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Updated: June 12, 2025
If I am engaged I don't want all creation to know about it. There was lots of space between the mule and the veranda; and, if you think I can't ride There!" Whereupon wilful Kitty set off, her dainty little head in the air, at a hand-gallop in the direction of the Bandstand; fully expecting, as she herself afterward told me, that I should follow her. What was the matter? Nothing indeed.
"Run and get him, Birger," she urged. "Oh, run quick!" "Erik, Erik, come here!" cried Birger, running after his friend. But before Birger's voice reached his ears, the trombonist had said very plainly and harshly, "Get away from here, you dirty Lapp!" and poor Erik was looking at him with shame and anger in his eyes, when Birger took hold of his clenched hand and led him away from the bandstand.
The bandstand was still there, and a military band, in sky- blue Saxon uniform, was executing the first item in the forenoon programme of music. Around it, instead of the serried rows of green chairs that Yeovil remembered, was spread out an acre or so of small round tables, most of which had their quota of customers, engaged in a steady consumption of lager beer, coffee, lemonade and syrups.
As the musicians began to tune up at the bandstand, most of the remaining cadets sauntered through the company streets on their way to get close to the music. All cadets who passed through A company's street became suddenly silent when within ten paces of Dick's tent, and remained silent until ten paces beyond. Dick's tent being at the head of the street, he was quite near enough to the music.
They would turn deliberately off the Maidan and away from the bandstand to be rid of our irrelevant bows; they did their duty by the rest of us, but the most egregious among us, the Deputy-Commissioner for selection, could see that he hardly counted.
Men of the Legion rested on the rough wooden benches, staring absently at mourning plumes of cypresses, or white waterfalls that fleeted by like lost opportunities. Yes, despite the flowers in the myrtle borders it was a place of sadness, and of a mournful silence until the musicians brought their instruments into the curious bandstand formed of growing trees.
Here a deserted bandstand, there a railway station, here a dead haunt for pierrots, there a closed and barred cinema house, here a row of stranded bathing-machines, there a shuttered tea-house and not a living soul in sight.
There was band concert in camp that night. Many cadets of the first and third classes had already gone to meet girls whom they would escort in strolling near the bandstand. Plebes are not expected to escort young ladies to these concerts. The members of the second class were away on the summer furlough, as Dick and Greg had been the summer before.
Saturday came along, with the lad apparently as far from making his escape as ever. But what he had hoped would come to pass had done so in a measure. That is, the owner of the show had become a little careless in watching the boy. Instead of accompanying Phil into the ring, Sully satisfied himself with standing by the entrance to the paddock, next to the bandstand.
A long dull road or street, a statue of the navigator La Perouse, a bandstand with a few trees about it, and plain, modern buildings without character, some larger and more pretentious than others, but all uninteresting. Is this Albi? No, but it is what appears to be so to the stranger who enters the place from the railway-station.
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