"Pay your sixpences now!Come along .pay your sixpences now."Crowds of people were passing through the stile,jostling one another,pressing and pushing,but all apparently in good temper,for there was a great deal of laughter and merriment.From the other side of the fence came a torrent of sound,so discordant and so tumultuous that it was impossible to separate the elements of it one from another--screams,shrieks,the bellowing of animals,and the monotonous rise and fall of scraps of tune,several bars of one and then bars of another,and then everything lost together in the general babel;and to the right of him Jeremy could see not very far away quiet fields with cows grazing,and the dark grave wood on the horizon.
Would he venture?For a moment his heart failed him--a wave of something threatening and terribly powerful seemed to come out to him through the stile,and the people who were passing in looked large and fierce.Then he saw two small boys,their whole bearing one of audacious boldness,push through.He was not going to be beaten.He followed a man with a back like a wall."One,please,"he said.
"'Come along now .pay your sixpences .pay your sixpences,"cried the man.He was through.He stepped at once into something that had for him all the elements of the most terrifying and enchanting of fairy tales.He was planted,it seemed,in a giant world.At first he could see nothing but the high and thick bodies of the people who moved on every side of him;he peered under shoulders,he was lost amongst legs and arms,he walked suddenly into waistcoat buttons and was flung thence on to walking sticks.
But it was,if he had known it,the most magical hour of all for him to have chosen.It was the moment when the sun,sinking behind the woods and hills,leaves a faint white crystal sky and a world transformed in an instant from sharp outlines and material form into coloured mist and rising vapour.The Fair also was transformed,putting forward all its lights and becoming,after the glaring tawdiness of the day,a place of shadow and sudden circles of flame and dim obscurity.
Lights,even as Jeremy watched,sprang into the air,wavered,faltered,hesitated,then rocked into a steady glow,only shifting a little with the haze.On either side of him were rough,wooden stalls,and these were illuminated with gas,which sizzled and hissed like angry snakes.The stalls were covered with everything invented by man;here a sweet stall,with thick,sticky lumps of white and green and red,glass bottles of bulls'eyes and peppermints,thick slabs of almond toffee and pink cocoanut icing,boxes of round chocolate creams and sticks of liquorice,lumps of gingerbread,with coloured pictures stuck upon them,saffron buns,plum cakes in glass jars,and chains of little sugary biscuits hanging on long red strings.There was the old-clothes'stall with trousers and coats and waistcoats,all shabby and lanky,swinging beneath the gas,and piles of clothes on the boards,all nonde and unhappy and faded;there was the stall with the farm implements,and the medicine stall,and the flower stall,and the vegetable stall,and many,many another.Each place had his or her guardian,vociferous,red-faced,screaming out the wares,lowering the voice to cajole,raising it again to draw back a retreating customer,carrying on suddenly an intimate conversation with the next-door shopkeeper,laughing,quarrelling,arguing.
To Jeremy it was a world of giant heights and depths.Behind the stalls,beyond the lane down which he moved,was an uncertain glory,a threatening peril.He fancied that strange animals moved there;he thought he heard a lion roar and an elephant bellow.The din of the sellers all about him made it impossible to tell what was happening beyond there;only the lights and bells,shouts and cries,confusing smells,and a great roar of distant voices.
He almost wished that he had not come,he felt so very small and helpless;he wondered whether he could find his way out again,and looking back,he was for a moment terrified to see that the stream of people behind him shut him in so that he could not see the stile,nor the wooden barrier,nor the red-faced man.Pushed forward,he found himself at the end of the lane and standing in a semi-circular space surrounded by strange-looking booths with painted pictures upon them,and in front of them platforms with wooden steps running up to them.Then,so unexpectedly that he gave a little scream,a sudden roar burst out behind him.He turned and,indeed,the world seemed to have gone mad.A moment ago there had been darkness and dim shadow.Now,suddenly,there was a huge whistling,tossing circle of light and flame,and from the centre of this a banging,brazen,cymbal-clashing scream issued-a scream that,through its strident shrillness,he recognised as a tune that he knew--a tune often whistled by Jim at Cow Farm."And her golden hair was hanging down her back."Whence the tune came he could not tell;from the very belly of the flaming monster,it seemed;but,as he watched,he saw that the huge circle whirled ever faster and faster,and that up and down on the flame of it coloured horses rose and fell,vanishing from light to darkness,from darkness to light,and seeming of their own free will and motion to dance to the thundering music.
It was the most terrific thing that he had ever seen.The most terrific thing.he stood there,his cap on the back of his head,his legs apart,his mouth open;forgetting utterly the crowd,thinking nothing of time or danger or punishment--he gazed with his whole body.
