"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
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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."
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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
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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.
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CHAPTER XXV.
"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-gorounds,
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
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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."
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"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
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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
