A little canvas village of tents and booths had sprung up, just beyond
the boundaries of the garden, in the green expanse of the park. A crowd
thronged its streets, the men dressed mostly in black--holiday best,
funeral best--the women in pale muslins. Here and there tricolour
bunting hung inert. In the midst of the canvas town, scarlet and gold
and crystal, the merry-go-round glittered in the sun. The balloon-man
walked among the crowd, and above his head, like a huge, inverted
bunch of many-coloured grapes, the balloons strained upwards. With a
scythe-like motion the boat-swings reaped the air, and from the funnel
of the engine which worked the roundabout rose a thin, scarcely wavering
column of black smoke.
Denis had climbed to the top of one of Sir Ferdinando’s towers, and
there, standing on the sun-baked leads, his elbows resting on the
parapet, he surveyed the scene. The steam-organ sent up prodigious
music. The clashing of automatic cymbals beat out with inexorable
precision the rhythm of piercingly sounded melodies. The harmonies were
like a musical shattering of glass and brass. Far down in the bass
the Last Trump was hugely blowing, and with such persistence, such
resonance, that its alternate tonic and dominant detached themselves
from the rest of the music and made a tune of their own, a loud,
monotonous see-saw.
Denis leaned over the gulf of swirling noise. If he threw himself over
the parapet, the noise would surely buoy him up, keep him suspended,
bobbing, as a fountain balances a ball on its breaking crest. Another
fancy came to him, this time in metrical form.
“My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretched
Over a bubbling cauldron.”
Bad, bad. But he liked the idea of something thin and distended being
blown up from underneath.
“My soul is a thin tent of gut...”
or better--
“My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane...”
That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical
quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time
for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual
vortex. He went down slowly. “My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane...”
On the terrace stood a knot of distinguished visitors. There was old
Lord Moleyn, like a caricature of an English milord in a French comic
paper: a long man, with a long nose and long, drooping moustaches and
long teeth of old ivory, and lower down, absurdly, a short covert coat,
and below that long, long legs cased in pearl-grey trousers--legs that
bent unsteadily at the knee and gave a kind of sideways wobble as
he walked. Beside him, short and thick-set, stood Mr. Callamay, the
venerable conservative statesman, with a face like a Roman bust, and
short white hair. Young girls didn’t much like going for motor drives
alone with Mr. Callamay; and of old Lord Moleyn one wondered why he
wasn’t living in gilded exile on the island of Capri among the other
distinguished persons who, for one reason or another, find it impossible
to live in England. They were talking to Anne, laughing, the one
profoundly, the other hootingly.
A black silk balloon towing a black-and-white striped parachute proved
to be old Mrs. Budge from the big house on the other side of the valley.
She stood low on the ground, and the spikes of her black-and-white
sunshade menaced the eyes of Priscilla Wimbush, who towered over her--a
massive figure dressed in purple and topped with a queenly toque on
which the nodding black plumes recalled the splendours of a first-class
Parisian funeral.
Denis peeped at them discreetly from the window of the morning-room.
His eyes were suddenly become innocent, childlike, unprejudiced. They
seemed, these people, inconceivably fantastic. And yet they really
existed, they functioned by themselves, they were conscious, they
had minds. Moreover, he was like them. Could one believe it? But the
evidence of the red notebook was conclusive.
It would have been polite to go and say, “How d’you do?” But at the
moment Denis did not want to talk, could not have talked. His soul was a
tenuous, tremulous, pale membrane. He would keep its sensibility intact
and virgin as long as he could. Cautiously he crept out by a side
door and made his way down towards the park. His soul fluttered as he
approached the noise and movement of the fair. He paused for a moment on
the brink, then stepped in and was engulfed.
Hundreds of people, each with his own private face and all of them real,
separate, alive: the thought was disquieting. He paid twopence and saw
the Tatooed Woman; twopence more, the Largest Rat in the World. From the
home of the Rat he emerged just in time to see a hydrogen-filled balloon
break loose for home. A child howled up after it; but calmly, a perfect
sphere of flushed opal, it mounted, mounted. Denis followed it with his
eyes until it became lost in the blinding sunlight. If he could but send
his soul to follow it!...
He sighed, stuck his steward’s rosette in his buttonhole, and started to
push his way, aimlessly but officially, through the crowd.