Chapter XXVI.

by Aldous Huxley

　　A little canvas village of tents and booths had sprung up, justbeyond the boundaries of the garden, in the green expanse of thepark. A crowd thronged its streets, the men dressed mostly inblack--holiday best, funeral best--the women in pale muslins.Here and there tricolour bunting hung inert. In the midst of thecanvas town, scarlet and gold and crystal, the merry-go-roundglittered in the sun. The balloon-man walked among the crowd,and above his head, like a huge, inverted bunch of many-colouredgrapes, the balloons strained upwards. With a scythe-like motionthe boat-swings reaped the air, and from the funnel of the enginewhich worked the roundabout rose a thin, scarcely wavering columnof 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 onthe parapet, he surveyed the scene. The steam-organ sent upprodigious music. The clashing of automatic cymbals beat outwith inexorable precision the rhythm of piercingly soundedmelodies. The harmonies were like a musical shattering of glassand brass. Far down in the bass the Last Trump was hugelyblowing, and with such persistence, such resonance, that itsalternate tonic and dominant detached themselves from the rest ofthe music and made a tune of their own, a loud, monotonous see-saw.Denis leaned over the gulf of swirling noise. If he threwhimself over the parapet, the noise would surely buoy him up,keep him suspended, bobbing, as a fountain balances a ball on itsbreaking crest. Another fancy came to him, this time in metricalform."My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretchedOver a bubbling cauldron."Bad, bad. But he liked the idea of something thin and distendedbeing 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 rightanatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisylife. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean ofwords into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. "My soul isa thin, tenuous membrane..."On the terrace stood a knot of distinguished visitors. There wasold Lord Moleyn, like a caricature of an English milord in aFrench 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 legscased in pearl-grey trousers--legs that bent unsteadily at theknee and gave a kind of sideways wobble as he walked. Besidehim, short and thick-set, stood Mr. Callamay, the venerableconservative statesman, with a face like a Roman bust, and shortwhite hair. Young girls didn't much like going for motor drivesalone with Mr. Callamay; and of old Lord Moleyn one wondered whyhe wasn't living in gilded exile on the island of Capri among theother distinguished persons who, for one reason or another, findit 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 parachuteproved to be old Mrs. Budge from the big house on the other sideof the valley. She stood low on the ground, and the spikes ofher black-and-white sunshade menaced the eyes of PriscillaWimbush, who towered over her--a massive figure dressed in purpleand topped with a queenly toque on which the nodding black plumesrecalled 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, inconceivablyfantastic. And yet they really existed, they functioned bythemselves, they were conscious, they had minds. Moreover, hewas like them. Could one believe it? But the evidence of thered notebook was conclusive.It would have been polite to go and say, "How d'you do?" But atthe moment Denis did not want to talk, could not have talked.His soul was a tenuous, tremulous, pale membrane. He would keepits sensibility intact and virgin as long as he could.Cautiously he crept out by a side door and made his way downtowards the park. His soul fluttered as he approached the noiseand 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 ofthem real, separate, alive: the thought was disquieting. Hepaid twopence and saw the Tatooed Woman; twopence more, theLargest Rat in the World. From the home of the Rat he emergedjust in time to see a hydrogen-filled balloon break loose forhome. A child howled up after it; but calmly, a perfect sphereof flushed opal, it mounted, mounted. Denis followed it with hiseyes until it became lost in the blinding sunlight. If he couldbut send his soul to follow it!...He sighed, stuck his steward's rosette in his buttonhole, andstarted to push his way, aimlessly but officially, through thecrowd.