World of Wonders

(1)

“Of course he was a charming man. A delightful person. Who has ever questioned it? But not a great magician.”

“By what standard do you judge?”

“Myself. Who else?”

“You consider yourself a greater magician than Robert-Houdin?”

“Certainly. He was a fine illusionist. But what is that? A man who depends on a lot of contraptions—mechanical devices, clockwork, mirrors, and such things. Haven’t we been working with that sort of rubbish for almost a week? Who made it? Who reproduced that Pâtissier du Palais-Royal we’ve been fiddling about with all day? I did. I’m the only man in the world who could do it. The more I see of it the more I despise it.”

“But it is delightful! When the little baker brings out his bonbons, his patisseries, his croissants, his glasses of port and Marsala, all at the word of command, I almost weep with pleasure! It is the most moving reminiscence of the spirit of the age of Louis Philippe! And you admit that you have reproduced it precisely as it was first made by Robert-Houdin. If he was not a great magician, what do you call a great magician?”

“A man who can stand stark naked in the midst of a crowd and keep it gaping for an hour while he manipulates a few coins, or cards, or billiard balls. I can do that, and I can do it better than anybody today or anybody who has ever lived. That’s why I’m tired of Robert-Houdin and his Wonderful Bakery and his Inexhaustible Punch Bowl and his Miraculous Orange Tree and all the rest of his wheels and cogs and levers and fancy junk.”

“But you’re going to complete the film?”

“Of course. I’ve signed a contract. I’ve never broken a contract in my life. I’m a professional. But I’m bored with it. What you’re asking me to do is like asking Rubinstein to perform on a player-piano. Given the apparatus anybody could do it.”

“You know of course that we asked you to make this film simply because you are the greatest magician in the world—the greatest magician of all time, if you like—and that gives tremendous added attraction to our film—”

“It’s been many years since I was called an added attraction.”

“Let me finish, please. We are presenting a great magician of today doing honour to a great magician of the past. People will love it.”

“It shows me at a disadvantage.”

“Oh, surely not. Consider the audience. After we have shown this on the B.B.C. it will appear on a great American network—the arrangements are almost complete—and then it will go all over the world. Think how it will be received in France alone, where there is still a great cult of Robert-Houdin. The eventual audience will be counted in millions. Can you be indifferent to that?”

“That just shows what you think about magic, and how much you know about it. I’ve already been seen all over the world. And I mean I’ve been seen, and the unique personal quality of my performance has been felt by audiences with whom I’ve created a unique relationship. You can’t do that on television.”

“That is precisely what I expect to do. I don’t want to speak boastfully. Perhaps we have had enough boasting here tonight. But I am not unknown as a film-maker. I can say without immodesty that I’m just as famous in my line as you are in yours. I am a magician too, and not a trivial one—”

“If my work is trivial, why do you want my help? Film—yes, of course it’s a commonplace nowadays that it is an art, just as people used to say that Robert-Houdin’s complicated automatic toys were art. People are always charmed by clever mechanisms that give an effect of life. But don’t you remember what the little actor in Noel Coward’s play called film? ‘A cheesy photograph’.”

“Please—”

“Very well, let’s not insist on ‘cheesy’. But we can’t escape ‘photograph’. Something is missing, and you know what it is: the inexplicable but beautifully controlled sympathy between the artist and his audience. Film isn’t even as good as the player-piano; at least you could add something personal to that, make it go fast or slow, loud or soft as you pleased.”

“Film is like painting, which is also unchanging. But each viewer brings his personal sensibility, his unique response to the completed canvas as he does to the film.”

“Who are your television viewers? Ragtag and bobtail; drunk and sober; attentive or in a nose-picking stupor. With the flabby concentration of people who are getting something for nothing. I am used to audiences who come because they want to see me, and have paid to do it. In the first five minutes I have made them attentive as they have never been before in their lives. I can’t guarantee to do that on TV. I can’t see my audience, and what I can’t see I can’t dominate. And what I can’t dominate I can’t enchant, and humour, and make partners in their own deception.”

“You must understand that that is where my art comes in. I am your audience, and I contain in myself all these millions of whom we speak. You satisfy me and you satisfy them, as well. Because I credit them with my intelligence and sensitivity and raise them to my level. Have I not shown it in more than a dozen acknowledged film masterpieces? This is my gift and my art. Trust me. That is what I am asking you to do. Trust me.”

(2)

This was the first serious quarrel since we had begun filming. Should I say “we”? As I was living in the house, and extremely curious about everything connected with the film, they let me hang around while they worked, and even gave me a job; as an historian I kept an eye on detail and did not allow the film-makers to stray too far from the period of Louis Philippe and his Paris, or at least no farther than artistic licence and necessity allowed. I had foreseen a quarrel. I was not seventy-two years old for nothing, and I knew Magnus Eisengrim very well. I thought I was beginning to know a little about the great director Jurgen Lind, too.

The project was to make an hour-long film for television about the great French illusionist, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who died in 1871. It was not simply to mark this centenary; as Lind had said, it would doubtless make the rounds of world television for years. The title was Un Hommage à Robert-Houdin—easily translatable—and its form was simple; the first twelve minutes were taken up with the story of his early life, as he told it in his Confidences d’un prestidigitateur, and for this actors had been employed; the remainder of the hour was to be an historical reproduction of one of Robert-Houdin’s Soirées Fantastiques as he gave it in his own theatre in the Palais-Royal. And to play the part of the great conjuror the film-makers and the British Broadcasting Corporation had engaged, at a substantial fee, the greatest of living conjurors, my old friend Magnus Eisengrim.

If they had filmed it in a studio, I do not suppose I should have been involved at all, but the reproduction of Robert-Houdin’s performance demanded so much magical apparatus, including several splendid automata which Eisengrim had made particularly for it, that it was decided to shoot this part of the picture in Switzerland, at Sorgenfrei, where Eisengrim’s stage equipment was stored in a large disused riding-school on the estate. It was not a difficult matter for the scene designers and artificers to fit Robert-Houdin’s tiny theatre, which had never seated more than two hundred spectators, into the space that was available.

This may have been a bad idea, for it mixed professional and domestic matters in a way that could certainly cause trouble. Eisengrim lived at Sorgenfrei, as permanent guest and—in a special sense—the lover of its owner and mistress, Dr Liselotte Naegeli. I also had retired to Sorgenfrei after I had my heart attack, and dwelt there very happily as the permanent guest and—in a special sense—the lover of the same Dr Liselotte, known to us both as Liesl. When I use the word “lover” to describe our relationship, I do not mean that we were a farcical ménage à trois, leaping in and out of bed at all hours and shrieking comic recriminations at one another. We did occasionally share a bed (usually at breakfast, when it was convenient and friendly for us all three to tuck up together and sample things from one another’s trays), but the athleticism of love was a thing of the past for me, and I suspect it was becoming an infrequent adventure for Eisengrim. We loved Liesl none the less—indeed rather more, and differently—than in our hot days, and what with loving and arguing and laughing and talking, we fleeted the time carelessly, as they did in the Golden World.

Even the Golden World may have welcomed a change, now and then, and we had been pleased when Magnus received his offer from the B.B.C. Liesl and I, who knew more about the world, or at least the artistic part of it, than Eisengrim, were excited that the film was to be directed by the great Jurgen Lind, the Swedish film-maker whose work we both admired. We wanted to meet him, for though we were neither of us naive people we had not wholly lost our belief that it is delightful to meet artists who have given us pleasure. That was why Liesl proposed that, although the film crew were living at an inn not far down the mountain from Sorgenfrei, Lind and one or two of his immediate entourage should dine with us as often as they pleased, ostensibly so that we could continue discussion of the film as it progressed, but really so that we could become acquainted with Lind.

We should have known better. Had we learned nothing from our experience with Magnus Eisengrim, who had a full share, a share pressed down and overflowing, of the egotism of the theatre artist? Who could not bear the least slight; who expected, as of right, to be served first at table, and to go through all doors first; who made the most unholy rows and fusses if he were not treated virtually as royalty? Lind had not been on the spot a day before we knew that he was just such another as our dear old friend Magnus, and that they were not going to hit it off together.

Not that Lind was like him in external things. He was modest, reticent, dressed like a workman, and soft of speech. He always hung back at doors, cared nothing for the little ceremonials of daily life in a rich woman’s house, and conferred with his chief colleagues about every detail. But it was clear that he expected and got his own way, once he had determined what it was.

Moreover, he seemed to me to be formidably intelligent. His long, sad, unsmiling face, with its hanging underlip that showed long, yellow teeth, the tragedy line of his eyelids, which began high on the bridge of his nose and swept miserably downward toward his cheeks, and the soft, bereaved tone of his voice, suggested a man who had seen too much to be amused by life; his great height—he was a little over six feet eight inches—gave him the air of a giant mingling with lesser creatures about whom he knew some unhappy secret which was concealed from themselves; he spoke slowly in an elegant English only slightly marked by that upper-class Swedish accent which suggests a man delicately sucking a lemon. He had been extensively educated—his junior assistants all were careful to speak to him as Dr Lind—and he had as well that theatre artist’s quality of seeming to know a great deal, without visible study or effort, about whatever was necessary for his immediate work. He did not know as much about the politics and economics of the reign of Louis Philippe as I did, for after all I had given my life to the study of history; but he seemed to know a great deal about its music, the way its clothes ought to be worn, the demeanour of its people, and its quality of life and spirit, which belonged to a sensibility far beyond mine. When historians meet with this kind of informed, imaginative sympathy with a past era in a non-historian, they are awed. How on earth does he know that, they are forced to ask themselves, and why did I never tumble to that? It takes a while to discover that the knowledge, though impressive and useful, has its limitations, and when the glow of imaginative creation no longer suffuses it, it is not really deeply grounded. But Lind was at work on the era of Louis Philippe, and specifically on the tiny part of it that applied to Robert-Houdin the illusionist, and for the present I was strongly under his spell.

That was the trouble. To put it gaudily but truly, that was where the canker gnawed. Liesl and I were both under Lind’s spell, and Eisengrim’s nose was out of joint.

That was why he was picking a quarrel with Lind, and Lind, who had been taught to argue logically, though unfairly, was at a disadvantage with a man who simply argued—pouted, rather—to get his own way and be cock of the walk again.

I thought I should do something about it, but I was forestalled by Roland Ingestree.

He was the man from the B. B.C., the executive producer of the film, or whatever the proper term is. He managed all the business, but was not simply a man of business, because he brooded, in a well-bred, don’t-think-I’m-interfering-but manner, over the whole venture, including its artistic side. He was a sixtyish, fattish, bald Englishman who always wore gold-rimmed half-glasses, which gave him something of the air of Mr Pickwick. But he was a shrewd fellow, and he had taken in the situation.

“We mustn’t delude ourselves, Jurgen,” he said. “Without Eisengrim this film would be nothing—nothing at all. He is the only man in the world who can reproduce the superlatively complex Robert-Houdin automata. It is quite understandable that he looks down on achievements that baffle lesser beings like ourselves. After all, as he points out, he is a magnificent classical conjuror, and he hasn’t much use for mechanical toys. That’s understood, of course. But what I think we’ve missed is that he’s an actor of the rarest sort; he can really give us the outward form of Robert-Houdin, with all that refinement of manner and perfection of grace that made Robert-Houdin great. How he can do it, God alone knows, but he can. When I watch him in rehearsal I am utterly convinced that a man of the first half of the nineteenth century stands before me. Where could we have found anyone else who can act as he is acting? John? Too tall, too subjective. Larry? Too flamboyant, too corporeal. Guinness? Too dry. There’s nobody else, you see. I hope I’m not being offensive, but I think it’s as an actor we must think of Eisengrim. The conjuring might have been faked. But the acting—tell me, frankly, who else is there that could touch him?”

He was not being offensive, and well he knew it. Eisengrim glowed, and all might have been well if Kinghovn had not pushed the thing a little farther. Kinghovn was Lind’s cameraman, and I gathered he was a great artist in his own right. But he was a man whose whole world was dominated by what he could see, and make other people see, and words were not his medium.

“Roly is right, Jurgen. This man is just right for looks. He compels belief. He can’t go wrong. It is God’s good luck, and we mustn’t quarrel with it.”

Now Lind’s nose was out of joint. He had been trying to placate a prima donna, and his associates seemed to be accusing him of underestimating the situation. He was sure that he never underestimated anything about one of his films. He was accused of flying in the face of good luck, when he was certain that the best possible luck that could happen to any film was that he should be asked to direct it. The heavy lip fell a little lower, the eyes became a little sadder, and the emotional temperature of the room dropped perceptibly.

Ingestree put his considerable talents to the work of restoring Lind’s self-esteem, without losing Eisengrim’s goodwill.

