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"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.
They entered the garden; at the head of one of the alleys stood a green wooden bench, embayed in the midst of a fragrant continent of lavender bushes. It was here, though the place was shadeless and one breathed hot, dry perfume instead of air it was here that Mr. Scogan elected to sit. He thrived on untempered sunlight. "Consider, for example, the case of Luther and Erasmus."
It is a realisation that makes one rather melancholy." "Carminative," said Mr. Scogan thoughtfully. "Carminative," Denis repeated, and they were silent for a time. "Words," said Denis at last, "words I wonder if you can realise how much I love them. You are too much preoccupied with mere things and ideas and people to understand the full beauty of words. Your mind is not a literary mind.
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."
I like pullulation; everything ought to increase and multiply as hard as it can." Gombauld grew lyrical. Everybody ought to have children Anne ought to have them, Mary ought to have them dozens and dozens. He emphasised his point by thumping with his walking-stick on the bull's leather flanks. Mr. Scogan ought to pass on his intelligence to little Scogans, and Denis to little Denises.
Very possibly the lines to Scogan were written not before, but immediately after, the accession of Henry IV. In that case they belong to about the same date as the wellknown and very plainspoken "Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse," addressed by him to the new Sovereign without loss of time, if not indeed, as it would be hardly uncharitable to suppose, prepared beforehand.
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.
Scogan, who had now seized on Jenny for his victim. "What are you reading?" "I don't know," said Denis truthfully. He looked at the title page; the book was called "The Stock Breeder's Vade Mecum." "I think you are so sensible to sit and read quietly," said Mary, fixing him with her china eyes. "I don't know why one dances. It's so boring." Denis made no reply; she exacerbated him.
Scogan replied, "all with the possible exception of Claudius, who was much too stupid to be a development of anything in my character. The seeds of Julius's courage and compelling energy, of Augustus's prudence, of the libidinousness and cruelty of Tiberius, of Caligula's folly, of Nero's artistic genius and enormous vanity, are all within me.
Scogan filled his glass, passed on the decanter, and, leaning back in his chair, looked about him for a moment in silence. The conversation rippled idly round him, but he disregarded it; he was smiling at some private joke. Gombauld noticed his smile. "What's amusing you?" he asked. "I was just looking at you all, sitting round this table," said Mr. Scogan. "Are we as comic as all that?"
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