For the sake of peace and quiet Denis had retired earlier on this same afternoon to his bedroom. He wanted to work, but the hour was a drowsy one, and lunch, so recently eaten, weighed heavily on body and mind. The meridian demon was upon him; he was possessed by that bored and hopeless post-prandial melancholy which the coenobites of old knew and feared under the name of “accidie.” He felt, like Ernest Dowson, “a little weary.” He was in the mood to write something rather exquisite and gentle and quietist in tone; something a little droopy and at the same time—how should he put it?—a little infinite. He thought of Anne, of love hopeless and unattainable. Perhaps that was the ideal kind of love, the hopeless kind—the quiet, theoretical kind of love. In this sad mood of repletion he could well believe it. He began to write. One elegant quatrain had flowed from beneath his pen:
“A brooding love which is at most
The stealth of moonbeams when they slide,
Evoking colour’s bloodless ghost,
O’er some scarce-breathing breast or side...”
when his attention was attracted by a sound from outside. He looked down from his window; there they were, Anne and Gombauld, talking, laughing together. They crossed the courtyard in front, and passed out of sight through the gate in the right-hand wall. That was the way to the green close and the granary; she was going to sit for him again. His pleasantly depressing melancholy was dissipated by a puff of violent emotion; angrily he threw his quatrain into the waste-paper basket and ran downstairs. “The stealth of moonbeams,” indeed!
In the hall he saw Mr. Scogan; the man seemed to be lying in wait. Denis tried to escape, but in vain. Mr. Scogan’s eye glittered like the eye of the Ancient Mariner.
“Not so fast,” he said, stretching out a small saurian hand with pointed nails—“not so fast. I was just going down to the flower garden to take the sun. We’ll go together.”
Denis abandoned himself; Mr. Scogan put on his hat and they went out arm in arm. On the shaven turf of the terrace Henry Wimbush and Mary were playing a solemn game of bowls. They descended by the yew-tree walk. It was here, thought Denis, here that Anne had fallen, here that he had kissed her, here—and he blushed with retrospective shame at the memory—here that he had tried to carry her and failed. Life was awful!
“Sanity!” said Mr. Scogan, suddenly breaking a long silence. “Sanity—that’s what’s wrong with me and that’s what will be wrong with you, my dear Denis, when you’re old enough to be sane or insane. In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don’t exist. I am just Vox et praeterea nihil.”
Denis made no response; he was thinking of other things. “After all,” he said to himself—“after all, Gombauld is better looking than I, more entertaining, more confident; and, besides, he’s already somebody and I’m still only potential...”
“Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen,” Mr. Scogan went on. Denis tried not to listen, but the tireless insistence of Mr. Scogan’s discourse gradually compelled his attention. “Men such as I am, such as you may possibly become, have never achieved anything. We’re too sane; we’re merely reasonable. We lack the human touch, the compelling enthusiastic mania. People are quite ready to listen to the philosophers for a little amusement, just as they would listen to a fiddler or a mountebank. But as to acting on the advice of the men of reason—never. Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory—reason.”
They entered the garden; at the head of one of the alleys stood a green wooden bench, embayed in the midst of a fragrant continent of lavender bushes. It was here, though the place was shadeless and one breathed hot, dry perfume instead of air—it was here that Mr. Scogan elected to sit. He thrived on untempered sunlight.
“Consider, for example, the case of Luther and Erasmus.” He took out his pipe and began to fill it as he talked. “There was Erasmus, a man of reason if ever there was one. People listened to him at first—a new virtuoso performing on that elegant and resourceful instrument, the intellect; they even admired and venerated him. But did he move them to behave as he wanted them to behave—reasonably, decently, or at least a little less porkishly than usual? He did not. And then Luther appears, violent, passionate, a madman insanely convinced about matters in which there can be no conviction. He shouted, and men rushed to follow him. Erasmus was no longer listened to; he was reviled for his reasonableness. Luther was serious, Luther was reality—like the Great War. Erasmus was only reason and decency; he lacked the power, being a sage, to move men to action. Europe followed Luther and embarked on a century and a half of war and bloody persecution. It’s a melancholy story.” Mr. Scogan lighted a match. In the intense light the flame was all but invisible. The smell of burning tobacco began to mingle with the sweetly acrid smell of the lavender.