“I think I sense what troubles Eisengrim about this whole Robert-Houdin business. It’s the book. It’s that wretched Confidences d’un prestidigitateur. We’ve been using it as a source for the biographical part of the film, and it’s certainly a classic of its kind. But did anybody ever read such a book? Vanity is perfectly acceptable in an artist. Personally, I wouldn’t give you sixpence for an artist who lacked vanity. But it’s honest vanity I respect. The false modesty, the exaggerated humility, the greasy bourgeois assertions of respectability, of good-husband-and-father, of debt-paying worthiness are what make the Confidences so hard to swallow. Robert-Houdin was an oddity; he was an artist who wanted to pass as a bourgeois. I’m sure that’s what irritates both you men, and sets you against each other. You feel that you are putting your very great, fully realized artistic personalities to the work of exalting a man whose attitude toward life you despise. I don’t blame you for being irritable—because you have been, you know; you’ve been terribly irritable tonight—but that’s what art is, as you very well know, much of the time: the transformation and glorification of the commonplace.”

“The revelation of the glory in the commonplace,” said Lind, who had no objection to being told that his vanity was an admirable and honest trait, and was coming around.

“Precisely. The revelation of the glory in the commonplace. And you two very great artists—the great film director and (may I say it) the great actor—are revealing the glory in Robert-Houdin, who perversely sought to conceal his own artistry behind that terrible good-citizen mask. It hampered him, of course, because it was against the grain of his talent. But you two are able to do an extraordinary, a metaphysical thing. You are able to show the world, a century after his death, what Robert-Houdin would have been if he had truly understood himself.”

Eisengrim and Lind were liking this. Magnus positively beamed, and Lind’s sad eyes rolled toward him with a glance from which the frost was slowly disappearing. Ingestree was well in the saddle now, and was riding on to victory.

“You are both men of immeasurably larger spirit than he. What was he, after all? The good citizen, the perfection of the bourgeoisie under Louis Philippe that he pretended? Who can believe it? There is in every artist something black, something savouring of the crook, which he may not even understand himself, and which he certainly keeps well out of the eye of his public. What was it in Robert-Houdin?

“He gives us a sniff of it in the very first chapter of his other book, which I have read, and which is certainly familiar to you, Mr Ramsay”—this with a nod to me—“called Les Secrets de la prestidigitation et de la magie—”

“My God, I read it as a boy!” I said.

“Very well. Then you recall the story of his beginnings as a magician? How he was befriended by the Count de l’Escalopier? How this nobleman gave a private show in his house, where Robert-Houdin amused the guests? How his best trick was burning a piece of paper on which the Archbishop of Paris had written a splendid compliment to Robert-Houdin, and the discovery of the piece of paper afterward in the smallest of twelve envelopes which were all sealed, one inside the other? It was a trick he learned from his master, de Grisy. But how did he try to make it up to l’Escalopier for putting him on his feet?”

“The trap for the robber,” I said.

“Exactly. A thief was robbing l’Escalopier blind, and nothing he tried would catch him. So Robert-Houdin offered to help, and what did he do? He worked out a mechanism to be concealed in the Count’s desk, so that when the robber opened it a pistol would be discharged, and a claw made of sharp needles would seize the thief’s hand and crunch the word ‘Voleur’ on the back of it. The needles were impregnated with silver nitrate, so that it was in effect tattooing—branding the man for life. A nice fellow, eh? And do you remember what he says? That this nasty thing was a refinement of a little gubbins he had made as a boy, to catch and mark another boy who was pinching things from his school locker. That was the way Robert-Houdin’s mind worked; he fancied himself as a thief-catcher. Now, in a man who makes such a parade of his integrity, what does that suggest? Over-compensation, shall we say? A deep, unresting doubt of his own honesty?

“If we had time, and the gift, we could learn a lot about the inner life of Robert-Houdin by analysing his tricks. Why are so many of the best of them concerned with giving things away? He gave away pastries, sweets, ribbons, fans, all sorts of stuff at every performance; yet we know how careful he was with money. What was all that generosity meant to conceal? Because he was concealing something, take my word for it. The whole of the Confidences is a gigantic whitewash job, a concealment. Analyse the tricks and you will get a subtext for the autobiography, which seems so delightfully bland and cosy.

“And that’s what we need for our film. A subtext. A reality running like a subterranean river under the surface; an enriching, but not necessarily edifying, background to what is seen.

“Where are we to get it? Not from Robert-Houdin. Too much trouble and perhaps not worth the trouble when we got it. No. It must come from the working together of you two great artists: Lind the genius-director and Eisengrim the genius-actor. And you must fish it up out of your own guts.”

“But that is what I always do,” said Lind.

“Of course. But Eisengrim must do it, as well. Now tell me, sir: you can’t always have been the greatest conjuror in the world. You learned your art somewhere. If we asked you—invited you—begged you—to make your own experience the subtext for this film about a man, certainly lesser than yourself, but of great and lasting fame in his special line, what would it be?”

I was surprised to see Eisengrim look as if he were considering this question very seriously. He never revealed anything about his past life, or his innermost thoughts, and it was only because I had known him—with very long intervals of losing him—since we had been boys together, that I knew anything about him at all. I had fished—fished cunningly with the subtlest lures I could devise—for more information about him than I had, but he was too clever for me. But here he was, swimming in the flattery of this clever Englishman Ingestree, and he looked as if he might be about to spill the beans. Well, anyhow I would be present when, and if, he did so. After some consideration, he spoke.

“The first thing I would tell you would be that my earliest instructor was the man you see in that chair yonder: Dunstan Ramsay. God knows he was the worst conjuror the world has ever seen, but he introduced me to conjuring, and by a coincidence his textbook was The Secrets of Stage Conjuring, by the man we are all talking about and, if you are right in what you say, Mr Ingestree, serving! Robert-Houdin.”

This caused some sensation, as Eisengrim knew it would. Ingestree, having forced the oyster to yield a little, pressed the knife in.

“Wonderful! We would never have taken Ramsay for a conjuror. But there must have been somebody else. If Ramsay was your first master, who was your second?”

“I’m not sure I’m going to tell you,” said Eisengrim. “I’ll have to think about it very carefully. Your idea of a subtext—the term and the idea are both new to me—is interesting. I’ll tell you this much. I began to learn conjuring seriously on 30 August 1918. That was the day I descended into hell, and did not rise again for seven years. I’ll consider whether I’m going to go farther than that. Now I’m going to bed.”

(3)

Liesl had said little during the quarrel—or rivalry of egotisms, or whatever you choose to call it—but she caught me the following morning before the film crew arrived, and seemed to be in high spirits.

“So Magnus has come to the confessional moment in his life,” she said. “It’s been impending for several months. Didn’t you notice? You didn’t! Oh, Ramsay, you are such a dunce about some things. If Magnus were the kind of man who could write an autobiography, this is when he would do it.”

“Magnus has an autobiography already. I should know. I wrote it.

“A lovely book. Phantasmata: the Life and Adventures of Magnus Eisengrim. But that was for sale at his performance; a kind of super-publicity. A splendid Gothic invention from your splendid Gothic imagination.”

“That’s not the way he regards it. When people ask he tells them that it is a poetic autobiography, far more true to the man he has become than any merely factual account of his experience could be.”

“I know. I told him to say that. You don’t suppose he thought it out himself, do you? You know him. He’s marvellously intelligent in his own way—sensitive, aware, and intuitive—but it’s not a literary or learned intelligence. Magnus is a truly original creature. They are of the greatest rarity. And as I say, he’s reached the confessional time of life. I expect we shall hear some strange things.”

“Not as strange as I could tell about him.”

“I know, I know. You are obsessed with the idea that his mother was a saint. Ramsay, in all your rummaging among the lives of the saints, did you ever encounter one who had a child? What was that child like? Perhaps we shall hear.”

“I’m a little miffed that he considers telling these strangers things he’s never told to you and me.”

“Ass! It’s always strangers who turn the tap that lets out the truth. Didn’t you yourself babble out all the secrets of your life to me within a couple of weeks of our first meeting? Magnus is going to tell.”

“But why, now?”

“Because he wants to impress Lind. He’s terribly taken with Lind, and he has his little fancies, like the rest of us. Once he wanted to impress me, but it wasn’t the right time in his life to spill the whole bottle.”

“But Ingestree suggested that Lind might do some telling, too. Are we to have a great mutual soul-scrape?”

“Ingestree is very foxy, behind all that fat and twinkling bonhomie. He knows Lind won’t tell anything. For one thing, it’s not his time; he’s only forty-three. And he is inhibited by his education; it makes people cagey. What he tells us he tells through his films, just as Ingestree suggested that Robert-Houdin revealed himself through his tricks. But Magnus is retired—or almost. Also he is not inhibited by education, which is the great modern destroyer of truth and originality. Magnus knows no history. Have you ever seen him read a book? He really thinks that whatever has happened to him is unique. It is an enviable characteristic.”

“Well, every life is unique.”

“To a point. But there are only a limited number of things a human creature can do.”

“So you think he is going to tell all?”

“Not all. Nobody tells that. Indeed, nobody knows everything about themselves. But I’ll bet you anything you like he tells a great deal.”

I argued no further. Liesl is very shrewd about such things. The morning was spent in arrangements about lighting. A mobile generator from Zürich had to be put in place, and all the lamps connected and hung; the riding-school was a jungle of pipe-scaffolding and cable. Kinghovn fussed over differences which seemed to me imperceptible, and as a script-girl stood in for Eisengrim while the lighting was being completed, he had time to wander about the riding-school, and as lunchtime approached he steered me off into a corner.

“Tell me about subtext,” he said.

“It’s a term modern theatre people are very fond of. It’s what a character thinks and knows, as opposed to what the playwright makes him say. Very psychological.”

“Give me an example.”

“Do you know Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler?”

He didn’t, and it was a foolish question. He didn’t know anything about any literature whatever. I waded in.

“It’s about a beautiful and attractive woman who has married, as a last resort, a man she thinks very dull. They have returned from a honeymoon during which she has become greatly disillusioned with him, but she knows she is already pregnant. In the first act she is talking to her husband’s adoring aunt, trying to be civil as the old woman prattles on about the joys of domesticity and the achievements of her nephew. But all the time she has, in her mind, the knowledge that he is dull, timid, a tiresome lover, that she is going to have a child by him, and that she fears childbirth. That’s the subtext. The awareness of it thickens up the actress’s performance, and emphasizes the irony of the situation.”

“I understand. It seems obvious.”

“First-rate actors have always been aware of it, but dramatists like Shakespeare usually brought the subtext up to the surface and gave it to the audience directly. Like Hamlet’s soliloquies.”

“I’ve never seen Hamlet.”

“Well—that’s subtext.”

“Do you think the circumstances of my own life really form a subtext for this film?”

“God only knows. One thing is certain: unless you choose to tell Lind and his friends about your life, it can’t do so.”

“You’re quite wrong. I would know, and I suppose whatever I do is rooted in what I am, and have been.”

It was never wise to underestimate Magnus, but I was always doing so. The pomposity of the learned. Because he didn’t know Hamlet and Hedda I tended to think him simpler than he was.

“I’m thinking of telling them a few things, Dunny. I might surprise them. They’re all so highly educated, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there’s a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others. I think I’ll surprise them. They talk so much about art, but really, education is just as much a barrier between a man and real art as it is in other parts of life. They don’t know what a mean old bitch art can be. I think I’ll surprise them.”

So Liesl had been right! He was ready to spill.

Well, I was ready to hear. Indeed, I was eager to hear. My reason was deep and professional. As an historian I had all my life been aware of the extraordinary importance of documents. I had handled hundreds of them: letters, reports, memoranda, sometimes diaries; I had always treated them with respect, and had come in time to have an affection for them. They summed up something that was becoming increasingly important to me, and that was an earthly form of immortality. Historians come and go, but the document remains, and it has the importance of a thing that cannot be changed or gainsaid. Whoever wrote it continues to speak through it. It might be honest and it might be complete: on the other hand it could be thoroughly crooked or omit something of importance. But there it was, and it was all succeeding ages possessed.

I deeply wanted to create, or record, and leave behind me a document, so that whenever its subject was dealt with in future, the notation “Ramsay says …” would have to appear. Thus, so far as this world is concerned, I should not wholly die. Well, here was my chance.

Would anyone care? Indeed they would. I had written an imaginative account of the life of Magnus Eisengrim, the great conjuror and illusionist, at his own request and that of Liesl, who had been the manager and in a very high degree the brains of his great show, the Soirée of Illusions. The book was sold in the foyers of any theatre in which he appeared, but it had also had a flattering success on its own account; it sold astonishingly in the places where the really big sales of books are achieved—cigar stores, airports, and bus stops. It had extravagantly outsold all my other books, even my Hundred Saints for Travellers and my very popular Celtic Saints of Britain and Europe. Why? Because it was a wonderfully good book of its kind. Readable by the educated, but not rebuffing to somebody who simply wanted a lively, spicy tale.

