The Circus of Dr. Lao Read Online Free PDF Page A

starting tomorrow."
     "Well, thank God!" said Mrs. Rogers. "Where? Tell me quick!"
     "Oh, maintenance stuff down at the hotel. But I wanted to tell you about that parade. Never saw such a thing. Got a snake there I bet's eighty feet long if he's an inch. And then there was a Chink. Funny old bird. Oh, yeah; but what I wanted to tell you about was a bear they had in a cage. There was a fellah standing beside me tried to tell me it was a man. Ever hear of such a thing? Couldn't tell a bear from a man! I thought he was joking at first, but he got hard as the devil, so I piped down and let him think it was a man. Ever hear of such a thing?"
     "Yes," said Mrs. Rogers, "I've heard considerable about it already this morning."
     "How's that?"
     "Oh, the children saw the parade, too."
     "Oh, they did, huh? That's good. They didn't think that bear was a man, did they?"
     "Willie thought it was a Russian," said Mrs. Rogers.
         At quarter to eleven Miss Agnes Birdsong, high-school English teacher, was down on Main Street waiting for the parade and feeling a little foolish. She felt even more foolish when she saw what a silly little parade it turned out to be. But she looked pretty standing in the shade in her flimsy summer dress; she looked pretty, and she knew it, and she kept on standing there and watching.
     She couldn't quite identify the animals at first. Then she said to herself: "Of course, that thing's a unicorn." Then she remembered that unicorns were figments of the imagination. "It's a fake," she corrected herself.
     She regarded the snake with a slight feeling of illness. She hated snakes anyway; this huge grey yellow-tongued worm with scarlet throat and jeweled eyes bothered her and frightened her. Suppose it should get loose. Of course, it was penned in there, but suppose it should get loose. How terrible. The grinning old Chinaman, noting her concern, reached around behind him with his whip handle and prodded the serpent. It hissed like a truck tire going flat and shifted its slimy coils.
     Miss Agnes shuddered.
     Then she saw the sphinx and the old bearded man driving it and the man in the cage on the wagon. The old bearded man was wool-gathering; the reins lay listless in his hands; his thoughts, far away from Abalone and the business of driving in the parade, played gently in some stray corner of the universe of his mind. The sphinx, noting its driver's inattention, took the bit in its teeth, gave a sluggish leap, and almost snapped the reins from the old fellow's grasp.
     "Pay attention to your business, Apollonius," snarled the sphinx.
     Miss Agnes Birdsong nearly sat down on the sidewalk in amazement. She looked at the people around her, but they seemed not to have heard a word. Miss Agnes touched her pulse and her brow. "I am a calm, intelligent girl," she said firmly. "I am a calm, intelligent girl."
     Then the last wagon came along drawn by the golden ass, driven by the clovenfooted satyr. A little gold ring was in the satyr's nose; beside him on the seat was his syrinx. To Miss Agnes he smelled like a goat. His torso was lean as a marathon runner's; his hoofs were stained grass-green. A grape leaf was caught in his hair. He leered at Miss Agnes; he shielded his eyes with his hand and leered at her. He turned in his seat and stared back at her, staring and staring as though out of his accumulation of years he could remember nothing to compare with her.
     "I am a calm, intelligent girl," Miss Agnes reassured herself. "I am a calm, intelligent girl, and I have not seen Pan on Main Street. Nevertheless, I will go to the circus and make sure."
         At a quarter past twelve, Mr. Etaoin, the Tribune proofreader, went around to the Tribune newsroom to see about getting a pass to the circus.
     The city editor gave him one. "Old Chink brought 'em in this morning. Funny old bird. Spoke