“If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about persuading them in a maniacal manner. The very sane precepts of the founders of religions are only made infectious by means of enthusiasms which to a sane man must appear deplorable. It is humiliating to find how impotent unadulterated sanity is. Sanity, for example, informs us that the only way in which we can preserve civilisation is by behaving decently and intelligently. Sanity appeals and argues; our rulers persevere in their customary porkishness, while we acquiesce and obey. The only hope is a maniacal crusade; I am ready, when it comes, to beat a tambourine with the loudest, but at the same time I shall feel a little ashamed of myself. However”—Mr. Scogan shrugged his shoulders and, pipe in hand, made a gesture of resignation—“It’s futile to complain that things are as they are. The fact remains that sanity unassisted is useless. What we want, then, is a sane and reasonable exploitation of the forces of insanity. We sane men will have the power yet.” Mr. Scogan’s eyes shone with a more than ordinary brightness, and, taking his pipe out of his mouth, he gave vent to his loud, dry, and somehow rather fiendish laugh.
“But I don’t want power,” said Denis. He was sitting in limp discomfort at one end of the bench, shading his eyes from the intolerable light. Mr. Scogan, bolt upright at the other end, laughed again.
“Everybody wants power,” he said. “Power in some form or other. The sort of power you hanker for is literary power. Some people want power to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust for power in persecuting words, twisting them, moulding them, torturing them to obey you. But I divagate.”
“Do you?” asked Denis faintly.
“Yes,” Mr. Scogan continued, unheeding, “the time will come. We men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities to the service of reason. We can’t leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can’t allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on casually appearing and turning everything upside down. In the past it didn’t so much matter; but our modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world’s maniacs is canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo...”
“Making electricity to light a Swiss hotel,” said Denis. “You ought to complete the simile.”
Mr. Scogan waved away the interruption. “There’s only one thing to be done,” he said. “The men of intelligence must combine, must conspire, and seize power from the imbeciles and maniacs who now direct us. They must found the Rational State.”
The heat that was slowly paralysing all Denis’s mental and bodily faculties, seemed to bring to Mr. Scogan additional vitality. He talked with an ever-increasing energy, his hands moved in sharp, quick, precise gestures, his eyes shone. Hard, dry, and continuous, his voice went on sounding and sounding in Denis’s ears with the insistence of a mechanical noise.
“In the Rational State,” he heard Mr. Scogan saying, “human beings will be separated out into distinct species, not according to the colour of their eyes or the shape of their skulls, but according to the qualities of their mind and temperament. Examining psychologists, trained to what would now seem an almost superhuman clairvoyance, will test each child that is born and assign it to its proper species. Duly labelled and docketed, the child will be given the education suitable to members of its species, and will be set, in adult life, to perform those functions which human beings of his variety are capable of performing.”
“How many species will there be?” asked Denis.
“A great many, no doubt,” Mr. Scogan answered; “the classification will be subtle and elaborate. But it is not in the power of a prophet to go into details, nor is it his business. I will do more than indicate the three main species into which the subjects of the Rational State will be divided.”
He paused, cleared his throat, and coughed once or twice, evoking in Denis’s mind the vision of a table with a glass and water-bottle, and, lying across one corner, a long white pointer for the lantern pictures.
“The three main species,” Mr. Scogan went on, “will be these: the Directing Intelligences, the Men of Faith, and the Herd. Among the Intelligences will be found all those capable of thought, those who know how to attain a certain degree of freedom—and, alas, how limited, even among the most intelligent, that freedom is!—from the mental bondage of their time. A select body of Intelligences, drawn from among those who have turned their attention to the problems of practical life, will be the governors of the Rational State. They will employ as their instruments of power the second great species of humanity—the men of Faith, the Madmen, as I have been calling them, who believe in things unreasonably, with passion, and are ready to die for their beliefs and their desires. These wild men, with their fearful potentialities for good or for mischief, will no longer be allowed to react casually to a casual environment. There will be no more Caesar Borgias, no more Luthers and Mohammeds, no more Joanna Southcotts, no more Comstocks. The old-fashioned Man of Faith and Desire, that haphazard creature of brute circumstance, who might drive men to tears and repentance, or who might equally well set them on to cutting one another’s throats, will be replaced by a new sort of madman, still externally the same, still bubbling with a seemingly spontaneous enthusiasm, but, ah, how very different from the madman of the past! For the new Man of Faith will be expending his passion, his desire, and his enthusiasm in the propagation of some reasonable idea. He will be, all unawares, the tool of some superior intelligence.”