Its authorship was still a secret, for although I received a half-share of the royalties it was ostensibly the work of Magnus Eisengrim. It had done great things for him. People who believed what they read came to see the man who had lived the richly adventurous and macabre life described in it; sophisticates came to see the man who had written such gorgeous, gaudy lies about himself. As Liesl said, it was Gothic, full of enormities bathed in the delusive lights of nineteenth-century romance. But it was modern enough, as well; it touched the sexy, rowdy string so many readers want to hear.

Some day it would be known that I had written it. We had already received at Sorgenfrei a serious film offer and a number of inquiries from earnest Ph.D. students who explained apologetically that they were making investigations, of one kind or another, of what they called “popular literature”. And when it became known that I had written it, which would probably not be until Eisengrim and I were both dead, then—Aha! then my document would come into its own. For then the carefully tailored life of Magnus Eisengrim, which had given pleasure to so many millions in English, French, German, Danish, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, and had been accorded the distinction of a pirated version in Japanese, would be compared with the version I would prepare from Eisengrim’s own confessions, and “Ramsay says …” would certainly be heard loud and clear.

Was this a base ambition for an historian and a hagiologist? What had Ingestree said? In every artist there is something black, something savouring of the crook. Was I, in a modest way, an artist? I was beginning to wonder. No, no; unless I falsified the record what could be dishonest, or artistic, about making a few notes?

(4)

“I have spent a good deal of time since last night wondering whether I should tell you anything about my life,” said Eisengrim, after dinner that evening, “and I think I shall, on the condition that you regard it as a secret among ourselves. After all, the audience doesn’t have to know the subtext, does it? Your film isn’t Shakespeare, where everything is revealed; it is Ibsen, where much is implied.”

How quickly he learns, I thought. And how well he knows the power of pretending something is secret which he has every intention of revealing. I turned up my mental, wholly psychological historian’s hearing-aid, determined to miss nothing, and to get at least the skeleton of it on paper before I went to sleep.

“Begin with going to hell,” said Ingestree. “You’ve given us a date: August 30, 1918. You told us you knew Ramsay when you were a boy, so I suppose you must be a Canadian. If I were going to hell, I don’t think I’d start from Canada. What happened?”

“I went to the village fair. Our village, which was called Deptford, had a proud local reputation for its fair. Schoolchildren were admitted free. That helped to swell the attendance, and the Fair Board liked to run up the biggest possible annual figure. You wouldn’t imagine there was anything wrong in what I did, but judged by the lights of my home it was sin. We were an unusually religious household, and my father mistrusted the fair. He had promised me that he might, if I could repeat the whole of Psalm 79 without an error, at suppertime, take me to the fair in the evening, to see the animals. This task of memorizing was part of a great undertaking that he had set his heart on: I was to get the whole of the Book of Psalms by heart. He assured me that it would be a bulwark and a stay to me through the whole of my life. He wasn’t rushing the job; I was supposed to learn ten verses each day, but as I was working for a treat, he thought I might run to the thirteen verses of Psalm 79 to get to the fair. But the treat was conditional; if I stumbled, the promise about the fair was off.”

“It sounds very much like rural Sweden, when I was a boy,” said Kinghovn. “How do the children of such people grow up?”

“Ah, but you mustn’t misunderstand. My father wasn’t a tyrant; he truly wanted to protect me against evil.”

“A fatal desire in a parent,” said Lind, who was known throughout the world—to film-goers at least—as an expert on evil.

“There was a special reason. My mother was an unusual person. If you want to know the best about her, you must apply to Ramsay. I don’t suppose I can tell you my own story without giving you something of the other side of her nature. She was supposed to have some very bad instincts, and our family suffered for it. She had to be kept under confinement. My father, with what I suppose must be described as compassion, wanted to make sure I wouldn’t follow in her ways. So, from the age of eight, I was set to work to acquire the bulwark and the stay of the Psalms, and in a year and a half—something like that—I had gnawed my way through them up to Psalm 79.”

“How old were you?” said Ingestree.

“Getting on for ten. I wanted fiercely to go to the fair, so I set to work on the Psalm. Do you know the Psalms? I have never been able to make head or tail of a lot of them, but others strike with a terrible truth on your heart, if you meet them at the right time. I plugged on till I came to We are become a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and derision to them that are round about us. Yes! Yes, there we were! The Dempsters, a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and derision to the whole village of Deptford. And particularly to the children of Deptford, with whom I had to go to school. School was to begin on the day after Labour Day, less than a week from the day when I sat puzzling over Psalm 79. Tell me, Lind, you know so much about evil, and have explored it in your films, Liesl tells me, like a man with an ordnance map in his hand; have you ever explored the evil of children?”

“Even I have never dared to do that,” said Lind, with the tragic grin which was the nearest he ever came to a laugh.

“If you ever decide to do so, call me in as a special adviser. It’s a primal evil, a pure malignance. They really enjoy giving pain. This is described by sentimentalists as innocence. I was tormented by the children of our village from the earliest days I can remember. My mother had done something—I never found out what it was—that made most of the village hate her, and the children knew that, so it was all right to hate me and torture me. They said my mother was a hoor—that was the local pronunciation of whore—and they tormented me with a virtuosity they never showed in anything else they did. When I cried, somebody might say, ‘Aw, let the kid alone; he can’t help it his mother’s a hoor.’ I suppose the philosopher-kings who struggled up to that level have since become the rulers of the place. But I soon determined not to cry.

“Not that I became hard. I simply accepted the wretchedness of my station. Not that I hated them—not then; I learned to hate them later in life. At that time I simply assumed that children must be as they were. I was a misfit in the world, and didn’t know why.

“Onward I went with Psalm 79. 0 remember not against us former iniquities: let thy tender mercies speedily prevent us: for we are brought very low. But as soon as I put my nose into the schoolyard they would remember former iniquities against me. God’s tender mercies had never reached the Deptford schoolyard. And I was unquestionably brought very low, for all that desolation would begin again next Tuesday.

“Having got that far with me, Satan had me well on the path to hell. I knew where some money was kept; it was small change for the baker and the milkman when they called; under my mother’s very nose—she was sitting in a chair, staring into space, tied by a rope to a ringbolt my father had set in the wall—I pinched fifteen cents; I held it up so that she could see it, so that she would think I was going to pay one of the delivery-men. Then I ran off to the fair, and my heart was full of terrible joy. I was wicked, but O what a delicious release it was!

“I pieced out the enjoyment of the fair like a gourmet savouring a feast. Begin at the bottom, with what was least amusing. That would be the Women’s Institute display of bottled pickles, embalmed fruit, doilies, home-cooking, and ‘fancy-work’. Then the animals, the huge draught-horses, the cows with enormous udders, the prize bull (though I did not go very near to him, for some of my schoolmates were lingering there, to snigger and work themselves up into a horny stew, gaping at his enormous testicles), the pigs so unwontedly clean, and the foolish poultry, White Wyandottes, Buff Orpingtons, and Mrs Forrester’s gorgeous Cochin Chinas, and in a corner a man from the Department of Agriculture giving an educational display of egg-candling.

“Pleasure now began to be really intense. I looked with awe and some fear at the display from the nearby Indian Reservation. Men with wrinkled, tobacco-coloured faces sat behind a stand, not really offering slim walking-canes, with ornate whittled handles into which patterns of colour had been worked; their women, as silent and unmoving as they, displayed all sorts of fancy boxes made of sweetgrass, ornamented with beads and dyed porcupine quill. But these goods, which had some merit as craftwork, were not so gorgeous in my eyes as the trash offered by a booth which was not of local origin, in which a man sold whirligigs of gaudy celluloid, kewpie dolls with tinsel skirts riding high over their gross stomachs, alarm-clocks with two bells for determined sleepers, and beautiful red or blue pony-whips. I yearned toward those whips, but they cost a whole quarter apiece, and were thus out of my reach.

“But I was not cut off from all the carnal pleasures of the fair. After a great deal of deliberation I spent five of my ill-gotten cents on a large paper cornet of pink candy floss, a delicacy I had never seen before. It had little substance, and made my mouth sticky and dry, but it was a luxury, and my life had known nothing of luxuries.

“Then, after a full ten minutes of deliberation, I laid out another five cents on a ride on the merry-go-round. I chose my mount with care, a splendid dapple-grey with flaring nostrils, ramping wonderfully up and down on his brass pole; he seemed to me like the horse in Job that saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; for a hundred and eighty seconds I rode him in ecstasy, and dismounted only when I was chased away by the man who took care of such things and was on the look-out for enchanted riders like myself.

“But even this was only leading up to what I knew to be the crown of the fair. That was Wanless’s World of Wonders, the one pleasure which my father would certainly never have permitted me. Shows of all kinds were utterly evil in his sight, and this was a show that turned my bowels to water, even from the outside.

“The tent seemed vast to me, and on a scaffold on its outside were big painted pictures of the wonders within. A Fat Woman, immense and pink, beside whom even the biggest pigs in the agricultural tents were starvelings. A man who ate fire. A Strong Man, who would wrestle with anybody who dared to try it. A Human Marvel, half man and half woman. A Missing Link, in itself worth more than the price of admission, because it was powerfully educational, illustrating what Man had been before he decided to settle in such places as Deptford. On a raised platform outside the tent a man in fine clothes was shouting to the crowd about everything that was to be seen; it was before the days of rnicrophones, and he roared hoarsely through a megaphone. Beside him stood the Fire Eater, holding a flaming torch in front of his mouth. ‘See Molza, the man who can always be sure of a hot meal,’ bellowed the man in the fine clothes, and a few Deptfordians laughed shyly. ‘See Professor Spencer, born without arms, but he can write a finer hand with his feet than any of your schoolteachers. And within the tent the greatest physiological marvel of the age, Andro, the Italian nobleman so evenly divided between the sexes that you may see him shave the whiskers off of the one side of his face, while the other displays the peachy smoothness of a lovely woman. A human miracle, attested to by doctors and men of science at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. Any local doctor wishing to examine this greatest of marvels may make an appointment to do so, in the presence of myself, after the show tonight.’

“But I was not very attentive to the man in the fine clothes, because my eyes were all for another figure on the platform, who was doing wonders with decks of cards; he whirled them out from his hands in what appeared to be ribbons, and then drew them—magically it seemed to me—back into his hands again. He spread them in fans. He made them loop-the-loop from one hand to another. The man in the fine clothes introduced him as Willard the Wizard, positively the greatest artist in sleight-of-hand in the world today, briefly on loan from the Palace Theatre in New York.

“Willard was a tall man, and looked even taller because he wore what was then called a garter-snake suit, which had wriggling lines of light and dark fabric running perpendicularly through it. He was crowned by a pearl-grey hard hat—what we called a Derby, and known in Deptford only as part of the Sunday dress of doctors and other grandees. He was the most elegant thing I had ever seen in my life, and his thin, unsmiling face spoke to me of breathtaking secrets. I could not take my eyes off him, nor did I try to still my ravening desire to know those secrets. I too was a conjuror, you see; I had continued, on the sly, to practise the few elementary sleights and passes I had learned from Ramsay, before my father put a stop to it. I longed with my whole soul to know what Willard knew. As the hart pants after the water brooks, even so my blasphemous soul panted after the Wizard. And the unbelievable thing was that, of the fifteen or twenty people gathered in front of the platform, he seemed to look most often at me, and once I could swear I saw him wink!

“I paid my five cents—a special price for schoolchildren until six o’clock—and entered in the full splendour of Wanless’s World of Wonders. It is impossible for me to describe the impression it made on me then, because I came to know it so well later on. It was just a fair-sized tent, capable of holding ten or twelve exhibits and the spectators. It was of that discouraged whitey-grey colour that such tents used to be before somebody had the good idea of colouring canvas brown. A few strings of lights hung between the three main poles, but they were not on, because it was assumed that we could see well enough by the light that leaked in from outdoors. The exhibits were on stands the height of a table; indeed, they were like collapsible tables, and each exhibit had his own necessities. Professor Spencer had the blackboard on which he wrote so elegantly with his feet; Molza had his jet of flaming gas, and a rack to hold the swords he swallowed; it was really, I suppose, very tacky and ordinary. But I was under the spell of Willard, and I didn’t, at that time, take much heed of anything else, not even of the clamorous Fat Woman, who seemed never to be wholly quiet, even when the other exhibits were having their turn.

“The loud-voiced man had followed us inside, and bellowed about each wonder as we toured round the circle. Even to such an innocent as I, it was plain that the wonders were shown in an ascending order of importance, beginning with the Knife Thrower and Molza, and working upward through Zovene the Midget Juggler and Sonny the Strong Man to Professor Spencer and Zitta the Serpent Woman. She seemed to mark a divide, and after her came Rango the Missing Link, then the Fat Woman, called Happy Hannah, then Willard, and finally Andro the Half-Man Half-Woman.

