a Bridge of Despair. He had fled from the dressing-room of the little
music-hall just outside the city walls, which he shared with three others
of the troupe, from its horrible reek of escaping gas and drainage and
grease-paint and the hoarded human emanations of years, and had come here
instinctively to breathe the pure air that swept down the broad stream.
He had come for rest of mind and comfort of soul; but only found himself
noisily alone amid an unsympathetic multitude.

He had failed. He had learned it first from the apathy of the audience.
He had learned it afterwards from the demeanour and the speech far from
apathetic of the manager and leader of the troupe. They were a company of
six, Les Merveilleux, five jugglers, plate spinners, eccentric musicians,
ventriloquists, and one low comedian. Lackaday was the low comedian, his
business to repeat in burlesque most of the performance of his fellow
artists. It was his first engagement, outside the Cirque Rocambeau, his
first day with the troupe. Everything had gone badly. His enormous lean
length put the show out of scale. The troupe, accustomed to the business of
a smaller man, whose sudden illness caused the gap which Lackaday came from
Paris to fill, resented the change, and gave him little help. They demanded
impossibilities. Although they had rehearsed--and the rehearsals had been
a sufficient nightmare of suffering--everybody had seemed to devote a
ferocious malice to his humiliation. Where the professional juggler is
accustomed to catch things at his hip, they threw them at his knees; they
appeared to decide that his head should be on the level of his breast. The
leading lady, Madame Coincon, wife of the manager, a compact person of five
foot two, roundly declared that she could not play with him, and in his
funniest act, dependent on her co-operation, she left him to be helplessly
funny by himself. The tradition of the troupe required the comedian to be
attired in a loud check suit, green necktie and white felt bowler hat. On
the podgy form of Lackaday's predecessor it produced its comic effect. On