Mr. Scogan chuckled maliciously; it was as though he were taking a revenge, in the name of reason, on enthusiasts. “From their earliest years, as soon, that is, as the examining psychologists have assigned them their place in the classified scheme, the Men of Faith will have had their special education under the eye of the Intelligences. Moulded by a long process of suggestion, they will go out into the world, preaching and practising with a generous mania the coldly reasonable projects of the Directors from above. When these projects are accomplished, or when the ideas that were useful a decade ago have ceased to be useful, the Intelligences will inspire a new generation of madmen with a new eternal truth. The principal function of the Men of Faith will be to move and direct the Multitude, that third great species consisting of those countless millions who lack intelligence and are without valuable enthusiasm. When any particular effort is required of the Herd, when it is thought necessary, for the sake of solidarity, that humanity shall be kindled and united by some single enthusiastic desire or idea, the Men of Faith, primed with some simple and satisfying creed, will be sent out on a mission of evangelisation. At ordinary times, when the high spiritual temperature of a Crusade would be unhealthy, the Men of Faith will be quietly and earnestly busy with the great work of education. In the upbringing of the Herd, humanity’s almost boundless suggestibility will be scientifically exploited. Systematically, from earliest infancy, its members will be assured that there is no happiness to be found except in work and obedience; they will be made to believe that they are happy, that they are tremendously important beings, and that everything they do is noble and significant. For the lower species the earth will be restored to the centre of the universe and man to pre-eminence on the earth. Oh, I envy the lot of the commonality in the Rational State! Working their eight hours a day, obeying their betters, convinced of their own grandeur and significance and immortality, they will be marvellously happy, happier than any race of men has ever been. They will go through life in a rosy state of intoxication, from which they will never awake. The Men of Faith will play the cup-bearers at this lifelong bacchanal, filling and ever filling again with the warm liquor that the Intelligences, in sad and sober privacy behind the scenes, will brew for the intoxication of their subjects.”
“And what will be my place in the Rational State?” Denis drowsily inquired from under his shading hand.
Mr. Scogan looked at him for a moment in silence. “It’s difficult to see where you would fit in,” he said at last. “You couldn’t do manual work; you’re too independent and unsuggestible to belong to the larger Herd; you have none of the characteristics required in a Man of Faith. As for the Directing Intelligences, they will have to be marvellously clear and merciless and penetrating.” He paused and shook his head. “No, I can see no place for you; only the lethal chamber.”
Deeply hurt, Denis emitted the imitation of a loud Homeric laugh. “I’m getting sunstroke here,” he said, and got up.
Mr. Scogan followed his example, and they walked slowly away down the narrow path, brushing the blue lavender flowers in their passage. Denis pulled a sprig of lavender and sniffed at it; then some dark leaves of rosemary that smelt like incense in a cavernous church. They passed a bed of opium poppies, dispetaled now; the round, ripe seedheads were brown and dry—like Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads stuck on poles. He liked the fancy enough to impart it to Mr. Scogan.
“Like Polynesian trophies...” Uttered aloud, the fancy seemed less charming and significant than it did when it first occurred to him.
There was a silence, and in a growing wave of sound the whir of the reaping machines swelled up from the fields beyond the garden and then receded into a remoter hum.
“It is satisfactory to think,” said Mr. Scogan, as they strolled slowly onward, “that a multitude of people are toiling in the harvest fields in order that we may talk of Polynesia. Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. Let us be duly thankful for that, my dear Denis—duly thankful,” he repeated, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
Denis was not listening. He had suddenly remembered Anne. She was with Gombauld—alone with him in his studio. It was an intolerable thought.
“Shall we go and pay a call on Gombauld?” he suggested carelessly. “It would be amusing to see what he’s doing now.”
He laughed inwardly to think how furious Gombauld would be when he saw them arriving.