“Even though my eyes constantly wandered toward Willard, who seemed now and then to meet them with a dark and enchantingly wizard-like gaze, I was too prudent to ignore the lesser attractions. After all, I had invested five ill-gotten cents in this adventure, and I was in no position to throw money away. But we came to Willard at last, and the loud-voiced man did not need to introduce him, because even before Happy Hannah had finished her noisy harangue and had begun to sell pictures of herself, he threw away his cigarette, sprang to his feet, and began to pluck coins out of the air. He snatched them from everywhere—from the backs of his knees, from his elbows, from above his head—and threw them into a metal basin on his little tripod table. You could hear them clink as they fell, and as the number increased the sound from the basin changed. Then, without speaking a word, he seized the basin and hurled its contents into the crowd. People ducked and shielded their faces. But the basin was empty! Willard laughed a mocking laugh. Oh, very Mephistophelian! It sounded like a trumpet call to me, because I had never heard anybody laugh like that before. He was laughing at us, for having been deceived. What power! What glorious command over lesser humanity! Silly people often say that they are enraptured by something which has merely pleased them, but I was truly enraptured. I was utterly unaware of myself, whirled into a new sort of comprehension of life by what I saw.

“You must understand that I had never seen a conjuror before. I knew what conjuring was, and I could do some tricks. But I had never seen anybody else do sleight-of-hand except Ramsay here, who made very heavy weather of getting one poor coin from one of his great red hands to the other, and if he had not explained that the pass was supposed to be invisible you would never have known it was a trick at all. Please don’t be hurt, Ramsay. You are a dear fellow and rather a famous writer in your own line, but as a conjuror you were abject. But Willard! For me the Book of Revelation came alive: here was an angel come down from heaven, having great power, and the earth was lightened with his glory; if only I could be like him, surely there would be no more sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, and all former things—my dark home, my mad, disgraceful mother, the torment of school—would pass away.”

“So you ran away with the show,” said Kinghovn, who had no tact.

“Ramsay tells me they say in Deptford that I ran away with the show,” said Eisengrim, smiling what I would myself have called a Mephistophelian smile, beneath which he looked like any other man whose story has been interrupted by somebody who doesn’t understand the form and art of stories. “I don’t think Deptford would ever comprehend that it was not a matter of choice. But if you have understood what I have said about the way Deptford regarded me, you will realize that I had no choice. I did not run away with the show; the show ran away with me.”

“Because you were so utterly entranced by Willard?” said Ingestree.

“No, I think our friend means something more than that,” said Lind. “These possessions of the soul are very powerful, but there must have been something else. I smell it. The Bible obsession must somehow have supported the obsession with the conjuror. Not even a great revelation wipes out a childhood’s indoctrination; the two must have come together in some way.”

“You are right,” said Eisengrim. “And I begin to see why people call you a great artist. Your education and sophistication haven’t gobbled up your understanding of the realities of life. Let me go on.

“Willard’s show had to be short, because there were ten exhibits in the tent, and a full show was not supposed to run over forty-five minutes. As one of the best attractions he was allowed something like five minutes, and after the trick with the coins he did some splendid things with ribbons, pulling them out of his mouth and throwing them into the bowl, from which he produced them neatly braided. Then he did some very flashy things with cards, causing any card chosen by a member of the audience to pop out of a pack that was stuck in a wineglass as far away from himself as his platform allowed. He finished by eating a spool of thread and a packet of needles, and then producing the thread from his mouth, with all the needles threaded on it at intervals of six inches. During the Oohs and Aahs, he nonchalantly produced the wooden spool from his ear, and threw it into the audience—threw it so that I caught it. I remember being amazed that it wasn’t even wet, which shows how very green I was.

“I didn’t want to see Andro, whose neatly compartmentalized sexuality meant nothing to me. As the crowd moved on to hear the loud-mouthed man bellow about the medical miracle called hermaphroditism—only one in four hundred million births, ladies and gentlemen, only six thoroughly proven hermaphrodites in the whole long history of mankind, and one of them stands before you in Deptford today!—I hung around Willard’s table. He leapt down from it and lighted another cigarette. Even the way he did that was magical, for he flicked the pack toward his mouth, and the cigarette leaped between his lips, waiting for the match he was striking with the thumbnail of his other hand. There I was, near enough to the Wizard to touch him. But it was he who touched me. He reached toward my left ear and produced a quarter from it, and flicked it toward me. I snatched it out of the air, and handed it back to him. ‘No, it’s for you, kid,’ he said. His voice was low and hoarse, and not in keeping with the rest of his elegant presentation, but I didn’t care. A quarter! For me! I had never known such riches in my life. My infrequent stealings had never, before this day, aspired beyond a nickel. The man was not only a Wizard; he was princely.

“I was inspired. Inspired by you, Ramsay, you may be surprised to hear. You remember your trick in which you pretended to eat money, though one could always see it in your hand as you took it away from your mouth? I did that. I popped the quarter into my mouth, chewed it up, showed Willard that it was gone, and that I had nothing in my hands. I could do a little magic, too, and I was eager to claim some kinship with this god.

“He did not smile. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Come with me, kid. I got sumpn to show ya,’ and steered me toward a back entry of the tent which I had not noticed.

“We walked perhaps halfway around the fairground, which was not really very far, and we kept behind tents and buildings. I would have been proud to be seen by the crowd with such a hero, but we met very few people, and they were busy with their own affairs in the agricultural tents, so I do not suppose anybody noticed us. We came to the back of the barn where the horses were stabled when they were not being shown; it was one of the two or three permanent buildings of the fair. Behind it was a lean-to with a wall which did not quite reach to the roof, nor fully to the ground. It was the men’s urinal, old, dilapidated, and smelly. Willard peeped in, found it empty, and pushed me in ahead of him. I had never been in such a place before, because it was part of my training that one never ‘went’ anywhere except at home, and all arrangements had to be made to accommodate this rule. It was a queer place, as I remember it; just a tin trough nailed to the wall, sloping slightly downward so that it drained into a hole in the ground. A pile of earth was ready to fill in the hole, once the fair was over.

“At the end of this shanty was a door which hung partly open, and it was through this that Willard guided me. We were in an earth closet, as old as Deptford fair, I should judge, for a heavy, sweetish, old smell hung over it. Hornets buzzed under the sloping roof. The two holes in the seat were covered by rounds of wood, with crude handles. I think I would know them if I saw them now.

“Willard took a clean white handkerchief out of his pocket, twisted it quickly into a roll, and forced it between my teeth. No: I should not say ‘forced’. I thought this was the beginning of some splendid illusion, and opened my mouth willingly. Then he whirled me round, lifted me up on the seat in a kneeling position, pulled down my pants and sodomized me.

“Quickly said: an eternity in the doing. I struggled and resisted: he struck me such a blow over the ear that I slackened my grip with the pain, and he had gained an entry. It was rough: it was painful, and I suppose it was soon over. But as I say, it seemed an eternity, for it was a kind of feeling I had never guessed at.

“I am anxious you should not misunderstand me. I was no Greek lad, discovering the supposed pleasures of pederastic love in a society that knew it and condoned it. I was a boy not yet quite ten years old, who did not know what sex was in any form. I thought I was being killed, and in a shameful way.

“The innocence of children is very widely misunderstood. Few of them—I suppose only children brought up in wealthy families that desire and can contrive a conspiracy of ignorance—are unknowing about sex. No child brought up so near the country as I was, and among schoolchildren whose ages might reach as high as fifteen or sixteen, can be utterly ignorant of sex. It had touched me, but not intimately. For one thing, I had heard the whole of the Bible read through several times by my father; he had a plan of readings which, pursued morning and evening, worked through the whole of the book in a year. I had heard the sound as an infant, and as a little child, long before I could understand anything of the sense. So I knew about men going in unto women, and people raising up seed of their loins, and I knew that my father’s voice took on a special tone of shame and detestation when he read about Lot and his daughters, though I had never followed what it was they did in that cave, and thought their sin was to make their father drunk. I knew these things because I had heard them, but they had no reality for me.

“As for my mother, who was called hoor by my schoolmates, I knew only that hoors—my father used the local pronunciation, and I don’t think he knew any other—were always turning up in the Bible, and always in a bad sense which meant nothing to me as a reality. Ezekiel, sixteen, was a riot of whoredoms and abominations, and I shivered to think how terrible they must be: but I did not know what they were, even in the plainest sense of the words. I only knew that there was something filthy and disgraceful that pertained to my mother, and that we all, my father and I, were spattered by her shame, or abomination, or whatever it might be.

“I was aware that there was some difference between boys and girls, but I didn’t know, or want to know, what it was, because I connected it somehow with the shame of my mother. You couldn’t be a hoor unless you were a woman, and they had something special that made it possible. What I had, as a male, I had most strictly been warned against as an evil and shameful part of my body. ‘Don’t you ever monkey with yourself, down there,’ was the full extent of the sexual instruction I had from my father. I knew that the boys who were gloating over the bull’s testicles were doing something dirty, and my training was such that I was both disgusted and terrified by their sly nastiness. But I didn’t know why, and it never would have occurred to me to relate the bull’s showy apparatus with those things I possessed, in so slight a degree, and which I wasn’t to monkey with. So you can see that without being utterly ignorant, I was innocent, in my way. If I had not been innocent, how could I have lived my life, and even have felt some meagre joy, from time to time?

“Sometimes I felt that joy when I was with you, Ramsay, because you were kind to me, and kindness was a great rarity in my life. You were the only person in my childhood who had treated me as if I were a human creature. I don’t say, who loved me, you notice. My father loved me, but his love was a greater burden, almost, than hate might have been. But you treated me as a fellow-being, because I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to do anything else. You never ran with the crowd.

“The rape itself was horrible, because it was painful physically, but worse because it was an outrage on another part of my body which I had been told to fear and be ashamed of. Liesl tells me that Freud has had a great deal to say about the importance of the functions of excretion in deciding and moulding character. I don’t know anything about that; don’t want to know it, because all that sort of thinking lies outside what I really understand. I have my own notions about psychology, and they have served me well. But this rape—it was something filthy going in where I knew only that filthy things should come out, as secretly as could be managed. In our house there was no word for excretion, only two or three prim locutions, and the word used in the schoolyard seemed to me a horrifying indecency. It’s very popular nowadays in literature, I’m told by Liesl. She reads a great deal. I don’t know how writers can put it down, though there was a time when I used it often enough in my daily speech. But as I have grown older I have returned to that early primness. We don’t get over some things. But what Willard did to me was, in a sense I could understand, a reversal of the order of nature, and I was terrified that it would kill me.

“It didn’t, of course. But that, and Willard’s heavy breathing, and the flood of filthy language that he whispered as a kind of ecstatic accompaniment to what he was doing, were more horrible to me than anything I have met with since.

“When it was over he pulled my head around so that he could he see my face and said, ‘You O.K., kid?’ I can remember the tone now. He had no idea at all of what I was, or what I might feel. He was obviously happy, and the Mephistophelian smile had given place to an expression that was almost boyish. ‘Go on now,’ he said. ‘Pull up your pants and beat it. And if you blat to anybody, by the living Jesus I’ll cut your nuts off with a rusty knife.’

“Then I fainted, but for how long, or what I looked like when I did it, I of course can’t tell you. Perhaps I was out for a few minutes, because when I became aware again Willard was looking anxious, and patting my cheeks lightly. He had taken the gag out of my mouth. I was crying, but making no noise. I had learned very early in life not to make a noise when I cried. I was still crumpled up on the horrible seat, and now its stench was too much for me and I vomited. Willard sprang back, anxious for his fine trousers and the high polish on his shoes. But he dared not leave me. Of course I had no idea how frightened he was. He felt he could trust in my shame and his threats up to a point, but I might be one of those terrible children who go beyond the point set for them by adults. He tried to placate me.

“ ‘Hey,’ he whispered, ‘you’re a pretty smart kid. Where’d you learn that trick with the quarter, eh? Come on now, show it to me again. I never seen a better trick than that, even at the Palace, New York. You’re the kid that eats money; that’s who you are. A real show-business kid. Now look, I’ll give you this, if you’ll eat it.’ He offered me a silver dollar. But I turned my face away, and sobbed, without sound.

“ ‘Aw now, look, it wasn’t as bad as that,’ he said. ‘Just some fun between us two. Just playing paw and maw, eh? You want to grow up to be smart, don’t you? Want to have fun? Take it from me, kid, you can’t start too young. The day’ll come, you’ll thank me. Yes sir, you’ll thank me. Now look here. I show you I’ve got nothing in my hands, see? Now watch.’ He spread his fingers one by one, and magically quarters appeared between them until he held four quarters in each hand. ‘Magic money, see? All for you; two whole dollars if you’ll shut up and get the hell outa here, and never say anything to anybody.’

