Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Who Cares? a story of adolescence by Cosmo Hamilton
page 121 of 344 (35%)
stalls, to surround himself with several women whose gigantic
proportions were horribly exposed to the eye. The rumble of his
voice and the high squeals of their laughter clashed with the sounds
of the vitriolic argument on the stage, and the noises of a bored
band, in which an oboe was giving a remarkable imitation of a
gobbling turkey cock, and a cornet of a man blowing his nose. The
leader of the band was pacing up and down the musicians' room,
saying to himself: "Zis is ze last timer. Zis is ze last timer,"
well knowing that it wasn't. The poor devil had a wife and children
to feed.

Bevies of weary and spirit-broken chorus girls in costume were
sprawling on the chairs in the lower boxes, some sleeping, some too
tired to sleep, and some eating ravenously from paper bags. Chorus
men and costumers, wig makers and lyric writers, authors and friends
of the company, sat about singly and in pairs in the orchestra
seats. They were mostly bored so far beyond mere impatience by all
this super-inefficiency and chaos as to have arrived at a state of
intellectual coma. The various men out of whose brains had
originally come the book and lyrics no longer hated each other and
themselves; they lusted for the blood of the stage director or saw
gorgeous mental pictures of a little fat oozy corpse surrounded by
the gleeful faces of the army of people who had been impotent to
protest against the lash of his whip, the impertinence of his tongue
or the gross dishonesty of his methods.

One other man in addition to the raucous, self-advertising stage
director, Jackrack, commonly called "Jack-in-office," showed
distinct signs of life--a short, overdressed, perky person with
piano fingers and baldish head much too big for his body, who
DigitalOcean Referral Badge