Gombauld was by no means so furious at their apparition as Denis had hoped and expected he would be. Indeed, he was rather pleased than annoyed when the two faces, one brown and pointed, the other round and pale, appeared in the frame of the open door. The energy born of his restless irritation was dying within him, returning to its emotional elements. A moment more and he would have been losing his temper again—and Anne would be keeping hers, infuriatingly. Yes, he was positively glad to see them.
“Come in, come in,” he called out hospitably.
Followed by Mr. Scogan, Denis climbed the little ladder and stepped over the threshold. He looked suspiciously from Gombauld to his sitter, and could learn nothing from the expression of their faces except that they both seemed pleased to see the visitors. Were they really glad, or were they cunningly simulating gladness? He wondered.
Mr. Scogan, meanwhile, was looking at the portrait.
“Excellent,” he said approvingly, “excellent. Almost too true to character, if that is possible; yes, positively too true. But I’m surprised to find you putting in all this psychology business.” He pointed to the face, and with his extended finger followed the slack curves of the painted figure. “I thought you were one of the fellows who went in exclusively for balanced masses and impinging planes.”
Gombauld laughed. “This is a little infidelity,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Scogan. “I for one, without ever having had the slightest appreciation of painting, have always taken particular pleasure in Cubismus. I like to see pictures from which nature has been completely banished, pictures which are exclusively the product of the human mind. They give me the same pleasure as I derive from a good piece of reasoning or a mathematical problem or an achievement of engineering. Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and incomprehensible. I am at home with the works of man; if I choose to set my mind to it, I can understand anything that any man has made or thought. That is why I always travel by Tube, never by bus if I can possibly help it. For, travelling by bus, one can’t avoid seeing, even in London, a few stray works of God—the sky, for example, an occasional tree, the flowers in the window-boxes. But travel by Tube and you see nothing but the works of man—iron riveted into geometrical forms, straight lines of concrete, patterned expanses of tiles. All is human and the product of friendly and comprehensible minds. All philosophies and all religions—what are they but spiritual Tubes bored through the universe! Through these narrow tunnels, where all is recognisably human, one travels comfortable and secure, contriving to forget that all round and below and above them stretches the blind mass of earth, endless and unexplored. Yes, give me the Tube and Cubismus every time; give me ideas, so snug and neat and simple and well made. And preserve me from nature, preserve me from all that’s inhumanly large and complicated and obscure. I haven’t the courage, and, above all, I haven’t the time to start wandering in that labyrinth.”
While Mr. Scogan was discoursing, Denis had crossed over to the farther side of the little square chamber, where Anne was sitting, still in her graceful, lazy pose, on the low chair.
“Well?” he demanded, looking at her almost fiercely. What was he asking of her? He hardly knew himself.
Anne looked up at him, and for answer echoed his “Well?” in another, a laughing key.
Denis had nothing more, at the moment, to say. Two or three canvases stood in the corner behind Anne’s chair, their faces turned to the wall. He pulled them out and began to look at the paintings.
“May I see too?” Anne requested.
He stood them in a row against the wall. Anne had to turn round in her chair to look at them. There was the big canvas of the man fallen from the horse, there was a painting of flowers, there was a small landscape. His hands on the back of the chair, Denis leaned over her. From behind the easel at the other side of the room Mr. Scogan was talking away. For a long time they looked at the pictures, saying nothing; or, rather, Anne looked at the pictures, while Denis, for the most part, looked at Anne.
“I like the man and the horse; don’t you?” she said at last, looking up with an inquiring smile.
Denis nodded, and then in a queer, strangled voice, as though it had cost him a great effort to utter the words, he said, “I love you.”
It was a remark which Anne had heard a good many times before and mostly heard with equanimity. But on this occasion—perhaps because they had come so unexpectedly, perhaps for some other reason—the words provoked in her a certain surprised commotion.
“My poor Denis,” she managed to say, with a laugh; but she was blushing as she spoke.
It was noon. Denis, descending from his chamber, where he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular, found the drawing-room deserted. He was about to go out into the garden when his eye fell on a familiar but mysterious object—the large red notebook in which he had so often seen Jenny quietly and busily scribbling. She had left it lying on the window-seat. The temptation was great. He picked up the book and slipped off the elastic band that kept it discreetly closed.