“I fainted again, and this time when I came round Willard was looking deeply worried. ‘What you need is rest,’ he said. ‘Rest, and time to think about that money. I’ve gotta get back for the next show, but you stay here, and don’t let anybody in. Nobody, see? I’ll come back as soon as I can and I’ll bring you something. Something nice. But don’t let anybody in, don’t holler, and keep quiet like a mouse.’

“He went, and I heard him pause for a moment outside the door. Then I was alone, and I sobbed myself to sleep.

“I did not wake until he came back, I suppose an hour later. He brought me a hot dog, and urged me to eat it. I took one bite—it was my first hot dog—and vomited again. Willard was now very worried indeed. He swore fiercely, but not at me. All he said to me was, ‘My God you’re a crazy kid. Stay here. Now stay here, I tell ya. I’ll come back as soon as I can.’

“That was not very soon. Perhaps two hours. But when he came he had an air of desperation about him, which I picked up at once. Terrible things had happened, and terrible remedies must be found. He had brought a large blanket, and he wrapped me in it, so that not even my head was showing, and lugged me bodily—I was not very heavy—out of the privy; I felt myself dumped into what I suppose was the back of a buggy or a carry-all, or something, and other wraps were thrown over me. Off I went, bumping along in the back of the cart, and it was some time later that I felt myself lifted out again, carried over rough ground, and humped painfully up onto what seemed to be a platform. Then another painful business of being lugged over a floor, some sounds of objects being moved, and at last the blanket was taken off. I was in a dark place, and only vaguely conscious that some distance away a door, like the door of a shed, was open, and I could see the light of dusk through it.

“Willard lost no time. ‘Get in here,’ he commanded, and pushed me into a place that was entirely dark, and confined. I had to climb upward, boosted by him, until I came to what seemed to be a shelf, or seat, and on this he pushed me. ‘Now you’ll be all right,’ he said, in a voice that carried no confidence at all that I would be all right. It was a desperate voice. ‘Here’s something for you to eat.’ A box was pushed in beside me. Then a door below me was closed, and snapped from the outside, and I was in utter darkness.

“After a while I felt around me. Irregular walls, seeming to be curved everywhere; there was even a small dome over my head. A smell, not clean, but not as disgusting as the privy at the fair. A little fresh air from a point above my head. I fell asleep again.

“When I woke, it was because I heard the whistle of a train, and a train-like thundering nearby. But I was not moving. I was wretchedly hungry, and in the darkness I explored Willard’s box. Something lumpy and sticky inside it, which I tried to eat, and then greedily ate it all. Sleep again. Terrible fatigue all through my body, and the worst pain of all in my bottom. But I could not move very much in any direction, and I had to sit on my misery. At last, a space of time that seemed like a geological age later, I felt movement. Banging and thumping which went on for some time. A sound of voices. The sound of another whistle, and then trundling, lumbering movement, which increased to a good speed. For the first time in my life I was on a train, but of course I didn’t know that.

“And that, my friends, is the first instalment of my subtext to the memoirs of Robert-Houdin, whose childhood, you recall, was such an idyll of family love and care, and whose introduction to magic was so charmingly brought about. Enough, I think, for one evening. Good-night.”

(5)

When I made my way to bed, some time later, I tapped at Eisengrim’s door. As I had expected, he was awake, and lay, looking very fine, against his pillows, wearing a handsome dressing-robe.

“Kind of you to come in and say good-night, Dunny.”

“I expected you’d be waiting up to see what your notices were.”

“A disgusting way of putting it. Well, what were they?”

“About what you’d expect. Kinghovn had a fine sense of the appearance of everything. I’ll bet that as you talked he had that fair all cut up into long shots, close-ups, and atmosphere shots. And of course he’s a devil for detail. For one thing, he wondered why nobody wanted to use the privy while you were left in it for so long.”

“Simple enough. Willard wrote a note which said ‘INFECTION: Closed by Doctor’s Order’, and pinned it to the door.”

“Also he was anxious to know what it was you ate when you found yourself in the curious prison with the rounded walls.”

“It was a box of Cracker-Jack. I didn’t know what it was at the time, and had never eaten it before. Why should I have included those details in my story? I didn’t know them then. It would have been a violation of narrative art to tell things I didn’t know. Kinghovn ought to have more sense of artistic congruity.”

“He’s a cameraman. He wants to get a shot of everything, and edit later.”

“I edit as I go along. What did the others say?”

“Ingestree talked for quite a while about the nature of puritanism. He doesn’t know anything about it. It’s just a theological whimwham to him. He’s talked about puritanism at Oxford to Ronny Knox and Monsignor D’Arcy, but that stuff means nothing in terms of the daily, bred-in-the-bone puritanism we lived in Deptford. North American puritanism and the puritanism the English know are worlds apart. I could have told him a thing or two about that, but my time for instructing people is over. Let ’em wallow in whatever nonsense pleases ’em, say I.”

“Did Lind have anything to say?”

“Not much. But he did say that nothing you told us was incomprehensible to him, or even very strange. ‘We know of such things in Sweden,’ he said.”

“I suppose people know of such things everywhere. But every rape is unique for the aggressor and the victim. He talks as if he knew everything.”

“I don’t think he means it quite that way. When he talks about Sweden, I think it is a mystical rather than a geographical concept. When he talks of Sweden he means himself, whether he knows it or not. He really does understand a great deal. You remember what Goethe said? No, of course you don’t. He said he’d never heard of a crime of which he could not believe himself capable. Same with Lind, I suppose. That’s his strength as an artist.”

“He’s a great man to work with. I think between us we’ll do something extraordinary with this film.”

“I hope so. And by the way, Magnus, I must thank you for the very kind things you said about me tonight. But I assure you I didn’t especially mean to be kind to you, when we were boys. I mean, it wasn’t anything conscious.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t. But that’s the point, don’t you see? If you’d done it out of duty, or for religious reasons, it would have been different. But it was just decency. You’re a very decent man, Dunny.”

“Really? Well—it’s nice of you to think so. I’ve heard dissenting opinions.”

“It’s true. That’s why I think you ought to know something I didn’t see fit to tell them tonight.”

“You suggested you had been editing. What did you leave out?”

“One gets carried away, telling a story. I may have leaned a little too heavily on my character as the wronged child. But would they have understood the whole truth? I don’t after fifty years when I have thought of it over and over. You believe in the Devil, don’t you.”

“In an extremely sophisticated way, which would take several hours to explain, I do.”

“Yes. Well, when the Devil is walking beside you, as he was walking beside me at that fair, it doesn’t take a lot of argument to make him seem real.”

“I won’t insult you by saying you’re a simple man, but you’re certainly a man of strong feeling, and your feelings take concrete shapes. What did the Devil do to you that you withheld when you were talking downstairs?”

“The whole nub of the story. When Willard gave me that quarter in the tent, we were standing behind the crowd, which was gaping at Andro who was showing his big right bicep while twitching his sumptuous left breast. Nobody was looking. Willard had slipped his hand down the back of my pants and gently stroked my left buttock. Gave it a meaning squeeze. I remember very well how warm his hand felt.”

“Yes?”

“I smiled up into his face.”

“Yes?”

“Is that all you have to say? Don’t you see what I’m getting at? I had never had any knowledge of sex, had never known a sexual caress before, even of the kind parents quite innocently give their children. But at this first sexual approach I yielded. I cosied up to Willard. How could I, without any true understanding of what I was doing, respond in such a way to such a strange act?”

“You were mad to learn his magic. It doesn’t seem very strange to me.”

“But it made me an accomplice in what followed.”

“You think that? And you still blame yourself?”

“What did I know of such things? I can only think it was the Devil prompting me, and pushing me on to what looked then, and for years after, like my own destruction.”

“The Devil isn’t a popular figure nowadays. The people who take him seriously are few.”

“I know. How he must laugh. I don’t suppose God laughs at the people who think He doesn’t exist. He’s above jokes. But the Devil isn’t. That’s one of his most endearing qualities. But I still remember that smile. I had never smiled like that before. It was a smile of complicity. Now where would such a child as I was learn such a smile as that?”

“From that other old joker, Nature, do you suppose?”

“I don’t take much stock in Nature … Thanks for coming in. Good-night, decent man.”

“Magnus, are you becoming sentimental in your old age?”

“I’m fully ten years younger than you, you sour Scot. Good-night, kind man.”

I went to my room, and to my bed, but it was a long time before I slept. I lay awake, thinking about the Devil. Many people would have considered my bedroom at Sorgenfrei a first-class place for such reflection, because so many people associate the Devil with a high standard of old-fashioned luxury. Mine was a handsome room in a corner tower, with an area of floor as big as that of a modest modern North American house. Sorgenfrei was an early-nineteenth-century construction, built by a forebear of Liesl’s who seemed to have something in common, at least in his architectural taste, with the mad King of Bavaria; it was a powerfully romantic Gothic Revival house, built and furnished with Teutonic thoroughness. Everything was heavy, everything was the best of its kind, everything was carved, and polished, and gilded, and painted to the highest possible degree, and everything would drive a modern interior decorator out of his tasteful mind. But it suited me splendidly.

Not, however, when I wanted to think about the Devil. It was too romantic, too Germanic altogether. As I lay in my big bed, looking out of the windows at the mountains on which moonlight was falling, what could be easier than to accept an operatic Devil, up to every sort of high-class deception, and always defeated at the end of the story by the power of sheer simple-minded goodness? All my life I have been a keen operagoer and playgoer, and in the theatre I am willing to accept the notion that although the Devil is a very clever fellow, he is no match for some ninny who is merely good. And what is this goodness? A squalid, know-nothing acceptance of things as they are, an operatic version of the dream which, in North America, means Mom and apple pie. My whole life had been a protest against this world, or the smudged, grey version of it into which I had been born in my rural Canada.

No, no; that Devil would never do. But what else is there? Theologians have not been so successful in their definitions of the Devil as they have been in their definitions of God. The words of the Westminster Confession, painstakingly learned by heart as a necessity of Presbyterian boyhood, still seemed, after many wanderings, to have the ring of indisputable authority. God was infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory. Excellent, even if one is somewhat seduced by the high quality of the prose of 1648. What else? Most loving, most gracious, merciful, longsuffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin; the rewarder of those that diligently seek him. Aha, but where does one seek God? In Deptford, where Eisengrim and I were born, and might still be living if, in my case, I had not gone off to the First World War, and in his case, if he had not been abducted by a mountebank in a travelling show? I had sought God in my lifelong, unlikely (for a Canadian schoolmaster) preoccupation with that fantastic collection of wise men, virtuous women, thinkers, doers, organizers, contemplatives, crack-brained simpletons, and mad mullahs that are all called Saints. But all I had found in that lifelong study was a complexity that brought God no nearer. Had Eisengrim sought God at all? How could I know? How can anybody know what another man does in this most secret part of his life? What else had I been taught in that profound and knotty definition? That God was most just and terrible in his judgements, hating all sin, one who will by no means clear the guilty. Noble words, and (only slightly cloaked by their nobility) a terrifying concept. And why should it not be terrifying? A little terror, in my view, is good for the soul, when it is terror in the face of a noble object.

The Devil, however, seems never to have been so splendidly mapped and defined. Nor can you spy him simply by turning a fine definition of God inside out; he is something decidedly more subtle than just God’s opposite.

Is the Devil, then, sin? No, though sin is very useful to him; anything we may reasonably call sin involves some personal choice. It is flattering to be asked to make important choices. The Devil loves the time of indecision.

What about evil, then? Is the Devil the origin and ruler of that great realm of manifestly dreadful and appalling things which are not, so far as we can determine, anybody’s fault or the consequence of any sin? Of the cancer wards, and the wards for children born misshapen and mindless? I have had reason to visit such places—asylums for the insane in particular—and I do not think I am fanciful or absurdly sensitive in saying that I have felt evil to be palpable there, in spite of whatever could be done to lessen it.

These are evil things within my knowledge: I am certain there are worse things I have never encountered. And how constant this evil is! Let mankind laboriously suppress leprosy, and tuberculosis rages: when tuberculosis is chained, cancer rushes to take its place. One might almost conclude that such evils were necessities of our collective life. If the Devil is the inspirer and ruler of evil, he is a serious adversary indeed, and I cannot understand why so many people become jokey and facetious at the mention of his name.

Where is the Devil? Was Eisengrim, whose intuitions and directness of observation in all things concerning himself I had come to respect, right in saying the Devil stood beside him when Willard the Wizard solicited him to an action which, under the circumstances, I should certainly have to call evil? Both God and the Devil wish to intervene in the world, and the Devil chooses his moments shrewdly.

What had Eisengrim told us? That on 30 August 1918, he had descended into hell, and did not rise again for seven years? Allowing for his wish to startle us, and his taste for what a severe critic might call flashy rhetoric, could what he said be discounted?

It was always a mistake, in my experience, to discount Magnus Eisengrim. The only thing to do was to wait for the remainder of his narrative, and hope that it would make it possible for me to reach a conclusion. And that would be my much-desired document.

