Chapter XXV.

by Aldous Huxley

　　"I hope you all realise," said Henry Wimbush during dinner, "thatnext Monday is Bank Holiday, and that you will all be expected tohelp 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 fearI cannot. I should have liked to put an end to it years ago; butthe claims of Charity are strong.""It's not charity we want," Anne murmured rebelliously; "it'sjustice.""Besides," Mr. Wimbush went on, "the Fair has become aninstitution. Let me see, it must be twenty-two years since westarted it. It was a modest affair then. Now..." he made asweeping movement with his hand and was silent.It spoke highly for Mr. Wimbush's public spirit that he stillcontinued to tolerate the Fair. Beginning as a sort of glorifiedchurch bazaar, Crome's yearly Charity Fair had grown into a noisything of merry-go-rounds, cocoanut shies, and miscellaneous sideshows--a real genuine fair on the grand scale. It was the localSt. Bartholomew, and the people of all the neighbouring villages,with even a contingent from the county town, flocked into thepark for their Bank Holiday amusement. The local hospitalprofited handsomely, and it was this fact alone which preventedMr. Wimbush, to whom the Fair was a cause of recurrent and never-diminishing agony, from putting a stop to the nuisance whichyearly 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. Theswings and the merry-go-round arrive on Sunday.""So there's no escape," said Anne, turning to the rest of theparty. "You'll all have to do something. As a special favouryou'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 moreimportant things to think about than the Fair. But you need haveno doubt that I shall do my best when Monday comes to encouragethe villagers.""That's splendid," said Anne. "Aunt Priscilla will encourage thevillagers. What will you do, Mary?""I won't do anything where I have to stand by and watch otherpeople eat.""Then you'll look after the children's sports.""All right," Mary agreed. "I'll look after the children'ssports.""And Mr. Scogan?"Mr. Scogan reflected. "May I be allowed to tell fortunes?" heasked 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 ourlightning artist," she said. "'Your portrait for a shilling infive minutes.'""It's a pity I'm not Ivor," said Gombauld, with a laugh. "Icould throw in a picture of their Auras for an extra sixpence."Mary flushed. "Nothing is to be gained," she said severely, "byspeaking with levity of serious subjects. And, after all,whatever your personal views may be, psychical research is aperfectly 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 theirbuttonholes and go about telling people which is the way to teaand not to walk on the grass.""No, no," said Anne. "That won't do. You must do something morethan that.""But what? All the good jobs are taken, and I can do nothing butlisp in numbers.""Well, then, you must lisp," concluded Anne. "You must write apoem for the occasion--an 'Ode on Bank Holiday.' We'll print iton 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. "Nobodywill 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 atsixpence an execution, but decided it would be wiser to go onfeigning ignorance of her talent. His mind reverted to the rednotebook. Could it really be true that he looked like that?"What will I do," Jenny echoed, "what will I do?" She frownedthoughtfully for a moment; then her face brightened and shesmiled. "When I was young," she said, "I learnt to play thedrums.""The drums?"Jenny nodded, and, in proof of her assertion, agitated her knifeand fork, like a pair of drumsticks, over her plate. "If there'sany 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 myBank Holiday. It ought to be gay.""It ought indeed," Mr Scogan assented. "But you may rest assuredthat it won't be. No holiday is ever anything but adisappointment.""Come, come," protested Gombauld. "My holiday at Crome isn'tbeing 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; "ourholidays can't help being disappointments. Reflect for a moment.What is a holiday? The ideal, the Platonic Holiday of Holidaysis surely a complete and absolute change. You agree with me inmy definition?" Mr. Scogan glanced from face to face round thetable; his sharp nose moved in a series of rapid jerks throughall the points of the compass. There was no sign of dissent; hecontinued: "A complete and absolute change; very well. Butisn't a complete and absolute change precisely the thing we cannever have--never, in the very nature of things?" Mr. Scoganonce more looked rapidly about him. "Of course it is. Asourselves, as specimens of Homo Sapiens, as members of a society,how can we