The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon Read Online Free PDF

elusive. He knew that he badly wanted a change but not in the sense that a harassed man needs a holiday. In fact he decided there and then that he did not in the least want a holiday, for a holiday implied idleness and what he wanted was work, interesting but unexacting work, preferably with his hands or at some task that left him free to dream. To dream about what? Money? He was not interested in making a fortune. His needs were, and always had been, extremely simple and he had very little sense of possession. He had never collected anything, not even foreign stamps, had never owned a stock or a share and did not personally own the house he occupied. Thinking it
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    over, Mr. Sermon decided that the only thing he did want was personal freedom, freedom not only to make the change but to live from day to day instead of from term to term, to go where he pleased when he pleased, to break out of the ring that was enclosing him and find . . . ? But here Mr. Sermon's train of thought hit the terminus buffer and went cannoning up the platform in confusion, for the truth of the matter was that Sebastian Sermon's secret heart was fully aware of what he wanted above and beyond all these generalised abstracts and Sebastian Sermon was ashamed of naming it, even to himself. The recoil headed him directly into the island represented by Sybil, his wife.
    He had set out to marshal his thoughts with an express purpose and had begun this mental spring-clean with the honest intention of returning home to Sybil with a tidy mind and some kind of plan that embraced not only her and himself but the children, Jonquil and Keith, for surely all four of them were closely involved in any kind of change or move. But here was something that did not involve them, or, if it did, could certainly bring pain and distress to them and perhaps misery to Sybil, who would surely find it very difficult to believe that a husband who, in nineteen years of married life, had never given her a moment's anxiety regarding other women, should in his fiftieth year admit to an almost over-powering yearning for romance.
    'Romance' he called it, but was that its real name? Wasn't it something more down-to-earth, sexual curiosity or-face it man- middle-aged lust? He hoped not. With all his heart he hoped not, for if it was then how thin the partition separating him from the poor devils he read 'about in Sunday newspapers, men of his own age who pounced in parks and cinemas and were hauled before Magisterial Benches on far more shameful charges than any Lane-Perkins' father could bring.
    For a moment or so he thought of the Headmaster's remarks about the change of life and wondered if, after all, they were as ridiculous as they seemed. Perhaps men did suffer a physical change and perhaps the manifestation of that change included a wild hunger for sexual adventures, for new and exciting conquests, or weird and bizarre experiments in fields that Mr. Sermon had glimpsed
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    between covers in the Charing Cross Road. As he thought about this, Sebastian was conscious of shame and disloyalty. A man, he thought, might be forgiven such hunger if he had married a cold, niggardly woman, miserly with her embraces and impatient with male appetites, but Sybil was not such a woman. She was generous and even gracious in her duties and if gratification left him vaguely disappointed then it was not she who was to blame but himself, for his experience in the subtleties of courtship was very limited. Her very complaisance in these matters made him cautious and inhibited instead of bold and boisterous and almost masochistically he now forced himself to consider their love-making over the last few years. He was dismayed to discover that it fell into the same category as everything else about which he felt so dissatisfied. It never varied. It was like the houses and the quiet roads of the estate. It was like the overture to one of Sybil's Gilbert and Sullivan productions, where stage business was a