(6)

I knew nothing about filming, but Lind’s subordinates told me that his methods were not ordinary. He was extremely deliberate, and because he liked careful rehearsal and would not work at night he seemed to take a lot of time. But as he wasted none of this time, his films were not as devastatingly expensive as impatient people feared they might be. He was a master of his craft. I did not presume to question him about it, but I sensed that he attached more importance to Eisengrim’s story than ordinary curiosity would explain, and that the dinners and discussions at Sorgenfrei fed the fire of his creation. Certainly he and Kinghovn and Ingestree were anxious for more as we settled down in the library on the third night. Liesl had seen to it that there was plenty of brandy, for although Eisengrim drank very little, and I was too keen on my document to drink much, Lind loved to tipple as he listened and had a real Scandinavian head; brandy never changed him in the least. Kinghovn was a heavy drinker, and Ingestree, a fatty, could not resist anything that could be put into his mouth, be it food, drink, or cigar.

Magnus knew they were waiting, and after he had toyed with them for a few minutes, and appeared to be leading them into general conversation, he yielded to Lind’s strong urging that he go on with his story or—as Ingestree now quite seriously called it—“the subtext”.

“I told you I was on a train, but didn’t know it. I think that is true, but I must have had some notion of what was happening to me, because I had heard the whistle, and felt the motion, and of course I had seen trains. But I was so wretched that I couldn’t reason, or be sure of anything, except that I was in close quarters in pitchy darkness. My mind was on a different unhappiness. I knew that when I was in trouble I should pray, and God would surely help me. But I couldn’t pray, for two reasons. First, I couldn’t kneel, and to me prayer without kneeling was unknown. Second, if I had been able to kneel I could not have dared to do it, because I was horribly aware that what Willard had done to me in that disgusting privy had been done while I was in a kneeling posture. I assure you, however strange it may seem, that I didn’t know what he had done, but I felt strongly that it was a blasphemy against kneeling, and if I knew nothing of sex I certainly knew a lot about blasphemy. I guessed I might be on a train, but I knew for a certainty that I had angered God. I had been involved in what was very likely the Sin against the Holy Ghost. Can you imagine what that meant to me? I had never known such desolation. I had wept in the privy and now I could weep no more. Weeping meant sound, and I had a confused idea that although God certainly knew about me, and undoubtedly had terrible plans for me, He might be waiting for me to betray myself by sound before He went to work on me. So I kept painfully still.

“I suppose I was in a state of what would now be called shock. How long it went on I could not then tell. But I know now that it was from Friday night until the following Sunday morning that I sat in my close prison, without food or water or light. The train had not been travelling all that time. All day Saturday Wanless’s World of Wonders had a day’s work at a village not many miles from Deptford, and I was conscious of the noises of unloading the train in the morning, and of loading it again very late at night, though I could not interpret them. But Sunday morning brought a kind of release.

“There were more men’s voices, and more sounds of heavy things being methodically moved near where I was. Then after a period of silence I heard Willard’s voice. ‘He’s in there,’ it said. Then sounds somewhat below me, and a hand reached up and touched my leg. I made no sound—could not make a sound, I suppose—and was rather roughly hauled out into a dim light, and laid on the floor. Then a strange voice. ‘Jesus, Willard,’ it said, ‘you’ve killed him. Now we’re all up the well-known creek.’ But then I moved a little. ‘Christ, he’s alive,’ said the strange voice; ‘thank God for that.’ Then Willard’s voice: ‘I’d rather he was dead,’ it said; ‘what are we going to do with him now?’

“ ‘We got to get Gus,’ said the strange voice. ‘Gus is the one who’ll know what to do. Don’t talk about him being dead. Haven’t you got any sense? We got to get Gus right now.’ Then Willard spoke. ‘Yeah, Gus, Gus, Gus; it’s always Gus with you. Gus hates me. I’ll be outa the show.’ ‘Leave Gus to me about you and the show,’ said the other voice; ‘but only Gus can deal with this right now. You wait here.’

“The other man went away, and as he went I heard the heavy door of the freight-car—for I was in a freight-car in which the World of Wonders took its trappings from town to town—and I was for a second time alone with Willard. Through my eyelashes I could see him sitting on a box beside me. His Mephistophelian air of command was gone; he looked diminished, shabby, and afraid.

“After a time the other man returned with Gus, who proved to be a woman—a real horse’s godmother of a woman, a little, hard-faced, tough woman who looked like a jockey. But she inspired confidence, and while it would be false to say that my spirits lightened, I felt a little less desolate. I have always had a quick response to people, and though it is sometimes wrong it is more often right. If I like them on sight they are lucky people for me, and that’s really all I care about. Gus was in a furious temper.

“ ‘Willard, you son-of-a-bitch, what the hell have you got us into now? Lemme look at this kid.’ Gus knelt and hauled me round so that she could see me. Then she sent the other man to open the doors further, to give her a better light.

“Gus had a rough touch, and she hurt me so that I whimpered. ‘What’s your name, kid?’ she said. ‘Paul Dempster.’ ‘Who’s your Dad?’ ‘Reverend Amasa Dempster.’ This pushed Gus’s rage up a few notches. ‘A reverend’s kid,’ she shouted; ‘you had to go and kidnap a reverend’s kid. Well, I wash my hands of you, Willard. I hope they hang you, and if they do, by God I’ll come and swing on your feet!’

“I can’t pretend to remember all their talk, because Gus sent the unknown man, whom she called Charlie, to get water and milk and food for me, and while they wrangled she fed me, first, sugared water from a spoon, and then, when I had plucked up a little, some milk, and finally a few biscuits. I can still remember the pain as my body began to return to its normal state, and the pins-and-needles in my arms and legs. She put me on my feet and walked me up and down but I was wobbly, and couldn’t stand much of that.

“Nor can I pretend that I understood much of what was said at that time, though later, from knowledge I picked up over a period of years, I know what it must have been. I was not Gus’s chief problem; I was a complication of a problem that was already filling the foreground of her mind. Wanless’s World of Wonders belonged to Gus, and her brothers Charlie and Jerry; they were Americans, although their show toured chiefly in Canada, and Charlie ought to have been in the American Army, for the 1917 draft had included him and he had had his call-up. But Charlie had no mind for fighting, and Gus was doing her best to keep him out of harm’s way, in hopes that the War would end before his situation became desperate. Charlie was very much her darling, and I judge he must have been at least ten years younger than she; Jerry was the oldest. Therefore, involvements with the law were not to Gus’s taste, even though they might bring about the downfall of Willard. She detested him because he was Charlie’s best friend, and a bad influence. Willard, in his panic, had abducted me, and it was up to Gus to get me out of the way without calling attention to the Wanless family.

“It is easy now to think of several things they might have done, but none of those three were thinkers. Their obsession was that I must be kept from running to the police and telling my tale of seduction, abduction, and hard usage; it never occurred to them to ask me, or they would have found out that I had no clear idea of who or what the police were, and had no belief in any rights of mine that might have gone contrary to the will of any adult. They assumed that I was aching to return to my loving family, whereas I was frightened of what my father would do when he found out what had happened in the privy, and what the retribution would be for having stolen fifteen cents, a crime of the uttermost seriousness in my father’s eyes.

“My father was no brute, and I think he hated beating me, but he knew his duty. ‘He that spareth his rod hateth his son; but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes’; this was part of the prayer that always preceded a beating and he laid the rod on hard, while my mother wept or—this was very much worse, and indeed quite horrible—laughed sadly as if at something my father and I did not and could not know. But Gus Wanless was a sentimentalist, American-style, and it never entered her head that a boy in my situation would be prepared to do anything rather than go home.

“There was another thing which seems extraordinary to me now, but which was perfectly in keeping with that period in history and the kind of people into whose hands I had fallen. There was never, at any time, any reference to what had happened in the privy. Gus and Charlie certainly knew that Willard had not stolen a boy, or thought it necessary to conceal a boy, simply as a matter of caprice. As I grew to know these carnival people I discovered that their deepest morality was precisely that of the kind of people they amused; whatever freedom their travelling way of life might give them, it did not cut far into the rock of North American accepted custom and morality. If Willard had despoiled a girl, I think Gus would have known better what to do, but she was unwilling to strike out into the deep and dirty waters that Willard’s crime had revealed in the always troubled landscape of Wanless’s World of Wonders.

“I think she was right: if Willard had fallen into the hands of the law as we knew it in Deptford, and in the county of which it was a part, the scandal would have wrecked the World of Wonders and Charlie would have been shipped back to the States to face the music. A showman, a magician at that, a stranger, an American, who had ravaged a local child in a fashion of which I am certain half the village had never heard except as something forbidden in the Bible—we didn’t go in for lynchings in our part of the world, but I think Willard might have been killed by the other prisoners when he went to jail; jails have their own morality, and Willard would have found himself outside it. So nothing was said about that, then or afterward. This was all the worse for me, as I found out in the years to come. I was part of something shameful and dangerous everybody knew about, but which nobody would have dreamed of bringing into the light.

“What were they to do with me? I am sure Willard had spoken truly when he wished me dead, but he hadn’t the courage to kill me when he had his chance. Now that Gus, who was the whole of the law and the prophets in the World of Wonders, knew about me, that moment had passed. As I have said, none of them had any capacity for thought or reasoning, and as they talked on and on Gus’s mood turned from rage to fear. Willard was more at home in the air of fear than in that of anger.

“ ‘Honest to God, Gus, nothing would ever have happened, if the kid hadn’t shown some talent.’

“This was a lucky string to touch. Gus was sure she knew everything there was to know about Talent—a word she always pronounced with the air of one giving it a capital letter. And so it came out that when Willard had given me a quarter, out of pure open-heartedness, I had immediately done a trick with it. As neat a palm-and-pass as Willard had ever seen. Good enough for the Palace Theatre in New York.

“ ‘You mean the kid can do tricks?’ It was Charlie who spoke. ‘Then why can’t we fix him up a little with some hair-dye and maybe colour his skin, and use him as a Boy-Conjuror—Bonzo the Boy Wonder, or like that?’

“But this did not sit well with Willard. He wanted no rival conjurors in the show.

“ ‘Jeeze, Willard, I only meant as a kind of assistant to you. Hand you things and like that. Maybe do a funny trick or two when you’re not looking. You could plan something.’

“Now it was Gus who objected. ‘Charlie, you ought to know by now that you can’t never disguise anybody from somebody that knows him well. The law’s going to follow the show; just keep that in mind. The kid’s Dad, this reverend, comes into the show, sees a kid this size, and no hair-dye and blackface is going to hide him. Anyway, the kid sees his Dad, this reverend, and he gives him the high-sign. Use whatever head you got, Charlie.’

“Now it was Willard’s turn to have a bright idea. ‘Abdullah!’ he said.

“Even though I was busy with the biscuits I stopped eating to look at them. They were like people from whose minds a cloud had lifted.

“ ‘But can he handle Abdullah?’ said Gus.

“ ‘I betcha he can. I tell you, this kid’s Talent. A natural. He’s made for Abdullah. Don’t you see, Gus? This is the silver lining. I made a little slip, I grant ya. But if Abdullah’s back in the show, what does it matter? Abdullah’s the big draw. Now look; we put Abdullah back, and I go to the top of the show, and let’s not hear any more about Happy Hannah or that gaffed morphodite Andro.’

“ ‘Just hold your horses, Willard. I’ll believe a kid can handle Abdullah when I’ve seen it. You got to show me.’

“ ‘And I’ll show you. Gimme time, just a very little time, and I’ll show you. Kid, can you handle a pack of cards?’ Nothing could make me admit that I could handle a pack of cards. Ramsay had taught me a few card tricks, but when my father found it out he gave me such a beating as only a thoroughgoing Baptist can give a son who has been handling the Devil’s Picture Book. It had been thoroughly slashed into my backside that cards were not for me. I denied all knowledge of cards before I had thought for an instant. Yet, immediately I had spoken, the four suits and the ways in which they could be made to dance began to rise in my memory.

“Willard was not troubled by my lack of knowledge. He had the real showman’s enthusiasm for a new scheme. But Gus was dubious.

“ ‘Just give me today, Gus,’ said Willard. ‘Only just this one Sunday, to show you what can be done. I’ll work him in. You’ll see. We can do it right here.’

“That was how I became the soul of Abdullah, and entered into a long servitude to the craft and art of magic.

“We began at once. Gus bustled away on some of the endless business she always had in hand, but Charlie remained, and he and Willard began to uncover something at the very back of the car—the only object in it which the handlers had not unloaded for Monday’s fair—which was under several tarpaulins. Whatever it was, this was the prison in which I had spent my wretched, starving hours.

