And the sense of excitement. He couldn't believe that when he had passed the gate and reached the grass under the plane trees nothing would happen, though now it wasn't a girl he wanted or a magic ring, but something far less likely -- to mislay the events of twenty years. His heart beat and the band played, and inside the lean experienced skull lay childhood.
"Come and try your luck, sir?" said the clergyman in a voice which was obviously baritone at socials.
"If I could have some coppers."
"Thirteen for a shilling, sir."
Arthur Rowe slid the pennies one after the other down the little inclined groove and watched them stagger on the board.
"Not your lucky day, sir, I'm afraid. What about another Shilling's-worth? Another little flutter in a good cause?"
"I think perhaps I'll flutter further on," His mother, he remembered, had always fluttered further on, carefully dividing her patronage in equal parts, though she left the coconuts and the gambling to the children. At some stalls it had been very difficult to find anything at all, even to give away to the servants. . .
Under a little awning there was a cake on a stand surrounded by a small group of enthusiastic sightseers. A lady was explaining, "We clubbed our butter rations -- and Mr Tatham was able to get hold of the currants."
She turned to Arthur Rowe and said, "Won't you take a ticket and guess its weight?"
He lifted it and said at random, "Three pounds five ounces."
"A very good guess, I should say. Your wife must have been teaching you."
He winced away from the group. "Oh no, I'm not married."
War had made the stall-holders' task extraordinarily difficult: second-hand Penguins for the Forces filled most of one stall, while another was sprinkled rather than filled with the strangest second-hand clothes -- the cast-offs of old age -- long petticoats with pockets, high lacy collars with bone supports, routed out of Edwardian drawers and discarded at last for the sake of the free mothers, and corsets that clanked. Baby clothes played only a very small part now that wool was rationed and the second-hand was so much in demand among friends. The third stall was the traditional one -- the white elephant -- though black might have described it better since many Anglo-Indian families had surrendered their collections of ebony elephants. There were also brass ash-trays, embroidered match-cases which had not held matches now for a very long time, books too shabby for the bookstall, two postcard albums, a complete set of Dickens cigarette-cards, an electro-plated egg-boiler, a long pink cigarette-holder, several embossed boxes for pins from Benares, a signed post-card of Mrs Winston Churchill, and a plateful of mixed foreign copper coins. . . Arthur Rowe turned over the books and found with an ache of the heart a dingy copy of The Little Duke. He paid sixpence for it and walked on. There was something threatening, it seemed to him, in the very perfection of the day. Between the plane trees which shaded the treasure-ground he could see the ruined section of the square; it was as if Providence had led him to exactly this point to indicate the difference between then and now. These people might have been playing a part in an expensive morality for his sole benefit. . .
He couldn't, of course, not take part in the treasure-hunt, though it was a sad declension to know the nature of the prize, and afterwards there remained nothing of consequence but the fortune-teller -- it was a fortune-teller's booth and not a lavatory. A curtain made of a cloth brought home by somebody from Algiers dangled at the entrance. A lady caught his arm and said, "You must. You really must. Mrs Bellairs is quite wonderful. She told my son. . ." and clutching another middle-aged lady as she went by, she went breathlessly on, "I was just telling this gentleman about wonderful Mrs Bellairs and my son."
"Your younger son?"
"Yes. Jack."
The interruption enabled Rowe to escape. The sun was going down: the square garden was emptying: it was nearly time to dig up the treasure and make tracks, before darkness and blackout and siren-time. So many fortunes one had listened to, behind a country hedge, over the cards in a liner's saloon, but the fascination remained even when the fortune was cast by an amateur at a garden fête. Always, for a little while, one could half-believe in the journey overseas, in the strange dark woman, and the letter with good news. Once somebody had refused to tell his fortune at all -- it was just an act, of course, put on to impress him -- and yet that silence had really come closer to the truth than anything else.
He lifted the curtain and felt his way in.
It was very dark inside the tent and he could hardly distinguish Mrs Bellairs, a bulky figure shrouded in what looked like cast-off widow's weeds -- or perhaps it was some kind of peasant's costume. He was unprepared for Mrs Bellairs' deep powerful voice: a convincing voice. He had expected the wavering tones of a lady whose other hobby was water-colours.
"Sit down, please, and cross my hand with silver."
"It's so dark."
But now he could just manage to make her out: it was a peasant's costume with a big head-dress and a veil of some kind tucked back over her shoulder. He found a half-crown and sketched a cross upon her palm.
"Your hand."
He held it out and felt it gripped firmly as though she intended to convey: expect no mercy. A tiny electric night-light was reflected down on the girdle of Venus, the little crosses which should have meant children, the long, long line of life. . .
He said, "You're up-to-date. The electric nightlight, I mean."
She paid no attention to his flippancy. She said, "First the character, then the past: by law I am not allowed to tell the future. You're a man of determination and imagination and you are very sensitive -- to pain, but you sometimes feel you have not been allowed a proper scope for your gifts. You want to do great deeds, not dream them all day long. Never mind. After all, you have made one woman happy."
He tried to take his hand away, but she held it too firmly: it would have been a tug of war. She said, "You have found the true contentment in a happy marriage. Try to be more patient, though. Now I will tell you your past."