Arab Woman and Child Charcoal Drawing By JOAN BELL
JULY 7, 1932 THE NEW ENGLISH WEEKLY 281 Hippodrome I had known the young man, but in what circumstances I could not remember. The poster surprised me at first, for I had not expected to see him in a tableau. I remembered he had been beautiful, with his easy muscles and sincere boyish face; now they had discovered his quality and shown him in tights for Apollo. He lay wreathed on a plinth of marble, milk white, attended by a Goddess, white as himself, with a large and muscular torso,—like the Venus of Medici. As I looked, wondering who gave him his circus name, and how he was faring in the accommodating life of the theatre, a schoolmaster came up and stood before the poster. He was a little corpulent, in middle age, with a leaden mouth and inky, dyspeptical eyes. I recognised the sag of his greatcoat; but he had forgotten me. I went up the road, on Mary's errand, to buy paraffin at an oilshop, and thought about myself. The Hippodrome was very crowded, for on that day the shops had been closed early, and the comic conjuror was confident of his popularity. He balanced pyramids of axioms and hypotheses, and ran round in circles on deductive wheels. From his hat he drew out large buoyant theories and endless yards of information. His mouth was leaden and he had inky, dyspeptical eyes. The lights were dimmed, and we could see him, among Egyptian columns, in the cap and hood of a pedagogue. He picked a small ball of glass out of the air. He held it out on his chalky fingers and when the people stared it kindled to a mystery. At first it flushed with a green light, that was soon intense and steady, and then the green began to spin, shaping a coreless vortex that drilled into the darkness. The pedagogue pattered explanations and we could see the substance of the vortex overflowing in the glass. " A point has position but no magnitude," he said, 41 position but no magnitude." Green circles spun out, small at first, but increasing as they floated above us. The great ones drifted into the domed roof and lay along the edges of the galleries. Smaller ones, without space to increase, sank over our heads and on to the mouths of the trumpets.
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