The Reed-Bed Subcommittee on Cultural Matters met in special session on Thursday afternoon, four days after the close of the midsummer programme beneath the Old Willow, to take up the question of an autumn programme. It sat under a heading of “forward planning,” which the acting chair called at the opening “preliminary in the warmest possible sense.” Present were the Clerk of the Cultural Subcommittee in his second capacity, the acting chair, and a small number of further members. The acting chair has not been named across this season’s coverage, and indicated at the opening that he did not, on this occasion, wish to be.
The chair opened on the success of the midsummer programme. It had drawn an audience of the largest dimension this gazette has yet recorded, and a critical reception that had not, on the whole, been unfavourable. Such a success, he said, invited the question of whether a further programme might be contemplated for the autumn proper. He raised it now, he was careful to add, not because a programme had been decided upon, but because the season’s customary preparatory weeks were beginning to approach. He wished the question entered on the record before any party less collegial might enter it first.
The session then took, in the order the chair tabled them, the questions any autumn programme would have to address. The first was the senior performer. By way of preparatory inquiry, the chair said, he had sought to learn Hettie’s autumn availability through the customary channel, by which is meant, on all prior evidence, her mother. The reply came in writing: Hettie would not, before the autumn proper, accept further engagements. The chair called this “explicit, and to that extent helpful.”
The second question was the co-honker. Mabel, whose name the gazette is asked to supply for the reader who has not followed the matter through several dispatches, had been sounded out informally on the autumn. Her reply, as the Clerk relayed it, was that she was “available for consideration.” This the chair pronounced, and the phrase is given here verbatim, “of the optimum form.” The phrase is reproduced and left to stand.
The third question was the running order. No running order, the chair said, could responsibly be drawn without a performer slate, and so he did not propose to draw one on Thursday. He noted in passing that the long-resident frog of the southern waters had not yet been approached for any view on a further engagement. Any such approach would go through the appropriate seasonal channel, at a time the frog would be reckoned, on reasonable evidence, amenable to it. The Clerk did not propose to make it on Thursday.
After a short further consideration, in which each question was examined and each set aside as not yet ripe, the chair proposed and the session accepted that the matter be deferred to the next regular session of the Cultural Subcommittee. The deferral, the Clerk noted, was by acclamation. The session ended on the fourth honk. The question of the autumn stays where it was found, on the record and undecided.
Afterward the gazette asked the Clerk whether the deferral was to be read as encouraging the autumn programme’s prospects or discouraging them. The deferral, the Clerk replied, might be read as a deferral.