The Complete Short Stories (40 page)

‘What happened next?’ I
said.

‘Well,’ said Moon, ‘I
finished my speech, shook hands with the gentlemen, kissed all the ladies, and
went home to bed.’

I could see that somehow
I had hurt Moon’s feelings.

‘Do
tell me what
transpired,’ I said urgently.

‘I am
not
mad,’
said Moon; then he continued his story.

‘To tell you the truth,’
said Moon, ‘the whole race of Hampstead was dying out from the sheer lack of
something to do in its spare time. They had only one recreation. In the
evenings they would get together at the local Welfare Centre. All they did was
to sit on the floor and chant. The chant went like this: Tum tum
ya,
tum
tum
ya
— the same thing over and over again. Nothing else. Just tum tum
ya
the whole evening until they were tired. And it was the same every night.
Naturally, at this rate, the race was beginning to die out.

‘Well, we put it to them
that what we had to offer was a very good thing. We proposed to set up a
playhouse at Hampstead, and give nightly performances for a small fee. We
proposed to bring them the Changing Drama of the Moon. I told them,’ said Moon.
‘“Once you have seen and heard the Changing Drama of the Moon,” I said, “you
will never more be content, my friends, with your own national classic, the
Unchanging Tum tum
ya.
It is not,” I added, “that we of the Moon do not
hold the classical tradition in the greatest possible reverence. But you will
have observed amongst yourselves that the time-honoured tum tum
ya
no
longer possesses the power to keep you interested in life. Many of your youth
have died from the disease of boredom. No babies have been born for the past
two years.

“‘Friends,” I concluded,
“the turn tum
ya
is not enough.”

‘We had only one
opponent — young Johnnie Heath, assistant editor of the
Tum Tum Times.
Johnnie
set up the slogan: “Hampstead for the sons of Ham,” and pasted up bills all
over the town with headlines like “Down with the Moon,” and “Protect Our Women
from the Arty Crafties.” But no one took any notice of Johnnie Heath — there
was terrific excitement over the new scheme. We took over the Welfare Centre
and got it reconstructed into a large theatre. First we called it the Moon
Playhouse, but Johnnie Heath started agitating about this name, so to keep him
quiet we changed it simply to the Playhouse.

‘The opening night was a
tremendous triumph. I must tell you something about the Changing Drama of the
Moon.

‘The artists of the Moon
had only one principal theme, and this was the story on which our show was
based. It happens to be a true story. On top of a high mountain on the Moon
there was at that time a singing voice. It did not sing in words, only pure
notes. There had always been much speculation on the Moon as to whether this
was a man’s voice or a woman’s voice; it was very difficult to tell. From time
to time an expedition set out to the singing mountain to try to locate the
singer. The approach to the singing mountain was pitted with deep concealed
craters. No one had ever returned from an expedition. But there was once a
young girl, an acrobat and singer by profession, who taught herself to mimic
the voice. She decided to fit its music to words, and set off for the mountain,
intending to find out what inspired the singer. If she knew the source of the
melody, she would know what words to fit in.

‘By her acrobatic skill,
this Moon girl managed to reach the mountain, swinging from rock to tree to
rock. All the people in that territory of the Moon could hear her singing to
cheer herself up as she climbed the mountain, because it was night. She sang a
song about her journey, the warm, strange-smelling forests and the lakes of
phosphorus. As she approached the top, the song combined with the voice of the
singing mountain like a duet. She reached the summit at dawn. Suddenly the Moon
girl was silent. Only the mountain notes could be heard. The people waited
anxiously all that day for some sign from the Moon girl, but no sound came.
Towards evening they gave her up as lost. She had been murdered, they
concluded, by the jealous voice of the mountain.

