These were occasions of festival, the local rituals of Dionysius.
Earlier in the fall I had gone to a county fair and had seen the
products of the field on display; and had studied the people: the tall
angular gawks, the men carrying whips, the dust, the noise, the cheap
fakirs and gamblers, the fights, the drunkenness, the women tired and
perspiring carrying their babies and leading a brood. To me it was more
like a cattle pen befogged with dust than an assemblage of human beings.
And there was no happiness, no real joy; only barbaric breaking away
from hard labor and the silence of the farms; only a reeling and a
howling and a war dance; and only here and there a flash of breeding and
fineness, and intelligent use of the occasion for sweeter joys and
fuller life.
The winter came down; but I was better prepared for it than I was the
year before. My house with its walls a foot thick of solid oak and
tightly plastered against the penetrating winds kept out the cold. And
my fireplaces built under my very eye threw a steady heat into the
rooms. I was giving parties from time to time and attending them as
well. Douglas always came. He was unfailingly the life of the party. He
had reenforced his political successes with a genuine hold upon the
hearts of the young people and the older people.
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