We follow thee!
They are all like that: songs, recitations, almanacs, and “children’s games.” If you ask how evenings are spent at home, any little boy will tell you what good times he has (with his face drawn down dutifully), how he has just been in a play called, say, The Freemason Circus; he won’t know what a Freemason is, but he’ll tell about the unpleasant magician, and the fearful Jew, Amschel Rothschild, the circus director. There is a “black brother” too; very wicked, very funny, dressed in clerical clothes; a “red bear” with a Russian accent and a meek fool with “English’* traits. “I played a good part myself,” the little boy says, “in costume. I was made up as Marianne — they sprinkled perfume all over me. I was supposed to be France, you know: it was a political play.”
Oh, a political play! Well, what happens?
“You know perfectly well what happens!” he says in a mocking voice, laughing uncertainly and not believing that the question was honest. He speaks his punch line, timing it slowly, like a good actor reaching his climax: “The German, Michel, licks them all.”
Of course he does….
“Want to see how it goes?” he is asking. “We rehearsed for ages before we gave the real performance at the Gau meeting. I know every part by heart, backward and forward.”
All right, then, what does Marianne say to the red bear?
He takes his place as Marianne, giving her the loose loping walk and rotating hips of a street-walker, and doing it well, too. For the bear, he keeps his paw up in threat. “O, you lovely creature,” he says, deep in his throat, “O, sweet red bear!” he chirps in answer, falsetto, swinging his hips; and then, with his fist up too (a duet, he explains), “Let’s have a marriage pact.”
“Against Michel, a strong contract,” Marianne puts in calculatingly; but the bear knows what he’s after, and goes on roughly and covetously: “You’re my object, my delight, I’ll eat you up, love, in one bite!”
But that’s charming, and the little boy is so obliging, and such a good actor! And what does Michel say to this?