There is nothing new under the sun—not even at Epsom. The first time I saw the wonderful crowd of the Derby Day—perhaps the largest crowd in the world—I could scarcely believe my eyes, for I found on passing through it that the hundreds of thousands of people there had nothing more to amuse them than they would have found at an ordinary country fair. Swings, roundabouts, cockshies at coconuts, rootletum, tootletum, and beer. That was all. No new amusement whatsoever: a very humdrum sort of world, my masters!
The next finest crowd is the crowd on August bank-holiday all along the Brighton beach, and there it is just the same. Nothing for the folk but Punch, brass bands, and somersaulters—dull old stories in my grandmother’s time.
Xerxes offered a reward to anyone who could invent him a fresh pleasure—the multitude of the Derby Day and Brighton beach should do the same. But indeed they do, for an immense fortune would certainly be the reward of such a discoverer. One gets tired of pitching sticks at coconuts all one’s time.
However, at Woolhorton nobody but the very rawest and crudest folk cared for the shows, all they did care was to alternately stand stock still and then shove. First they shoved as far as the “Lion” and had some beer, then they shoved back to the “Lamb” and had some beer, then they stood stock still in the street and blocked those who were shoving. Several thousand people were thus happily occupied, and the Lion and the Lamb laid down together peacefully that day.
Amaryllis and old Iden had in like manner to shove, for there was no other way to get through, no one thought of moving, or giving any passage, if you wanted to progress you must shoulder them aside. As Grandfather Iden could not shove very hard they were frequently compelled to wait till the groups opened, and thus it happened that Amaryllis found herself once face to face with Jack Duck.
He kind of sniggered in a foolish way at Amaryllis, and touched his hat to Iden. “You ain’t a been over to Coombe lately, Mr. Iden,” he said.
“No,” replied the old man sharply, and went on.
Jack could hardly have struck a note more discordant to Amaryllis. The father had not been to visit his son for more than a year—she did not want unpleasant memories stirred up.
Again in another group a sturdy labourer touched his hat and asked her if her father was at fair, as he was looking out for a job. Old Iden started and grunted like a snorting horse.
Amaryllis, though put out, stayed to speak kindly to him, for she knew he was always in difficulties. Bill Nye was that contradiction a strong man without work. He wanted to engage for mowing. Bill Nye was a mower at Coombe, and his father, Bill Nye, before him, many a long year before he was discovered in California.
When she overtook Iden he was struggling to pass the stream of the Orinoco, which set strongly at that moment out of the “Lamb” towards the “Lion.” Strong men pushed out from the “Lamb” archway like a river into the sea, thrusting their way into the general crowd, and this mighty current cast back the tottering figure of old Iden as the swollen Orinoco swung the crank old Spanish caravels that tried to breast it.
It was as much as Amaryllis and he together could do to hold their ground at the edge of the current. While they were thus battling she chanced to look up.
A large window was open over the archway, and at this window a fellow was staring down at her. He stood in his shirtsleeves with a billiard-cue in his hand waiting his turn to play. It was the same young fellow, gentleman if you like, whose pale face had so displeased her that morning as he rode under when she watched the folk go by to fair. He was certainly the most advanced in civilization of all who had passed Plum Corner, and yet there was something in that pale and rather delicate face which was not in the coarse lineaments of the “varmers” and “drauvers” and “pig-dealers” who had gone by under the wall. Something that insulted her.
The face at the window was appraising her.
It was reckoning her up—so much for eyes, so much for hair, so much for figure, and as this went on the fingers were filling a pipe from an elastic tobacco-pouch. There was no romance, no poetry in that calculation—no rapture or pure admiration of beauty; there was a billiard-cue and a tobacco-pouch, and a glass of spirits and water, and an atmosphere of smoke, and a sound of clicking ivory balls at the back of the thought. His thumb was white where he had chalked it to make a better bridge for the cue. His face was white; for he had chalked it with dissipation. His physical body was whitened—chalked—a whited sepulchre; his moral nature likewise chalked.
At the back of his thought lay not the high esteem of the poet-thinker for beauty, but the cynical blackguardism of the XIX century.
The cynicism that deliberately reckons up things a Shakespeare would admire at their lowest possible sale value. A slow whiff of smoke from a corner of the sneering mouth, an air of intense knowingness, as much as to say, “You may depend upon me—I’ve been behind the scenes. All this is got up, you know; stage effect in front, pasteboard at the rear; nothing in it.”
In the sensuality of Nero there may still be found some trace of a higher nature; “What an artist the world has lost!” he exclaimed, dying.
The empress Theodora craved for the applause of the theatre to which she exposed her beauty.
This low, cynical nineteenth century blackguardism thinks of nothing but lowness, and has no ideal.
