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The noise had become incessant: Pierrots and Pierrettes, Harlequins and Columbines had worked themselves up into a veritable intoxication of shouts and laughter.
In one quarter was a Maypole dressed with garlands and people dancing round it to a tabor and pipes and rustic music, all masqued, as were all the various bands of music that were dispersed in different parts of the garden; some like huntsmen with French horns, some like peasants, and a troop of harlequins and scaramouches in the little open temple on the mount.
The King was but little amused, spoke only to two or three persons, who knew him immediately, and found nothing to admire at the masquerade but Punches and Harlequins, which served as a joke against him for the royal family, who often amused themselves with laughing at him about it. An event, simple in itself, brought dire suspicion upon the Queen.
"How it is all tinsel and falsetto!... I want a clean, cold, searching wave desert and night not life all choked with wax tapers and harlequins! I want something.... I don't know what I want. I only know I haven't got it!" His arm moved upon the base of the statue. He looked up at the white form with the arrow in its hands.
The shadows took the forms of rabbits, swans, foxes, elephants, fairies, sailors with wooden legs, old women who smoked pipes, ballet-girls who pirouetted, anglers who bobbed for fish, twirling harlequins, and the profiles of eminent statesmen all made with two hands and, at the most, the help of a tiny stick or piece of string.
We looked at the man across the table again and again; and could not satisfy ourselves what race of beings to class him with. How very odd that this never occurred to us before! We will frankly own that we have been much troubled with the harlequin. We see harlequins of so many kinds in the real living pantomime, that we hardly know which to select as the proper fellow of him of the theatres.
Now it is true, and I ought to take notice of it also, that, though these things happen, and may wrong a tradesman, yet it is oftener, ten times for once, that tradesmen neglect their shop and business to follow the track of their vices and extravagence some by taverns, others to the gaming-houses, others to balls and masquerades, plays, harlequins, and operas, very few by too much religion.
There were to be Pierrots and Pierettes, Harlequins and English clowns, aristocrats and goddesses!
Garrick, at Drury Lane, finding his audience with no heart for tragedy, and that they must have Pantomime, very wisely said, "If you won't come to 'Lear' and 'Hamlet, I must give you Harlequin." And Harlequin he did give them, in the person of Woodward, one of the best of Harlequins that ever trod the stage.
Head bent down, a desk, a telephone, books bound in green leather, electric light.... "Fresh coals, sir?" ... "Your tea, sir."... Talk about football, the Hotspurs, the Harlequins; six-thirty Star brought in by the office boy; the rooks of Gray's Inn passing overhead; branches in the fog thin and brittle; and through the roar of traffic now and again a voice shouting: "Verdict verdict winner winner," while letters accumulate in a basket, Jacob signs them, and each evening finds him, as he takes his coat down, with some muscle of the brain new stretched.
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