“Behold, all men and women at Glenfaba, I have made one further change
in my rôle of female Wandering Jew! You have to think of Glory now,
dear people, in a nice house in St. John's Wood, though there is no wood
anywhere visible except the park, where they keep all the wild beasts in
London--all that go on four legs, you know. The master of the mansion is
Mr. Carl Koenig, a dear old hippopotamus who is five-feet-nothing in his
boots, and has piercing black eyes and an electroplated mustache. He
is a sort of an English-German-Dutch-Polish musician. When he talks of
himself as an organist he is always a little John Bull, being F. R. C.
O. and lots of things besides; when he speaks of 'Vaterland' he is a
German; when he mentions the sea he is a Dutchman; and when he is in
good spirits (or they are in him) he sings 'Poland is not lost forever!'
all over the house until you sometimes wish it were.
“His wife is an Englishwoman, about forty or more, with big, moist,
doggy eyes that give you an idea of slave-humility, and an unappreciated
and undeveloped soul. There never were two married folk less alike, she
being one of those silent creatures who come into a room and sit and
listen and never speak, except to give instructions to the maids, while
he is always cackling like an old hen who can never lay an egg without
letting the whole world know all about it. They have two female
servants--both beautiful Cockneys--besides a boy in the garden, and
a parrot that holds forth all over the place; and their house is the
rendezvous of all kinds and conditions of great people, for Mr. Koenig
himself is a sort of Gideon's lamp among 'pros' of nearly every order.
“And now you want to know how I come to be here. You are to learn then
that Mr. Koenig happened to be one of my patients in the hospital, he
having gone there for a slight operation, and I having helped to nurse
him through what he calls his 'operatic cure.' In the course of that
ordeal he had music of a less excruciating kind sometimes, it seems, and
after his return home he searched for me all over London on account of
my voice, and finding me unexpectedly at last he sent his wife to Mrs.
Jupe's to fetch me, and--and here I am in a dainty little dimity
room, whose walls are covered with portraits of well-known singers,
violinists, pianists, and composers, with their affectionate
inscriptions underneath.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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