Towards sunset the fair itself became quiescent. It was the hour for the
dancing to begin. At one side of the village of tents a space had been
roped off. Acetylene lamps, hung round it on posts, cast a piercing
white light. In one corner sat the band, and, obedient to its scraping
and blowing, two or three hundred dancers trampled across the dry
ground, wearing away the grass with their booted feet. Round this patch
of all but daylight, alive with motion and noise, the night seemed
preternaturally dark. Bars of light reached out into it, and every now
and then a lonely figure or a couple of lovers, interlaced, would cross
the bright shaft, flashing for a moment into visible existence, to
disappear again as quickly and surprisingly as they had come.
Denis stood by the entrance of the enclosure, watching the swaying,
shuffling crowd. The slow vortex brought the couples round and round
again before him, as though he were passing them in review. There
was Priscilla, still wearing her queenly toque, still encouraging the
villagers--this time by dancing with one of the tenant farmers. There
was Lord Moleyn, who had stayed on to the disorganised, passoverish
meal that took the place of dinner on this festal day; he one-stepped
shamblingly, his bent knees more precariously wobbly than ever, with a
terrified village beauty. Mr. Scogan trotted round with another. Mary
was in the embrace of a young farmer of heroic proportions; she was
looking up at him, talking, as Denis could see, very seriously. What
about? he wondered. The Malthusian League, perhaps. Seated in the corner
among the band, Jenny was performing wonders of virtuosity upon the
drums. Her eyes shone, she smiled to herself. A whole subterranean life
seemed to be expressing itself in those loud rat-tats, those long rolls
and flourishes of drumming. Looking at her, Denis ruefully remembered
the red notebook; he wondered what sort of a figure he was cutting now.
But the sight of Anne and Gombauld swimming past--Anne with her eyes
almost shut and sleeping, as it were, on the sustaining wings of
movement and music--dissipated these preoccupations. Male and female
created He them...There they were, Anne and Gombauld, and a hundred
couples more--all stepping harmoniously together to the old tune of Male
and Female created He them. But Denis sat apart; he alone lacked his
complementary opposite. They were all coupled but he; all but he...
Somebody touched him on the shoulder and he looked up. It was Henry
Wimbush.
“I never showed you our oaken drainpipes,” he said. “Some of the ones
we dug up are lying quite close to here. Would you like to come and see
them?”
Denis got up, and they walked off together into the darkness. The music
grew fainter behind them. Some of the higher notes faded out altogether.
Jenny’s drumming and the steady sawing of the bass throbbed on, tuneless
and meaningless in their ears. Henry Wimbush halted.
“Here we are,” he said, and, taking an electric torch out of his pocket,
he cast a dim beam over two or three blackened sections of tree trunk,
scooped out into the semblance of pipes, which were lying forlornly in a
little depression in the ground.
“Very interesting,” said Denis, with a rather tepid enthusiasm.
They sat down on the grass. A faint white glare, rising from behind a
belt of trees, indicated the position of the dancing-floor. The music
was nothing but a muffled rhythmic pulse.
“I shall be glad,” said Henry Wimbush, “when this function comes at last
to an end.”
“I can believe it.”
“I do not know how it is,” Mr. Wimbush continued, “but the spectacle
of numbers of my fellow-creatures in a state of agitation moves in me
a certain weariness, rather than any gaiety or excitement. The fact is,
they don’t very much interest me. They’re aren’t in my line. You follow
me? I could never take much interest, for example, in a collection of
postage stamps. Primitives or seventeenth-century books--yes. They are
my line. But stamps, no. I don’t know anything about them; they’re not
my line. They don’t interest me, they give me no emotion. It’s rather
the same with people, I’m afraid. I’m more at home with these pipes.”
He jerked his head sideways towards the hollowed logs. “The trouble with
the people and events of the present is that you never know anything
about them. What do I know of contemporary politics? Nothing. What do I
know of the people I see round about me? Nothing. What they think of
me or of anything else in the world, what they will do in five minutes’
time, are things I can’t guess at. For all I know, you may suddenly jump
up and try to murder me in a moment’s time.”
“Come, come,” said Denis.
“True,” Mr. Wimbush continued, “the little I know about your past is
certainly reassuring. But I know nothing of your present, and neither
you nor I know anything of your future. It’s appalling; in living
people, one is dealing with unknown and unknowable quantities. One can
only hope to find out anything about them by a long series of the most
disagreeable and boring human contacts, involving a terrible expense
of time. It’s the same with current events; how can I find out anything
about them except by devoting years to the most exhausting first-hand
study, involving once more an endless number of the most unpleasant
contacts? No, give me the past. It doesn’t change; it’s all there
in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and
decorously and, above all, privately--by reading. By reading I know a
great deal of Caesar Borgia, of St. Francis, of Dr. Johnson; a few weeks
have made me thoroughly acquainted with these interesting characters,
and I have been spared the tedious and revolting process of getting to
know them by personal contact, which I should have to do if they were
living now. How gay and delightful life would be if one could get rid
of all the human contacts! Perhaps, in the future, when machines have
attained to a state of perfection--for I confess that I am, like
Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility
of machinery--then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like
myself, desire it, to live in a dignified seclusion, surrounded by the
delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure
from any human intrusion. It is a beautiful thought.”
“Beautiful,” Denis agreed. “But what about the desirable human contacts,
like love and friendship?”
The black silhouette against the darkness shook its head. “The pleasures
even of these contacts are much exaggerated,” said the polite level
voice. “It seems to me doubtful whether they are equal to the pleasures
of private reading and contemplation. Human contacts have been so highly
valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment
and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce. The world, you
must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more
and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people
will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social
life and none of its intolerable tedium. At present people in search
of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a
noise; in future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and
quiet. The proper study of mankind is books.”
“I sometimes think that it may be,” said Denis; he was wondering if Anne
and Gombauld were still dancing together.
“Instead of which,” said Mr. Wimbush, with a sigh, “I must go and see if
all is well on the dancing-floor.” They got up and began to walk slowly
towards the white glare. “If all these people were dead,” Henry Wimbush
went on, “this festivity would be extremely agreeable. Nothing would be
pleasanter than to read in a well-written book of an open-air ball that
took place a century ago. How charming! one would say; how pretty
and how amusing! But when the ball takes place to-day, when one finds
oneself involved in it, then one sees the thing in its true light. It
turns out to be merely this.” He waved his hand in the direction of
the acetylene flares. “In my youth,” he went on after a pause, “I
found myself, quite fortuitously, involved in a series of the most
phantasmagorical amorous intrigues. A novelist could have made his
fortune out of them, and even if I were to tell you, in my bald style,
the details of these adventures, you would be amazed at the romantic
tale. But I assure you, while they were happening--these romantic
adventures--they seemed to me no more and no less exciting than any
other incident of actual life. To climb by night up a rope-ladder to a
second-floor window in an old house in Toledo seemed to me, while I was
actually performing this rather dangerous feat, an action as obvious, as
much to be taken for granted, as--how shall I put it?--as quotidian as
catching the 8.52 from Surbiton to go to business on a Monday morning.
Adventures and romance only take on their adventurous and romantic
qualities at second-hand. Live them, and they are just a slice of life
like the rest. In literature they become as charming as this dismal ball
would be if we were celebrating its tercentenary.” They had come to
the entrance of the enclosure and stood there, blinking in the dazzling
light. “Ah, if only we were!” Henry Wimbush added.
Anne and Gombauld were still dancing together.