hope to have anything like an absolute change? We aretied down by the frightful limitation of our human faculties, bythe notions which society imposes on us through our fatalsuggestibility, by our own personalities. For us, a completeholiday is out of the question. Some of us struggle manfully totake one, but we never succeed, if I may be allowed to expressmyself metaphorically, we never succeed in getting farther thanSouthend.""You're depressing," said Anne."I mean to be," Mr. Scogan replied, and, expanding the fingers ofhis right hand, he went on: "Look at me, for example. What sortof a holiday can I take? In endowing me with passions andfaculties Nature has been horribly niggardly. The full range ofhuman potentialities is in any case distressingly limited; myrange is a limitation within a limitation. Out of the tenoctaves that make up the human instrument, I can compass perhapstwo. Thus, while I may have a certain amount of intelligence, Ihave no aesthetic sense; while I possess the mathematicalfaculty, I am wholly without the religious emotions; while I amnaturally addicted to venery, I have little ambition and am notat all avaricious. Education has further limited my scope.Having been brought up in society, I am impregnated with itslaws; 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 havea conscience as well as a fear of gaol. Yes, I know it byexperience. How often have I tried to take holidays, to get awayfrom myself, my own boring nature, my insufferable mentalsurroundings!" Mr. Scogan sighed. "But always without success,"he added, "always without success. In my youth I was alwaysstriving--how hard!--to feel religiously and aesthetically.Here, said I to myself, are two tremendously important andexciting emotions. Life would be richer, warmer, brighter,altogether more amusing, if I could feel them. I try to feelthem. I read the works of the mystics. They seemed to menothing but the most deplorable claptrap--as indeed they alwaysmust to anyone who does not feel the same emotion as the authorsfelt when they were writing. For it is the emotion that matters.The written work is simply an attempt to express emotion, whichis in itself inexpressible, in terms of intellect and logic. Themystic objectifies a rich feeling in the pit of the stomach intoa cosmology. For other mystics that cosmology is a symbol of therich feeling. For the unreligious it is a symbol of nothing, andso appears merely grotesque. A melancholy fact! But Idivagate." Mr. Scogan checked himself. "So much for thereligious emotion. As for the aesthetic--I was at even greaterpains to cultivate that. I have looked at all the right works ofart in every part of Europe. There was a time when, I venture tobelieve, I knew more about Taddeo da Poggibonsi, more about thecryptic Amico di Taddeo, even than Henry does. To-day, I amhappy to say, I have forgotten most of the knowledge I then solaboriously acquired; but without vanity I can assert that it wasprodigious. I don't pretend, of course, to know anything aboutnigger sculpture or the later seventeenth century in Italy; butabout all the periods that were fashionable before 1900 I am, orwas, omniscient. Yes, I repeat it, omniscient. But did thatfact make me any more appreciative of art in general? It didnot. Confronted by a picture, of which I could tell you all theknown and presumed history--the date when it was painted, thecharacter of the painter, the influences that had gone to make itwhat it was--I felt none of that strange excitement andexaltation which is, as I am informed by those who do feel it,the true aesthetic emotion. I felt nothing but a certaininterest in the subject of the picture; or more often, when thesubject was hackneyed and religious, I felt nothing but a greatweariness of spirit. Nevertheless, I must have gone on lookingat pictures for ten years before I would honestly admit to myselfthat they merely bored me. Since then I have given up allattempts to take a holiday. I go on cultivating my old staledaily self in the resigned spirit with which a bank clerkperforms from ten till six his daily task. A holiday, indeed!I'm sorry for you, Gombauld, if you still look forward to havinga holiday."Gombauld shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps," he said, "mystandards aren't as elevated as yours. But personally I foundthe war quite as thorough a holiday from all the ordinarydecencies and sanities, all the common emotions andpreoccupations, as I ever want to have.""Yes," Mr. Scogan thoughtfully agreed. "Yes, the war wascertainly something of a holiday. It was a step beyond Southend;it was Weston-super-Mare; it was almost Ilfracombe."