriously acquired; but
without vanity I can assert that it was prodigious. I don’t pretend, of
course, to know anything about nigger sculpture or the later seventeenth
century in Italy; but about all the periods that were fashionable before
1900 I am, or was, omniscient. Yes, I repeat it, omniscient. But did
that 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 and
presumed history--the date when it was painted, the character of the
painter, the influences that had gone to make it what it was--I felt
none of that strange excitement and exaltation which is, as I am
informed by those who do feel it, the true aesthetic emotion. I felt
nothing but a certain interest in the subject of the picture; or more
often, when the subject was hackneyed and religious, I felt nothing but
a great weariness of spirit. Nevertheless, I must have gone on looking
at pictures for ten years before I would honestly admit to myself that
they merely bored me. Since then I have given up all attempts to take
a holiday. I go on cultivating my old stale daily self in the resigned
spirit with which a bank clerk performs from ten till six his daily
task. A holiday, indeed! I’m sorry for you, Gombauld, if you still look
forward to having a holiday.”
Gombauld shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps,” he said, “my standards
aren’t as elevated as yours. But personally I found the war quite as
thorough a holiday from all the ordinary decencies and sanities, all the
common emotions and preoccupations, as I ever want to have.”
“Yes,” Mr. Scogan thoughtfully agreed. “Yes, the war was certainly
something of a holiday. It was a step beyond Southend; it was
Weston-super-Mare; it was almost Ilfracombe.”