“Private. Not to be opened,” was written in capital letters on the cover. He raised his eyebrows. It was the sort of thing one wrote in one’s Latin Grammar while one was still at one’s preparatory school.
“Black is the raven, black is the rook,
But blacker the thief who steals this book!”
It was curiously childish, he thought, and he smiled to himself. He opened the book. What he saw made him wince as though he had been struck.
Denis was his own severest critic; so, at least, he had always believed. He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul; he was Brown Dog to himself. His weaknesses, his absurdities—no one knew them better than he did. Indeed, in a vague way he imagined that nobody beside himself was aware of them at all. It seemed, somehow, inconceivable that he should appear to other people as they appeared to him; inconceivable that they ever spoke of him among themselves in that same freely critical and, to be quite honest, mildly malicious tone in which he was accustomed to talk of them. In his own eyes he had defects, but to see them was a privilege reserved to him alone. For the rest of the world he was surely an image of flawless crystal. It was almost axiomatic.
On opening the red notebook that crystal image of himself crashed to the ground, and was irreparably shattered. He was not his own severest critic after all. The discovery was a painful one.
The fruit of Jenny’s unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A caricature of himself, reading (the book was upside-down). In the background a dancing couple, recognisable as Gombauld and Anne. Beneath, the legend: “Fable of the Wallflower and the Sour Grapes.” Fascinated and horrified, Denis pored over the drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious Rouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The expression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered by a feeble envy; the attitude of the body and limbs, an attitude of studious and scholarly dignity, given away by the fidgety pose of the turned-in feet—these things were terrible. And, more terrible still, was the likeness, was the magisterial certainty with which his physical peculiarities were all recorded and subtly exaggerated.
Denis looked deeper into the book. There were caricatures of other people: of Priscilla and Mr. Barbecue-Smith; of Henry Wimbush, of Anne and Gombauld; of Mr. Scogan, whom Jenny had represented in a light that was more than slightly sinister, that was, indeed, diabolic; of Mary and Ivor. He scarcely glanced at them. A fearful desire to know the worst about himself possessed him. He turned over the leaves, lingering at nothing that was not his own image. Seven full pages were devoted to him.
“Private. Not to be opened.” He had disobeyed the injunction; he had only got what he deserved. Thoughtfully he closed the book, and slid the rubber band once more into its place. Sadder and wiser, he went out on to the terrace. And so this, he reflected, this was how Jenny employed the leisure hours in her ivory tower apart. And he had thought her a simple-minded, uncritical creature! It was he, it seemed, who was the fool. He felt no resentment towards Jenny. No, the distressing thing wasn’t Jenny herself; it was what she and the phenomenon of her red book represented, what they stood for and concretely symbolised. They represented all the vast conscious world of men outside himself; they symbolised something that in his studious solitariness he was apt not to believe in. He could stand at Piccadilly Circus, could watch the crowds shuffle past, and still imagine himself the one fully conscious, intelligent, individual being among all those thousands. It seemed, somehow, impossible that other people should be in their way as elaborate and complete as he in his. Impossible; and yet, periodically he would make some painful discovery about the external world and the horrible reality of its consciousness and its intelligence. The red notebook was one of these discoveries, a footprint in the sand. It put beyond a doubt the fact that the outer world really existed.
Sitting on the balustrade of the terrace, he ruminated this unpleasant truth for some time. Still chewing on it, he strolled pensively down towards the swimming-pool. A peacock and his hen trailed their shabby finery across the turf of the lower lawn. Odious birds! Their necks, thick and greedily fleshy at the roots, tapered up to the cruel inanity of their brainless heads, their flat eyes and piercing beaks. The fabulists were right, he reflected, when they took beasts to illustrate their tractates of human morality. Animals resemble men with all the truthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, the red notebook!) He threw a piece of stick at the slowly pacing birds. They rushed towards it, thinking it was something to eat.
He walked on. The profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed him. Like a great wooden octopus, it spread its long arms abroad.
“Under the spreading ilex tree...”
He tried to remember who the poem was by, but couldn’t.
“The smith, a brawny man is he,
With arms like rubber bands.”