“When it was pulled forward and the wraps thrown aside, it was revealed as, I think still, the most hideous and offensive object I have ever seen in my life. You gentlemen know how particular I have always been about the accoutrements of my show. I have spent a great deal of money, which foolish people have thought unnecessary, on the beauty and workmanship of everything I have exhibited. In this I have been like Robert-Houdin, who also thought that the best was none too good for himself and his audiences. Perhaps some of my fastidiousness began with my hatred of the beastly figure that was called Abdullah.

“It was a crude effigy of a Chinese, sitting on top of a chest, with his legs crossed. To begin with, the name was crassly wrong. Why call a Chinese figure Abdullah? But everything about it was equally inartistic and inept. Its robes were of frowsy sateen; its head was vulgarly moulded in papier mâché with an ugly face, sharply slanted eyes, dangling moustaches, and yellow fangs which hung down over the lower lip. The thing was, in itself, reason for a sharp protest from the Chinese Ambassador, if there had been one. It summed up in itself all that spirit combined of jocosity and hatred with which ignorant people approach whatever is foreign and strange.

“The chest on which this monster sat was in the same mode of workmanship. It was lacquered with somebody’s stupid notion of a dragon, half hideous and half cute, in gaudy red on a black background. A lot of cheap gold paint had been splashed about.

“Neither Willard nor Charlie explained to me what this thing was, or what relationship I was expected to bear to it. However, I was used to being ignored and rather liked it; being noticed had, in my experience, usually meant trouble. All they told me was that I was to sit in this thing and make it work, and my lesson began as soon as Abdullah was unveiled.

“Once again, but this time in daylight and with some knowledge of what I was doing, I crawled into the chest at the back of the figure, and thence upward, rather like an old-fashioned chimney-sweep climbing a chimney, into the body, where there was a tiny ledge on which I could sit and allow my feet to hang down. But that was not the whole of my duty. When I was in place, Willard opened various doors in the front of the chest, then turned the whole figure around on the wheels which supported the chest, and opened a door in the back. These doors revealed to the spectators an impressive array of wheels, cogs, springs, and other mechanical devices, and when Willard touched a lever they moved convincingly. But the secret of these mechanisms was that they were shams, displayed in front of polished steel mirrors, so that they seemed to fill the whole of the chest under the figure of Abdullah, but really left room for a small person to conceal himself when necessary. And that time came after Willard had closed the doors in the chest, and pulled aside Abdullah’s robes to show some mechanism, and nothing else, in the figure itself. When that was happening, I had to let myself down into the secret open space in the chest and keep out of the way. Once Abdullah’s mechanical innards had been displayed l crept back up into the figure, thrust aside the fake mechanism, which folded out of the way, and prepared to make Abdullah do his work.

“Willard and Charlie both treated me as if I were very stupid, which God knows I was not. However, I thought it best not to be too clever in the beginning. This was intuition; I did not figure it out consciously. They showed me a pack of cards, and painstakingly taught me the suits and the values. What Abdullah had to do was to play cards, on a very simple principle, with anybody who would volunteer from an audience to try their luck with him. This spectator—the Rube, as Willard called him—shuffled and cut a deck which lay on a little tray across Abdullah’s knees. Then the Rube drew a card and laid it face down on the tray. At this point Willard pulled a lever on the side of Abdullah’s chest, which set up a mechanical sound in the depths of the figure, which in fact I, the concealed boy, set going by pumping a pedal with my left foot. While this was going on it was my job to discover what card the Rube had drawn—which was easy, because he had put it face downward on a ground-glass screen, and I could fairly easily make it out—and to select a higher card from a rack concealed inside Abdullah ready to my hand. Having chosen my card, I set Abdullah’s left arm in motion, slipping my own arm into the light framework in its sleeve; at the far end of this framework was a device into which I inserted the card that was to confound the Rube. I then made Abdullah’s right arm move slowly to the deck of cards on the tray, and cut them; this was possible because the fingers had a pincers device in them which could be worked from inside the arm by squeezing a handle. When Abdullah had cut the cards his left hand moved to the deck and took a card from the top. But in fact he did nothing of the sort, because his sleeve fell forward for a moment and concealed what was really happening; it was at this instant I pushed the little slide which shot the card I had chosen from the rack into Abdullah’s fingers, and it seemed to the spectators that this was the card he picked up from the deck. The Rube was then invited to turn up his card—a five, let us say; then a spectator was asked to turn up Abdullah’s card. A seven in the same suit! Consternation of the Rube! Applause of the audience! Great acclaim for Willard, who had never touched a card at any time and had merely pulled the lever which set in motion Abdullah, the Card-Playing Automaton, and Scientific Marvel of the Age!

“We slaved away all of that Sunday. I lost my fright because Willard and Charlie were so pleased with what I could do, and although they still talked about me as though I had no ears to hear them, and no understanding, the atmosphere became cheerful and excited and I was the reason for it. I must not pretend that I mastered the mechanisms of Abdullah in an instant, and even when I had done so I had to be taught not to be too quick; I thought the essence of the work was to do it as fast as possible. Willard and Charlie knew, though they never bothered to tell me, that a very deliberate, and even slow, pace created a far better effect on the spectators. And I had much to learn. When I sat inside Abdullah my head was at the level of his neck, and here his robes parted a little to allow me to see through a piece of wire mesh that was painted the colour of his gown. It was by observing the actions of the Rube that I timed my own work. I had to learn to pump the little treadle that made the mechanical noise which simulated the finely scientific machinery of the automaton, and it was easy to forget, or to pump too fast and make Abdullah too noisy. The hardest part was ducking my head just enough to see what card the Rube had chosen and laid on the tray; as I said, this was ground glass, and there was a mirror underneath it so that I could see the suit and value of his card, but it was not as easy or as convenient as you might suppose, because the light was dim. And I had to be quick and accurate in choosing a card of greater value. A deck identical with the one used by the Rube was set up in a rack concealed by Abdullah’s folded legs; it had eight pigeon-holes, in which each suit was divided into the cards from two to ten, and the Jack, Queen, King, and Ace by themselves. It was dark in Abdullah, and there was not much time for choosing, so I had to develop a good deal of dexterity.

“It was thrilling, and I worked feverishly to make myself perfect. How many times we went through the routine, when once I had mastered the general principle of it, I cannot guess, but I remember well that it was the management of the arms that gave me the most trouble, and any mistiming there made a mess of the whole deception. But we toiled as only people toil who are busy at the delicious work of putting something over on the public. There was a short noonday pause for a picnic, of which my share was milk and a lot of sticky buns; Gus had left instructions that I was not to be starved or overworked, because I was still weak, and I certainly was not starved.

“It was a hot day, and hotter still inside Abdullah. Also, Abdullah had a heavy smell, because of all the papier mâché and glue and size with which he was made. During my thirty-six hours or so of imprisonment I had been compelled to urinate, in spite of my awful thirst, and this had done nothing to freshen the atmosphere of that close confinement. Moreover, although I did not know it then, I learned later that the former operator of Abdullah had been a dwarf who cannot have been fastidious about his person, and there was a strong whiff of hot dwarf as I grew hotter myself. I suppose I became rather feverish, but although I would not describe my emotion as happiness I was possessed by an intensity of interest and ambition that was better than anything I had ever known in my life. When you were teaching me magic, Ramsay, I felt something like it, but not to the same degree, because—please don’t be hurt—you were so tooth-achingly rotten at all your simple tricks. But this was the real thing. I didn’t know quite what this reality was, but it was wonderful, and I was an important part of it.

“Charlie, who was as good-hearted as he was soft-headed, did all he could to make a game of it. He played the part of the Rube, and he did his best to include every kind of Rube he could think of. He was a terrible ham, but he was funny. He approached Abdullah as Uncle Zeke, the euchre champion of Pumpkin Centre, and as Swifty Dealer, the village tinhorn sport, and as Aunt Samantha, who didn’t believe she could be bested by any Chinaman that ever lived, and as a whole gallery of such caricatures. I had to beg him not to be so funny, because I couldn’t concentrate on my work when I was laughing so much. But Willard never laughed. He was the taskmaster, demanding the greatest skill I could achieve in the management of the mechanism. Charlie was a hearty praiser; he would gladly tell me that I was a wonderful kid and a gift to the carnival business and the possessor of a golden future. But Willard never praised a good piece of management; he was sharp about mistakes, and demanded more and more refinement of success. I didn’t care. I felt that inside Abdullah I had entered into my kingdom.

“Come five o’clock Willard and Charlie thought we were ready to show our work to Gus. I had never been associated with any kind of show folk, and I thought it quite wonderful the way Gus climbed into the freight-car and behaved as if she had never seen any of us before; Willard and Charlie too behaved as if it were a real show and Gus a stranger. Willard gave a speech that I had not heard before, about the wonders of Abdullah, and the countless hours and boundless ingenuity that had gone into his construction; during all of it I kept as still as a mouse, and fully convinced myself that Gus did not know I was anywhere near; perhaps she thought I had run away. Then Gus, at the right time, came forward reluctantly and suspiciously, like a real Rube and not one of Charlie’s comic turns, and cut the deck and chose a card: either Gus knew some sleight-of-hand herself or Willard had prepared a sharp test for me, because it was the Ace of Spades; there was no card to top it. And then I had one of those flashes which, I think I may say without boasting, have lifted my work above that of even a very good illusionist. At the bottom of the tray that held the court-cards in spades, there was a Joker, and that was what I caused Abdullah to put down on the tray to top Gus’s Ace. Of course it would not do so, but it showed that I was able to meet an unexpected situation, and Charlie gave a whoop that would have drawn a crowd if there had been anybody hanging around the railway siding on a late Sunday afternoon.

“Gus was impressed, but the expression of her jockey’s face did not change. ‘O.K. I guess it’ll do,’ was what she said, and immediately the three began haggling again about some of the questions that had come up in the morning. I did not understand them then, but they concerned Abdullah’s place in the show, which Willard insisted should be next to last, the place of honour reserved for the top attraction. It was now held by Andro, against whom Willard harboured a complicated grudge. Gus did not want to be rushed, and insisted that Abdullah should not be shown for a while, until we were far from Deptford.

“Charlie begged very hard that Abdullah should go into the show at once. Business wasn’t good; they needed a strong attraction, especially now Hannah was getting out of hand and would have to be sat on; nobody would know the kid was in Abdullah because they would all be convinced Abdullah was a mechanical marvel. Yes, countered Gus, but how was she going to explain to the Talent a kid who turned up without warning and whom they would certainly know was the secret of Abdullah’s card-playing genius? Would they just tell her that? A kid out of nowheres! Especially if there was any inquiry by Nosey Parkers and policemen. Could Hannah be trusted not to spill the beans? She was a religious old bitch and would love to do a mean thing for a holy reason. Ah, said Charlie, Gus surely knew how to handle Hannah; if Hannah had to go for as much as eight hours without the assistance of Elephant Gus, where would she be? And here Willard struck in to say that he knew a thing or two about Hannah that would keep her in order. And so on, at length, because they all argued in a circle, enjoying the contention rather than wishing to reach a conclusion. I had had a hard day, and the inside of Abdullah was like a Turkish bath; they had quite forgotten the living reality of the thing they were discussing. So I fell into an exhausted sleep. I did not understand it at the time, but I came to understand it very well later: when I was in Abdullah, I was Nobody. I was an extension and a magnification of Willard; I was an opponent and a baffling mystery to the Rube; I was something to be gawped at, but quickly forgotten, by the spectators. But as Paul Dempster I did not exist. I had found my place in life, and it was as Nobody.”

The film-makers sipped their brandy for a time before Lind spoke. “It would be interesting to do a film about Nobody,” he said. “I know I mustn’t hurry you, so I won’t ask you if you were Nobody for long. But you are going to continue, aren’t you?”

“You must,” said Ingestree. “Now we are getting a true story. Not like Robert-Houdin’s faked-up reminiscences. He was never Nobody. He was always triumphantly and self-assuredly Somebody. He was charming, lively little Eugene Robert, the delight of his family and his friends; or he was that deserving young watch- and clock-maker; or he was the interesting young traveller who extracted the most amazing confidences from everybody; or he was the successful Parisian entertainer, drawing the cream of society to his little theatre, but always respectful, always conscious of his place, always the perfect bourgeois, always Somebody. Do you suppose many people are Nobody?”

Eisengrim looked at him with a not very agreeable smile. “Have you any recollection of being Nobody?” he said.

“Not really. No, I can’t say I have.”

“Have you ever met anyone who was Nobody?”

“I don’t believe so. No, I’m sure I haven’t. But then, if one met Nobody, I don’t suppose Nobody would make much of an impression on one.”

“Obviously not,” said Eisengrim.

It was I who saw the film-makers to their car and watched them begin the descent from Sorgenfrei to the village where their inn was. Then I went back to the house as fast as my artificial leg would carry me and caught Eisengrim as he was getting into bed.

“About the Devil,” I said, “I’ve been thinking more about what we said.”

