Chapter 26

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 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