Just like his; he would have to try and do his Muller exercises more regularly.
He emerged once more into the sunshine. The pool lay before him, reflecting in its bronze mirror the blue and various green of the summer day. Looking at it, he thought of Anne’s bare arms and seal-sleek bathing-dress, her moving knees and feet.
“And little Luce with the white legs,
And bouncing Barbary...”
Oh, these rags and tags of other people’s making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was truly his own, or was it simply an education?
He walked slowly round the water’s edge. In an embayed recess among the surrounding yew trees, leaning her back against the pedestal of a pleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus, executed by some nameless mason of the seicento, he saw Mary pensively sitting.
“Hullo!” he said, for he was passing so close to her that he had to say something.
Mary looked up. “Hullo!” she answered in a melancholy, uninterested tone.
In this alcove hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of the pudic goddess. There was a prolonged silence.
At breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture postcard of Gobley Great Park. A stately Georgian pile, with a facade sixteen windows wide; parterres in the foreground; huge, smooth lawns receding out of the picture to right and left. Ten years more of the hard times and Gobley, with all its peers, will be deserted and decaying. Fifty years, and the countryside will know the old landmarks no more. They will have vanished as the monasteries vanished before them. At the moment, however, Mary’s mind was not moved by these considerations.
On the back of the postcard, next to the address, was written, in Ivor’s bold, large hand, a single quatrain.
“Hail, maid of moonlight! Bride of the sun, farewell!
Like bright plumes moulted in an angel’s flight,
There sleep within my heart’s most mystic cell
Memories of morning, memories of the night.”
There followed a postscript of three lines: “Would you mind asking one of the housemaids to forward the packet of safety-razor blades I left in the drawer of my washstand. Thanks.—Ivor.”
Seated under the Venus’s immemorial gesture, Mary considered life and love. The abolition of her repressions, so far from bringing the expected peace of mind, had brought nothing but disquiet, a new and hitherto unexperienced misery. Ivor, Ivor...She couldn’t do without him now. It was evident, on the other hand, from the poem on the back of the picture postcard, that Ivor could very well do without her. He was at Gobley now, so was Zenobia. Mary knew Zenobia. She thought of the last verse of the song he had sung that night in the garden.
“Le lendemain, Phillis peu sage
Aurait donne moutons et chien
Pour un baiser que le volage
A Lisette donnait pour rien.”
Mary shed tears at the memory; she had never been so unhappy in all her life before.
It was Denis who first broke the silence. “The individual,” he began in a soft and sadly philosophical tone, “is not a self-supporting universe. There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when he is forced to take cognisance of the existence of other universes besides himself.”
He had contrived this highly abstract generalisation as a preliminary to a personal confidence. It was the first gambit in a conversation that was to lead up to Jenny’s caricatures.
“True,” said Mary; and, generalising for herself, she added, “When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.”
“One is apt,” Denis went on, “to be so spellbound by the spectacle of one’s own personality that one forgets that the spectacle presents itself to other people as well as to oneself.”
Mary was not listening. “The difficulty,” she said, “makes itself acutely felt in matters of sex. If one individual seeks intimate contact with another individual in the natural way, she is certain to receive or inflict suffering. If on the other hand, she avoids contacts, she risks the equally grave sufferings that follow on unnatural repressions. As you see, it’s a dilemma.”
“When I think of my own case,” said Denis, making a more decided move in the desired direction, “I am amazed how ignorant I am of other people’s mentality in general, and above all and in particular, of their opinions about myself. Our minds are sealed books only occasionally opened to the outside world.” He made a gesture that was faintly suggestive of the drawing off of a rubber band.
“It’s an awful problem,” said Mary thoughtfully. “One has to have had personal experience to realise quite how awful it is.”
“Exactly.” Denis nodded. “One has to have had first-hand experience.” He leaned towards her and slightly lowered his voice. “This very morning, for example...” he began, but his confidences were cut short. The deep voice of the gong, tempered by distance to a pleasant booming, floated down from the house. It was lunch-time. Mechanically Mary rose to her feet, and Denis, a little hurt that she should exhibit such a desperate anxiety for her food and so slight an interest in his spiritual experiences, followed her. They made their way up to the house without speaking.
Ihope 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.”