Chapter 26 - Page 2

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.