"See that they follow near me. Allow them to remain close to me at all
times--I may need a good stone-thrower later!"
Gerda, her brother and the oaf without a name were rounded up in a
hurry, and soon found themselves being hustled along, willy-nilly, out
of the water, up onto the bridge and into Dionysus' van, where they
followed in the wake of the God, in front of the rest of the Procession.
Of the three, Forrester noted, Gerda was the only one who didn't seem to
think the invitation a high honor. The sight gave him a kind of hope.
_And at least_, he thought, _I can keep an eye on her this way_.
The Procession wended its way on, bending slowly southward toward the
little Temple-on-the-Green again. The musicians played energetically,
switching now from the hymn to their unofficial little ditty. Some
switched before others, some switched after, and some never bothered to
switch at all. The battery, caught between the opposing claims of two
perfectly good songs and a lot of extraneous matter, filled in as best
they could with a good deal of forceful banging and pounding, aided by
the steam calliope, and the result of all effort was a growing cacophony
that should have been terribly unpleasant but somehow wasn't.
The shouting of the crowd, joking and singing, may have had something to
do with it; nothing was clearly distinguishable, but the general feeling
was that a lot of noise was being produced, and that was all to the
good. Noise could have been packaged by the board foot and sold in
quantities sufficient to equip every town meeting throughout the country
in full for seven years, and there would have been enough left over,
Forrester thought, to provide for the subways, the classrooms, the
offices and even a couple of really top-grade traffic jams.
Gerda and the others of her party marched quietly. Ed, Forrester
noticed, tried a few cheers, but he got cold stares from his sister and
soon desisted. The oaf shambled along, his arm no longer around Gerda's
waist. This pleased Forrester no end, and he was in quite a happy mood
by the time the Procession reached the Temple-on-the-Green.
He was so happy that he performed his atoning high jump once again, this
time with a double somersault and a jack-knife thrown in, just to make
things interesting, and landed gently, feeling positively exhilarated
and very Godlike, on the roof of the Temple.
As the Procession straggled in, the music stopped. Forrester cleared his
throat and shouted in his most penetrating roar to the silent
assemblage: "Hear me!"
The crowd stirred, looked up and paid him the most rapt attention.
"On with the revels!" he roared. "Let the dancing begin! Let my wine
flow like the streams of the park! Let joy be unrestrained!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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