IARY

I stood looking at the Coronation Procession—I mean the one
in Beaconsfield; not the rather elephantine imitation of it which, I
believe, had some success in London—and I was seriously impressed.
Most of my life is passed in discovering with a deathly surprise that
I was quite right. Never before have I realised how right I was in
maintaining that the small area expresses the real patriotism: the
smaller the field the taller the tower. There were things in our local
procession that did not (one might even reverently say, could not) occur
in the London procession. One of the most prominent citizens in our
procession (for instance) had his face blacked. Another rode on a pony
which wore pink and blue trousers. I was not present at the Metropolitan
affair, and therefore my assertion is subject to such correction as the
eyewitness may always offer to the absentee. But I believe with some
firmness that no such features occurred in the London pageant.

But it is not of the local celebration that I would speak, but of
something that occurred before it. In the field beyond the end of my
garden the materials for a bonfire had been heaped; a hill of every kind
of rubbish and refuse and things that nobody wants; broken chairs, dead
trees, rags, shavings, newspapers, new religions, in pamphlet form,
reports of the Eugenic Congress, and so on. All this refuse, material
and mental, it was our purpose to purify and change to holy flame on the
day when the King was crowned. The following is an account of the rather
strange thing that really happened. I do not know whether it was any
sort of symbol; but I narrate it just as it befell.

In the middle of the night I woke up slowly and listened to what I
supposed to be the heavy crunching of a cart-wheel along a road of loose
stones. Then it grew louder, and I thought somebody was shooting out
cartloads of stones; then it seemed as if the shock was breaking big
stones into pieces. Then I realised that under this sound there was also
a strange, sleepy, almost inaudible roar; and that on top of it every
now and then came pigmy pops like a battle of penny pistols. Then I knew
what it was. I went to the window; and a great firelight flung across
two meadows smote me where I stood. "Oh, my holy aunt," I thought,
"they've mistaken the Coronation Day."

And yet when I eyed the transfigured scene it did not seem exactly like
a bonfire or any ritual illumination. It was too cha