CHAPTER XXVI

 

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 symbols 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 seesaw.

      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 Tattooed 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 on the blinding sunlight.  If he could be 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.