Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

“‘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.)