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
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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
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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 Westonsuper-
Mare; it was almost Ilfracombe."
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CHAPTER XXVI.
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.
"My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretched Over a bubbling
cauldron."
Bad, bad. But he liked the idea of something thin and distended
being blown up from underneath.
"My soul is a thin tent of gut..."
or better-
"My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane..."
That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right
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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..."
On the terrace stood a knot of distinguished visitors. There was old
Lord Moleyn, like a caricature of an English milord in a French comic
paper: a long man, with a long nose and long, drooping moustaches and
long teeth of old ivory, and lower down, absurdly, a short covert coat, and
below that long, long legs cased in pearl-grey trousers--legs that bent
unsteadily at the knee and gave a kind of sideways wobble as he walked.
Beside him, short and thick-set, stood Mr. Callamay, the venerable
conservative statesman, with a face like a Roman bust, and short white
hair. Young girls didn't much like going for motor drives alone with Mr.
Callamay; and of old Lord Moleyn one wondered why he wasn't living in
gilded exile on the island of Capri among the other distinguished persons
who, for one reason or another, find it impossible to live in England.
They were talking to Anne, laughing, the one profoundly, the other
hootingly.
A black silk balloon towing a black-and-white striped parachute
proved to be old Mrs. Budge from the big house on the other side of the
valley. She stood low on the ground, and the spikes of her black-andwhite
sunshade menaced the eyes of Priscilla Wimbush, who towered over
her--a massive figure dressed in purple and topped with a queenly toque
on which the nodding black plumes recalled the splendours of a first-class
Parisian funeral.
Denis peeped at them discreetly from the window of the morning-
room. His eyes were suddenly become innocent, childlike, unprejudiced.
They seemed, these people, inconceivably fantastic. And yet they really
existed, they functioned by themselves, they were conscious, they had
minds. Moreover, he was like them. Could one believe it? But the
evidence of the red notebook was conclusive.
It would have been polite to go and say, "How d'you do?" But at the
moment Denis did not want to talk, could not have talked. His soul was a
tenuous, tremulous, pale membrane. He would keep its sensibility intact
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and virgin as long as he could. Cautiously he crept out by a side door and
made his way down towards the park. His soul fluttered as he
approached the noise and movement of the fair. He paused for a moment
on the brink, then stepped in and was engulfed.
Hundreds of people, each with his own private face and all of them
real, separate, alive: the thought was disquieting. He paid twopence
and saw the Tatooed Woman; twopence more, the Largest Rat in the World.
From the home of the Rat he emerged just in time to see a hydrogen-filled
balloon break loose for home. A child howled up after it; but calmly, a
perfect sphere of flushed opal, it mounted, mounted. Denis followed it
with his eyes until it became lost in the blinding sunlight. If he could but
send his soul to follow it!...
He sighed, stuck his steward's rosette in his buttonhole, and started to
push his way, aimlessly but officially, through the crowd.
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CHAPTER XXVII.
Mr. Scogan had been accommodated in a little canvas hut. Dressed
in a black skirt and a red bodice, with a yellow-and-red bandana
handkerchief tied round his black wig, he looked--sharp-nosed, brown,
and wrinkled--like the Bohemian Hag of Frith's Derby Day. A placard
pinned to the curtain of the doorway announced the presence within the
tent of "Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana." Seated at a table, Mr.
Scogan received his clients in mysterious silence, indicating with a
movement of the finger that they were to sit down opposite him and to
extend their hands for his inspection. He then examined the palm that
was presented him, using a magnifying glass and a pair of horn spectacles.
He had a terrifying way of shaking his head, frowning and clicking with
his tongue as he looked at the lines. Sometimes he would whisper, as
though to himself, "Terrible, terrible!" or "God preserve us!" sketching out
the sign of the cross as he uttered the words. The clients who came in
laughing grew suddenly grave; they began to take the witch seriously.
She was a formidable- looking woman; could it be, was it possible, that
there was something in this sort of thing after all? After all, they thought,
as the hag shook her head over their hands, after all...And they waited,
with an uncomfortably beating heart, for the oracle to speak. After a long
and silent inspection, Mr. Scogan would suddenly look up and ask, in a
hoarse whisper, some horrifying question, such as, "Have you ever been
hit on the head with a hammer by a young man with red hair?" When the
answer was in the negative, which it could hardly fail to be, Mr. Scogan
would nod several times, saying, "I was afraid so. Everything is still to
come, still to come, though it can't be very far off now." Sometimes,
after a long examination, he would just whisper, "Where ignorance is bliss,
'tis folly to be wise," and refuse to divulge any details of a future too
appalling to be envisaged without despair. Sesostris had a success of
horror. People stood in a queue outside the witch's booth waiting for the
privilege of hearing sentence pronounced upon them.
Denis, in the course of his round, looked with curiosity at this crowd
of suppliants before the shrine of the oracle. He had a great desire to see
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how Mr. Scogan played his part. The canvas booth was a rickety, ill-
made structure. Between its walls and its sagging roof were long gaping
chinks and crannies. Denis went to the tea-tent and borrowed a wooden
bench and a small Union Jack. With these he hurried back to the booth
of Sesostris. Setting down the bench at the back of the booth, he climbed
up, and with a great air of busy efficiency began to tie the Union Jack to
the top of one of the tent-poles. Through the crannies in the canvas he
could see almost the whole of the interior of the tent. Mr. Scogan's
bandana-covered head was just below him; his terrifying whispers came
clearly up. Denis looked and listened while the witch prophesied
financial losses, death by apoplexy, destruction by air-raids in the next
war.
"Is there going to be another war?" asked the old lady to whom he had
predicted this end.
"Very soon," said Mr. Scogan, with an air of quiet confidence.
The old lady was succeeded by a girl dressed in white muslin,
garnished with pink ribbons. She was wearing a broad hat, so that Denis
could not see her face; but from her figure and the roundness of her bare
arms he judged her young and pleasing. Mr. Scogan looked at her hand,
then whispered, "You are still virtuous."
The young lady giggled and exclaimed, "Oh, lor'!"
"But you will not remain so for long," added Mr. Scogan sepulchrally.
The young lady giggled again. "Destiny, which interests itself in small
things no less than in great, has announced the fact upon your hand." Mr.
Scogan took up the magnifying-glass and began once more to examine the
white palm. "Very interesting," he said, as though to himself--"very
interesting. It's as clear as day." He was silent.
"What's clear?" asked the girl.
"I don't think I ought to tell you." Mr. Scogan shook his head; the
pendulous brass ear-rings which he had screwed on to his ears tinkled.
"Please, please!," she implored.
The witch seemed to ignore her remark. "Afterwards, it's not at all
clear. The fates don't say whether you will settle down to married life
and have four children or whether you will try to go on the cinema and
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have none. They are only specific about this one rather crucial incident."
"What is it? What is it? Oh, do tell me!"
The white muslin figure leant eagerly forward.
Mr. Scogan sighed. "Very well," he said, "if you must know, you
must know. But if anything untoward happens you must blame your own
curiosity. Listen. Listen." He lifted up a sharp, claw- nailed