‘But just as the sun had
set, they heard a cry from the mountain-top. The Moon girl began to sing again,
her voice beating against the mountain melody in a kind of desperate dialogue.
It made a strange harmony. The Moon girl sang a narrative song which told how
she was imprisoned by the voice of the mountain. The voice, she sang, had no
body attached to it, but it surrounded her and held her fast on the mountain
peak in a whirling spiral of sound. She could not move to left or right,
neither forward nor backward, but was compelled to spin round and round with
the voice of the mountain spirit. Our Moon girl is still there. She pirouettes
on the mountain peak every night, imprisoned in the spinning voice, and singing
a continual song of defiance, in harmony with the mountain spirit. Every day at
sunrise she stops singing, and her whirling body comes to a standstill. On
clear days the Moon people can make out her small figure standing motionless on
the mountain peak while the voice of the mountain mocks her with its high
wordless music. Eventually the Moon girl told us in her song how it is that she
can’t make any sound or movement during the day. Every morning there is a
certain ray of the sun which stabs her through the throat more sharply than a
fine steel blade. She is pinioned against the sky throughout the day, unable to
cry or move until the terrible blade of the sun withdraws itself from her
throat at nightfall. The Moon girl’s song tells us that this hard ray of the
sun is what inspires the musical mountain. And the Moon girl sings of other
things too. She tells us in her nightly song all she has seen on the landscape
of the moon. It was the Moon girl who told us in her song to bring her drama to
the earth.’

Moon Biglow was
beginning to look dreary. He was obviously much taken up with this Moon girl,
and seemed likely to discourse upon the wonder of the lady all morning.

‘What about your
Playhouse?’ I said, ‘— at Hampstead, you know.’

‘Yes,’ said Moon. ‘I was
just coming down to earth.

‘Well,’ he continued, ‘we
put on the Changing Drama of the Moon, based on this history of the Moon girl —
that’s the active part of it, the drama. The Changing part comes in the words
and music; because, you see, the Moon girl sings a different song every night.
She saves up everything she sees by day, and hurls it in her song against the
walls of the voice which imprisons her.

‘And so we followed her
story; we showed her journey to the mountain — dancing and singing. We
reproduced her changing dialogue with the mountain, reproaching the invisible
voice with everything under the sun — we put the glittering blue salt-banks on
the shores of the Moon lakes into human language; we satirized the incoming
tides of the earth, and the landmarks of Hampstead Heath from season to season;
we even put our enemy Johnnie Heath to music, to try and placate him, praising
his intelligence. But he didn’t care for it much. Our decor was magnificent.
Since we took it from the shapes and colours of the Moon, no one had seen
anything like it.

‘No one, in fact, had
seen anything like our Playhouse show before. It was a tremendous success. We
had to extend the premises, for the Playhouse had become a sort of communal
centre.

“‘A remarkable
performance,” everyone said. “Quite remarkable.”

‘In fact the Playhouse
came to be known as the Remarkable. People would arrange to meet each other at
the Remarkable, and we six Moon Brothers were known as the Young Remarkables. A
new spirit had entered the people of Hampstead. Not only were they wildly in
love with the Moon girl whose history and whose changing song we depicted
nightly, but they were more in love with each other. The youth of the community
stopped dying young; the maternity wards opened again; the Remarkable was
packed to the doors each evening.

‘For my part, I was in
love with Dolores, the daughter of the Mayor of Hampstead. We had not brought
any girls from the moon, as the earth doesn’t agree with the Moonish female. So
we got Dolores to play the part of the Moon girl, which she did in a most
lifelike manner. Of course, we were all six very fond of Dolores, but
eventually she became attached to me.

‘This was about five
years after we opened the Remarkable. Then Dolores’ father, the Mayor, died,
and we were all very irritated when Johnnie Heath took his place. The
Tum Tum
Times
was, of course, no longer functioning, but Johnnie had worked himself
up on some of the new civic welfare plans occasioned by the revitalized life of
the community. He was becoming very influential.

‘We had planned to
branch off into a new field and set up a sort of academy of art. Perhaps it was
just as well we never got the chance, but our reasons were quite
reasonable.
Although the Remarkable show continued to flourish, we somehow couldn’t
induce the people to practise any form of our art themselves. No Hampstead
poets, no painters, no musicians. The general feeling was that art was a Moon
affair; and only the Young Remarkables could really handle it. When we pointed
out how well Dolores expressed the Moon girl, they replied that she was a bit
of a born Moon girl herself. Perhaps they were right. We never got very far
with our academic project, and some months after Johnnie Heath became the
Mayor, we began to have difficulties with the Playhouse called Remarkable.
Johnnie had somehow introduced an acid note into the life of Hampstead. (It was
a descendant of Johnnie’s, by the way, who founded the London School of
Economics.)

