Simon the Jester eBook

William John Locke
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 379 pages of information about Simon the Jester.

Simon the Jester eBook

William John Locke
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 379 pages of information about Simon the Jester.

The performance had only just begun and Lola’s turn was seventh on the list.  I reflected that greater deliberation in my movements would have suited the maturity of my years, besides enabling me to eat a more digestible dinner.  I had come with the unreasoning impatience of a boy, fully conscious that I was too early, yet desperately anxious not to be too late.  I laughed at myself indulgently and patted the boy in me on the head.  Meanwhile, I gave myself up with mild interest to the entertainment provided.  It was the same as that at any music-hall, winter garden, or variety theatre the world over.  The same brawny gentlemen in tights made human pyramids out of themselves and played football with the little boys and minced with their aggravating steps down to the footlights; the same red-nosed clown tried to emulate his dashing companion on the horizontal bars, pulling himself up, to the eternal delight of the audience, by the seat of his baggy breeches, and hanging his hat on the smooth steel upright; the same massive lady with the deep chest sang sentimental ballads; the same China-man produced warrens of rabbits and flocks of pigeons from impossible receptacles; the same half-dozen scantily clad damsels sang the same inane chorus in the same flat baby voices and danced the same old dance.  Mankind in the bulk is very young; it is very easily amused and, like a child, clamours for the oft-repeated tale.

The curtain went down on the last turn before Lola’s.  I felt a curious suspense, and half wished that I had not come to see the performance.  I shrank from finding her a million miles away from me, a new, remote creature, impersonal as those who had already appeared on the stage.  Mingled with this was a fear lest she might not please this vast audience.  Failure, I felt, would be as humiliating to me as to her.  Agatha, I remembered, confessed to the same feeling with regard to myself when I made my first speech in the House of Commons.  But then I had an incontrovertible array of facts and arguments, drawn up by an infallible secretary and welded into cunning verbiage by myself, which I learned off by heart.  And the House, as I knew it would, had been half asleep.  I couldn’t fail.  But Lola had to please three thousand wide-awake Berlin citizens, who had paid their money for entertainment, with no other equipment than her own personality and the tricks of a set of wretched irresponsible cats.

The orchestra struck up the act music.  The curtains parted, and revealed the brightly polished miniature gymnasium I had seen at Anastasius’s cattery; the row of pussies at the back, each on a velvet stand, some white, some tabby, some long-furred, some short-furred, all sitting with their forepaws doubled demurely under their chests, wagging their tails comically, and blinking with feline indifference at the footlights; a cage in a corner in which I descried the ferocious wild tomcat; and, busily putting the last touches to the

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Project Gutenberg
Simon the Jester from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.