booths, quack dentists, shooting-galleries, cocoanut-shies, and bazaars,
all around you. Every establishment is jewelled, gilded, and
electrically lighted; every establishment has an orchestra, most often
played by steam and conducted by a stoker; every establishment has a
steam--whistle, which shrieks at the beginning and at the end of each
round or performance. You stand fixed in the multitude listening to a
thousand orchestras and whistles, with the roar of machinery and the
merry din of car-bells, and the popping of rifles for a background of
noise. Your eyes are charmed by the whirling of a million lights and the
mad whirling of millions of beautiful girls and happy youths under the
lights. For the roundabouts rule the scene; the roundabouts take the
money. The supreme desire of the revellers is to describe circles,
either on horseback or in yachts, either simple circles or complex
circles, either up and down or straight along, but always circles. And
it is as though inventors had sat up at nights puzzling their brains how
best to make revellers seasick while keeping them equidistant from a
steam-orchestra.... Then the crowd solidly lurches, and you find
yourself up against a dentist, or a firm of wrestlers, or a roundabout,
or an ice-cream refectory, and you take what comes. You have begun to
'do' the Wakes. The splendid insanity seizes you. The lights, the
colours, the explosions, the shrieks, the feathered hats, the pretty
faces as they fly past, the gilding, the statuary, the August night, and
the mingling of a thousand melodies in a counterpoint beyond the dreams
of Wagner--these things have stirred the sap of life in you, have shown
you how fine it is to be alive, and, careless and free, have caught up
your spirit into a heaven from which you scornfully survey the year of
daily toil between one Wakes and another as the eagle scornfully surveys
the potato-field. Your nostrils dilate--nay, matters reach such a pass
that, even if you are genteel, you forget to condescend.