‘He started a campaign
of inquiry against us. We had to fill in forms about our origin. We had to fill
in an enormous questionnaire for our licence to run the Playhouse.

‘On the grounds that we
were not born on earth, and because there was no evidence of life on the Moon,
Johnnie tried to prove that we did not exist at all. He sent us an official
note objecting to our description of the Playhouse. He could not accept the
phrase “known as the Remarkable”, he wrote, and begged to point out that
whereas “Playhouse” was a noun, “Remarkable” was an adjective. The two could
not be reconciled as signifying one and the same object.

‘As the year wore on, so
did Johnnie’s nuisance-campaign. His tone became more and more peremptory. He
tightened up on the vigilance of the police, and we were frequently fined for
small infringements.

‘Johnnie defeated us, in
fact. We gave our last performance one evening in February. It was seven years
since our first performance. The people were very upset, but Johnnie had so
worked on them that they were afraid to express their grief.

‘We had decided to take
Dolores back to the Moon with us, in the usual way, you know.’

‘What way?’ I asked,
eagerly.

‘Don’t interrupt,’ said
Moon. ‘And anyhow you know the way to the Moon. You go on the Uprise of your
Downfall, you told me yourself!’

‘Listen,’ I said
desperately, ‘I know nothing about how to get to the Moon. There’s a lot of talk
about spaceships, but what have they got to do with the Uprise…?’

‘Quite,’ said Moon. ‘Quite.’

I had better say
straight away that so far as getting to the Moon is concerned, that was all the
information I extracted from Moon Biglow. It has something to do with uprising
and downfalling, we may be sure. But the end of his story is still to be told.

‘On what I thought was
my last night on earth,’ Moon continued, ‘I took a walk over Hampstead Heath.
We had closed the doors of the Remarkable for the last time and were all
prepared for the last Uprise of our Downfall. Dolores was to come with us. We
were both sorry and glad to go. We felt sad about leaving Hampstead, but the
place and people had changed under Johnnie’s influence, and also largely under
our own in the last seven years.

‘I brooded on these
things and was turning back to our quarters where I was to meet Dolores, when
suddenly I heard a curious sound on my right.

‘As I walked towards the
place, I became aware that a number of people were gathered together hidden
from my sight behind a large boulder. Presently I could hear more clearly what
the noise was: these people were chanting together the old refrain. Tum tum
ya,
tum tum
ya.
Silently, I peered round the boulder, and stopped short,
sick and terrified and appalled by what I saw.

‘Before I describe what
I saw, I must tell you that Johnnie Heath had recently revived the
Tum Tum
Times.
One of its columns was regularly devoted to a plea for a return to
what was described variously as “the native purity of our customs”, or “the
purity of our native customs”, or else “the customs of our native purity”. I
had not thought very much about this, for Johnnie’s ideas were always rather
cranky. But one day I had chanced to read in this column a reference to an
organization which was recommended as offering “an outlet through a classical
mode of expressions of our most pure and primitive passions”. On reading this,
I shuddered, then thought no more about it.

‘I remembered this some
time after the incident on Hampstead Heath.

‘Now,’ said Moon Biglow,
‘I will tell you what I saw there.

‘A group of young men
and women, well known to me, and many of whom had been close friends, were
seated cross-legged in a circle round a stone slab. By the light of the Moon I
saw them led by Johnnie Heath clapping their hands to the rhythm of tum tum
ya,
tum tum
ya.
On the slab inside the circle lay the dead body of
Dolores, with a knife stuck in her throat. The blood was congealed on her neck,
where it had flowed and ceased to flow.

‘Then I saw, watching
from behind them, two of my Moon Brothers. They moved round silently to where I
was standing. Hand in hand we fled home.