It is an eerie and a horrible experience to be in attendance on a stand at a Flower Show, day after day, and to watch the staring faces that come to rest before my exhibits and then move on. From right to left, from left to right they pass, these faces, propelled with hesitating pace and starkly turned towards me. I watch them, because I cannot help but do so, and in the day’s reckoning I have looked into perhaps five, perhaps ten thousand human faces.
I do not watch, I search these faces, for mask-like as they are, they are not masks, but sensitive flesh in which the secrets of humanity are deeply chiselled for him who can to read. I am continuously searching the faces, and this close attention, and the repeated stimulation of one kind of cerebral activity, brings on sleep. I struggle with a great sleep that yawns to engulf me. What I see in the faces is incommunicable; but it promotes the release of ideas, with which I play, and by which I manage to hold myself awake.
To observe faces, as I am doing from the interior of this stand, is like observing birds from a hide. No one notices the quiet regard of my eyes, nor even, latterly, the tiny lens of the camera, behind a hole in the staging, with which from time to time I honour these faces with a record, when they stop transfixed before my bait—a model of a caterpillar feeding on a leaf. They do not know, these victims of mine, that that smirk or that intentness, that silly giggle, or that affected horror with which they respond to my stimuli, will emerge later, in the bowels of my cellar, ectoplastically, as a permanent image in silver. There is a streak of cruelty in Science.
I am no anthropologist, but it seems very strange to me that anthropologists should always be hiking away to the Caucasus, Mongolia, or the Polynesian Islands to look for material, when for the smallest of fees, anyone of them could come here and share my hide. Perhaps anthropologists do not work here for precisely the same reason that not one of my victims has so far seen the little lens of my camera; they do not see things which are immediately in front of their noses. They need red or yellow skins, or decorative weals on the bodies of savages to advertise to them the presence of their material. No one will see my camera unless I hang a notice, ‘This is a Camera’ beside it, and even so not one in a hundred would twig for what private purpose it is being used. That is my first observation about these faces, and they have eyes which do not observe unadvertised phenomena.
My next is that these faces all appear set to confront something that is not, in fact, before them. Their expressions are those of reticence, defiance, assumed indifference or bravado, they are all up against something that just is not there. It is not only the necessity to keeping awake by conscious effort, which comes over everybody in museums and shows, it is, I suppose, some one or other of the multitudinous aspects of the Devil, projected in their souls, and appearing to them, beyond sight, as an evil that retreats before them. These faces of clever jacks set to say ‘You can’t teach me’; the phlegmatic dials of heavy middle-aged men, the decorated features of would-be coquettes in garish hats; the sharp suspicious ferret eyes of small middle-aged ladies; the fat smirks of salesmen—‘My bubble won’t burst’; the set composure of married women; the critical poise of the intelligent, who allow themselves sometimes to be amused—confident that no harm can come of it; the tusky insolence of elderly clerks … these faces, these anxious, ingenuous, vapid, independent, shy, belligerent, clever-pained, smirking, bitter, brave or hateful faces, they have all one thing in common, they are advancing in face of a phantom enemy.
I feel no sympathy, liking or dislike for these faces. I am aware that my own is but another of them, that my own melancholy and resentful countenance is surely enough repulsing its own phantom Devil; but because of that I do not experience any sentiment of kindred with the faces, or with the people of whom they are part. I assume that I shall never see them again, and they might be made of papier maché for all I care. It is true that now and then somebody steps up and shakes me warmly by the hand, remembering some conversation at another Show, but I have invariably forgotten his face. He talks for a while and then bears off to right or left and vanishes.
Of course I have business to do. All these faces are of prospective customers. I am here and the whole stand is designed for the one purpose of associating the names of our stuff with their ideas about the maladies of plants. We want to make them think of us. So it is my duty to seem pleasant, and to give away information, to empty out a bottomless cornucopia of information, sugared with every kind of helpfulness and inducement to buy. Heaven knows I do my duty. But all this smiling and talking is but a movement in the bass, a running accompaniment to the horrible procession of faces.
When there is a lull, and for a minute or two a gap in the stream of people, their faces do not desert me; memories and anticipations of them move across my mind, provoking questions, endless questions, but not questions of mycology. I wonder what worlds, or what strange refractions of perhaps but one world, exist beyond those thousands of pairs of eyes. Even in this little pursuit of horticulture, which seems so petty and so truncated to me, I am convinced that there is to be found much pleasure, that these people or many of them enjoy: delights to which I am numb. They see beauty in the colourful reproductive organs of plants, cut off and massed leaflessly on seedsmen’s stands. For them, gardens populated with vegetative abortions, with all the awful results of plant surgery, isolation and goose-liver fattening with heat and fertilizers, have a kind of dream beauty. No! not dream beauty, I will not misuse words. They have for the horticulturalists the particular beauty of their particular heaven. A very different thing. I do not sympathize, I do not understand. I can in some measure perceive the functional beauty of plant growth, the beautiful unity of a plant organism, and also, shall we say, Goethe’s concept of a plant. I like the cow parsley: that grows in our hedges, and am sorry to see it cut down with a scythe. I have greatly enjoyed making little ecological surveys on heaths and meadows, lying in the sun and counting the many kinds of plants enclosed within my square of tape, speculating on their struggle for space and sunshine. But these people, these horticulturalists, for whom I make chemicals, take pleasure in grass lawns, and their nice green is a bleeding shambles of crippled and stunted plants. These people and I are wide as the stars apart. I see only the surface of their faces.
This lady to whom I have last been speaking, if I told her what I have just written, she would not think it could be true, she would stare at me in amazement or think me insane. And yet she has solemnly informed me that caterpillars lay eggs, she is proud of herself for having cut down a hazel copse to make a garden with herbaceous borders, and at this moment she is over at the stand opposite buying herself the latest novelty in chromium plated spades. I do not say she is insane, I do not even think so, I am just sorry I do not understand. They are remote, these faces, remote from me as the whole meaning and reason of the Horticulture at which they come to stare.
— © Estate of E.C. Large, 1937, 2008
