Crome Yellow (22 page)

‘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 realize 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.

‘
I HOPE YOU
all realize,' 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, cocoa-nut 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 tomorrow. 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 Wimbtish. ‘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 tried 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. Today, 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.'

A LITTLE CANVAS
village of tents and booths had sprung up, just beyond the boundaries of the garden, in the green expanse of the park. A crowd thronged its streets, the men dressed mostly in black – holiday best, funeral best – the women in pale muslins. Here and there tricolour bunting hung inert. In the midst of the canvas town, scarlet and gold and crystal, the merry-go-round glittered in the sun. The balloon-man walked among the crowd, and above his head, like a huge, inverted bunch of many-coloured grapes, the balloons strained upwards. With a scythe-like motion the boat-swings reaped the air, and from the funnel of the engine which worked the roundabout rose a thin, scarcely wavering column of black smoke.

Denis had climbed to the top of one of Sir Ferdinando's towers, and there, standing on the sun-baked leads, his elbows resting on the parapet, he surveyed the scene. The steam-organ sent up prodigious music. The clashing of automatic cymbals beat out with inexorable precision the rhythm of piercingly sounded melodies. The harmonies were like a musical shattering of glass and brass. Far down in the bass the Last Trump was hugely blowing, and with such persistence, such resonance, that its alternate tonic and dominant detached themselves from the rest of the music and made a tune of their own, a loud, monotonous see-saw.

Denis leaned over the gulf of swirling noise. If he threw himself over the parapet, the noise would surely buoy him up, keep him suspended, bobbing, as a fountain balances a ball on its breaking crest. Another fancy came to him, this time in metrical form.

Bad, bad. But he liked the idea of something thin and distended being blown up from underneath.

or better –

That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. ‘My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane. . . .'