CHAPTER XXVI.
A little canvas village of tents and booths had sprung up, just beyondthe boundaries of the garden, in the green expanse of the park. A crowdthronged its streets, the men dressed mostly in black--holiday best,funeral best--the women in pale muslins. Here and there tricolourbunting hung inert. In the midst of the canvas town, scarlet and goldand crystal, the merry-go-round glittered in the sun. The balloon-manwalked among the crowd, and above his head, like a huge, invertedbunch of many-coloured grapes, the balloons strained upwards. With ascythe-like motion the boat-swings reaped the air, and from the funnelof the engine which worked the roundabout rose a thin, scarcely waveringcolumn of black smoke.
Denis had climbed to the top of one of Sir Ferdinando's towers, andthere, standing on the sun-baked leads, his elbows resting on theparapet, he surveyed the scene. The steam-organ sent up prodigiousmusic. The clashing of automatic cymbals beat out with inexorableprecision the rhythm of piercingly sounded melodies. The harmonies werelike a musical shattering of glass and brass. Far down in the bassthe Last Trump was hugely blowing, and with such persistence, suchresonance, that its alternate tonic and dominant detached themselvesfrom 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 overthe parapet, the noise would surely buoy him up, keep him suspended,bobbing, as a fountain balances a ball on its breaking crest. Anotherfancy came to him, this time in metrical form.
"My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretched Over a bubblingcauldron."
Bad, bad. But he liked the idea of something thin and distended beingblown 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 anatomicalquality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was timefor him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actualvortex. He went down slowly. "My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane..."
On the terrace stood a knot of distinguished visitors. There was oldLord Moleyn, like a caricature of an English milord in a French comicpaper: a long man, with a long nose and long, drooping moustaches andlong teeth of old ivory, and lower down, absurdly, a short covert coat,and below that long, long legs cased in pearl-grey trousers--legs thatbent unsteadily at the knee and gave a kind of sideways wobble ashe walked. Beside him, short and thick-set, stood Mr. Callamay, thevenerable conservative statesman, with a face like a Roman bust, andshort white hair. Young girls didn't much like going for motor drivesalone with Mr. Callamay; and of old Lord Moleyn one wondered why hewasn't living in gilded exile on the island of Capri among the otherdistinguished persons who, for one reason or another, find it impossibleto live in England. They were talking to Anne, laughing, the oneprofoundly, the other hootingly.
A black silk balloon towing a black-and-white striped parachute provedto 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-whitesunshade menaced the eyes of Priscilla Wimbush, who towered over her--amassive figure dressed in purple and topped with a queenly toque onwhich the nodding black plumes recalled the splendours of a first-classParisian funeral.
Denis peeped at them discreetly from the window of the morning-room.His eyes were suddenly become innocent, childlike, unprejudiced. Theyseemed, these people, inconceivably fantastic. And yet they reallyexisted, they functioned by themselves, they were conscious, theyhad minds. Moreover, he was like them. Could one believe it? But theevidence of the red notebook was conclusive.
It would have been polite to go and say, "How d'you do?" But at themoment Denis did not want to talk, could not have talked. His soul was atenuous, tremulous, pale membrane. He would keep its sensibility intactand virgin as long as he could. Cautiously he crept out by a sidedoor and made his way down towards the park. His soul fluttered as heapproached the noise and movement of the fair. He paused for a moment onthe 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 sawthe Tatooed Woman; twopence more, the Largest Rat in the World. From thehome of the Rat he emerged just in time to see a hydrogen-filled balloonbreak loose for home. A child howled up after it; but calmly, a perfectsphere of flushed opal, it mounted, mounted. Denis followed it with hiseyes until it became lost in the blinding sunlight. If he could but sendhis soul to follow it!...
He sighed, stuck his steward's rosette in his buttonhole, and started topush his way, aimlessly but officially, through the crowd.