“Have you pinned him down, then?”

“Nothing like it. I am simply trying to get a better hold on his attributes. The attributes of God have been very carefully explored. But the Devil’s attributes have been left vague. I think I’ve found one of them. It is he who puts the prices on things.”

“Doesn’t God put a price on things?”

“No. One of his attributes is magnanimity. But the Devil is a setter of prices, and a usurer, as well. You buy from him at an agreed price, but the payments are all on time, and the interest is charged on the whole of the principal, right up to the last payment, however much of the principal you think you have paid off in the meantime. Do you suppose the Devil invented numbers? I shouldn’t be surprised if the Devil didn’t invent Time, with all the subtle terrors that Time comprises. I think you said you spent seven years in hell?”

“I may have underestimated my sentence.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“You’re developing into a theologian, Dunny.”

“A diabologian, rather. It’s a fairly clear field, these days.”

“Do you think you can study evil without living it? How are you going to discover the attributes of the Devil without getting close to him? Are you the man for that? Don’t bother your old grey head, Dunny.”

That was Magnus all over. He simply had to be the damnedest man around. What an egotist!

(7)

We were eating sandwiches and drinking beer at a lunch-break the following day. Magnus was not with us, because he had gone off to make some repairs and alterations in his make-up, about which he was extremely particular. Robert-Houdin had been a handsome man, in a French style, with strong features, a large, mobile mouth, and particularly fine eyes: Magnus would make no concession to a likeness, and insisted on playing the role of the great illusionist as his handsome self, and he darted away to touch up his face whenever he could. As soon as he was out of the way, Kinghovn turned the conversation to what we had heard the night before.

“Our friend puzzles me,” he said. “You remember that he said the image of Abdullah was the ugliest thing he had ever seen? Then he described it, and it sounded like the sort of trash one would expect in such a poor little travelling show, and just what would seem marvellous to a small boy. How much is he colouring his story with opinions he formed later?”

“But inevitably it’s all coloured by later opinions,” said Ingestree. “What can you expect? It’s the classic problem of autobiography; it’s inevitably life seen and understood backwards. However honest we try to be in our recollections we cannot help falsifying them in terms of later knowledge, and especially in terms of what we have become. Eisengrim is unquestionably the greatest magician of our day, and to hear him tell it, of any day. How is he to make himself into a photographic record of something that happened fifty years ago?”

“Then how can we reconstruct the past?” said Kinghovn. “Look at it from my point of view—really my point of view, which is through the camera. Suppose I had to make a film of what Eisengrim has told us, how could I be sure of what Abdullah looked like?”

“You couldn’t,” said Lind. “And you know it. But you and I and a good designer would work together, and we would produce an Abdullah that would give the right effect, though it might be far, far away from the real Abdullah of 1918. What would the real Abdullah be? Perhaps not as ugly as Eisengrim says, but certainly a piece of cheap junk. You and I, Harry, would show the world not simply what little Paul Dempster saw, but what he felt. We would even get that whiff of hot dwarf across to the public somehow. That’s what we do. That’s why we are necessary people.”

“Then the truth of the past can never be recovered?”

“Harry, you should never talk. Your talk is the least useful part of you. You should just stick to your cameras, with which you are a man of genius. The truth of the past is to be seen in museums, and what is it? Dead things, sometimes noble and beautiful, but dead. And cases and cases of coins, and snuffboxes, and combs, and mirrors that won’t reflect any more, and clothes that look as if the wearers had all been midgets, and masses of frowsy tat that tells us nothing at all. Once a man showed me a great treasure of his family; it was a handkerchief which somebody, on 30 January 1649, had dipped in the blood of the executed English King Charles I. It was a disgusting, rusty rag. But if you and I and Roly here had the money and the right people, we could fake up an execution of King Charles that would make people weep. Which is nearer to the truth? The rag, or our picture?”

I thought it was time for me to intervene. “I wouldn’t call either the rag or your picture truth,” I said; “I am an historian by training and temperament, and I would go to the documents, and there are plenty of them, about the execution of Charles, and when I had read and tested and reflected on them, I would back my truth against yours and win.”

“Ah, but you see, my dear Ramsay, we would not dream of making our picture until we had consulted you or somebody like you, and given the fullest importance to your opinion.”

“Well, would you be content to film the execution on a grey day? Wouldn’t you want a shot of the sun rising behind Whitehall as the sun of English monarchy was setting on the scaffold?”

Lind looked at me sadly. “How you scholars underestimate us artists,” he said, with wintry Scandinavian melancholy. “You think we are children, always beguiled by toys and vulgarities. When have you ever known me to stoop to a sunrise?”

“Besides, you don’t understand what we could do with all those wonderful pearly greys,” said Kinghovn.

“You will never persuade me to believe that truth is no more than what some artist, however gifted he may be, thinks is truth,” I said. “Give me a document, every time.”

“I suppose somebody has to write the document?” said Lind. “Has he no feeling? Of course he has. But because he is not used to giving full weight to his feelings, he is all the more likely to be deluded into thinking that what he puts into his document is objective truth.”

Ingestree broke in. “Eisengrim is coming back from tarting himself up for the next few shots,” he said. “And so far as his story is concerned, we might as well make up our minds that all we are going to get is his feeling. As a literary man, I am just pleased that he has some feelings. So few autobiographers have any feeling except a resolute self-protectiveness.”

“Feeling! Truth! Balls! Let’s get a few hundred good feet in the can before our star decides he is tired,” said Kinghovn. And that is what we did.

A good day’s filming put Magnus in an expansive mood. Ingestree’s flattery about the quality of his acting had also had its effect on him, and that night he gave us a gallery of impersonations.

“Charlie had his way, and I was soon on the show. Charlie was right; Abdullah pulled them in because people cannot resist automata. There is something in humanity that is repelled and entranced by a machine that seems to have more than human powers. People love to frighten themselves. Look at the fuss nowadays about computers; however deft they may be they can’t do anything that a man isn’t doing, through them; but you hear people giving themselves delicious shivers about a computer-dominated world. I’ve often thought of working up an illusion, using a computer, but it would be prohibitively expensive, and I can do anything the public would find amusing better and cheaper with clockwork and bits of string. But if I invented a computer-illusion I would take care to dress the computer up to look like a living creature of some sort—a Moon Man or Venusian—because the public cannot resist clever dollies. Abdullah was a clever dolly of a simple kind, and the Rubes couldn’t get enough of him.

“That was where Gus had to use her showman’s discretion. Charlie and Willard would have put Abdullah in a separate tent to milk him for twenty shows a day, but Gus knew that would exhaust his appeal. Used sparingly, Abdullah was good for years, and Gus took the long view. It appeared, too, that I was an improvement on the dwarf, who had become unreliable through some personal defect—booze, I would guess—and was apt to make a mess of the illusion, or give way to a fit of temperament and deal a low card when he should have dealt a high one. Willard had had no luck with Abdullah; he had bought the thing, and hired the dwarf, but the dwarf was so unreliable it was risky to put the automaton on the show, and then the dwarf had disappeared. It had been months since Abdullah was in commission, and so far as the show was concerned it was a new attraction.

“I was anxious to succeed as Abdullah, though I had no particular expectation of gaining anything thereby. I had no notion of the world, and for quite a long time I did not understand how powerful I was, or that I might profit by it. Nor did anyone in the World of Wonders seek to enlighten me. So far as I can recall my feelings during those first few months, they were restricted to a desire to do the best I could, lest I should be sent back to my father and inevitable punishment. To begin with, I liked being the hidden agent who helped in the great game of hoodwinking Rubes, and I was happiest when I was out of sight, in the smelly bowels of Abdullah.

“When I was in the open air I was Cass Fletcher. I always hated the name, but Willard liked it because he had invented it in one of his very few flights of fancy. Willard had no imagination, to speak of. I learned as time went on that he had learned his conjuring skill from an old performer, and had never expanded it or altered it by a jot. He had as little curiosity as any man I have ever known. But when we were riding on the train, in my very first week, he found that I must have a name, because the other performers, riding in the car reserved for the World of Wonders, were surprised to see a small boy in their midst, for whom no credentials were offered. Who was I?

“When the question was put directly to him by the wife of Joe Dark the Knife Thrower, Willard hesitated a moment, looked out of the window, and said: ‘Oh, this is young Cass, a kind of relative of mine; Cass Fletcher.’ Then he went off into one of his very rare fits of laughter.

“As soon as he could catch Charlie, who wandered up and down the car as it travelled through the flatlands of Western Ontario, and gossiped with everybody, Willard told him his great joke. ‘Em Dark wanted to know the kid’s name, see, and I was thinking who the hell is he, when I looked outa the window at one of these barns with a big sign saying FLETCHER’S CASTORIA, CHILDREN CRY FOR IT; and quick as a wink I says Cass Fletcher, that’s his name. Pretty smart way to name a kid, eh?’ I was offended at being named from a sign on a barn, but I was not consulted, and a general impression spread that I was Willard’s nephew.

“At least, that was the story that was agreed on. As time went on I heart whispers between Molza the Fire Eater and Sonny Sonnenfels the Strong Man that Willard was something they called an arse-bandit—an expression I did not understand—and that the kid was probably more to him than just a nephew and the gaff for Abdullah.

“Gaff. That was a word I had to learn at once, in all its refinements. The gaff was the element of deception in an exhibition, and though all the Talent would have admitted you couldn’t manage without it, there was a moral stigma attaching to it. Sonnenfels was not gaffed at all; he really was a strong man who picked up big bar-bells and tore up telephone books with his hands and lifted anybody who would volunteer to sit in a chair, which Sonny then heaved aloft with one hand. There are tricks to being a strong man, but no gaff; anybody was welcome to heft the bar-bells if they wanted to. Frank Molza the Fire Eater and Sword Swallower was partly gaffed, because his swords weren’t as sharp as he pretended, and eating fire is a complicated chemical trick which usually proves bad for the health. But Professor Spencer, who had been born without arms—really he had two pathetic little flippers but he did not show them—was wholly free of gaff; he wrote with his feet, on a blackboard and, if you wanted to pay twenty-five cents, in an elegant script on twelve visiting cards, where your name would be handsomely displayed. Joe Dark and his wife Emily were not gaffed at all; Joe threw knives at Emily with such accuracy that he outlined her form on the soft board against which she stood; it was skill, and the only skill poor Joe possessed, for he was certainly the dullest man in the World of Wonders. Nor could you say there was any gaff about Heinie Bayer and his educated monkey Rango; it was an honest monkey, as monkeys go, and its tricks were on the level. The Midget Juggler, Piccino Zovene, was honest as a juggler, but as crooked as a corkscrew in any human dealings; he wasn’t much of a juggler, and might have been improved by a little gaff.

“Gaff may have been said to begin with Zitta the Jungle Queen, whose snakes were kept quiet by various means, especially her sluggish old cobra who was over-fed and drugged. Snakes don’t live long in the sort of life Zitta gave them; they can’t stand constant mauling and dragging about; she was always wiring a supplier in Texas for new rattlers. I judged that a snake lived about a month to six weeks when once Zitta had got hold of it; they were nasty things, and I never felt much sympathy for them. Zitta was a nasty thing, too, but she was too stupid to give her nastiness serious play. Andro the Hermaphrodite was all gaff. He was a man, of a kind, and besottedly in love with himself. The left side of his body was supposed to be the female half, and he spent a lot of time on it with depilatories and skin creams; when he attached a pretty good left breast to it, and combed out the long, curly hair he allowed to grow on one side of his head, he was an interesting sight. His right side he exercised strenuously, so that he had big leg and arm muscles which he touched up with some fancy shadowing. I never became used to finding him using the men’s bucket in the donniker—which was the word used on the show for the primitive sanitary conveniences in the small back dressing tent. He was a show-off; in show business you get used to vanity, but Andro was a very special case.

“Of course Abdullah was one hundred per cent gaff. I don’t think anybody would have cared greatly, if they had not been stirred up to it by the one very remarkable Talent I haven’t yet mentioned. She was Happy Hannah the Fat Lady.

“A Fat Lady, or a Fat Man, is almost a necessity for a show like Wanless’s. Just as the public is fascinated by automata, it is unappeasable in its demand for fat people. A Human Skeleton is hardly worth having if he can’t do something else—grow hair to his feet, or eat glass or otherwise distinguish himself. But a Fat Lady merely has to be fat. Happy Hannah weighed 487 pounds; all she needed to do was to show herself sitting in a large chair, and her living was assured. But that wasn’t her style at all; she was an interferer, a tireless asserter of opinions, and—worst of all—a determined Moral Influence. It was this quality in her which made it a matter of interest whether she was gaffed or not.

“Willard was her enemy, and Willard said she was gaffed. For one thing, she wore a wig, a very youthful chestnut affair, curly and flirtatious; a kiss-curl coiled like a watchspring in front of each rosy ear. The rosy effect was gaffed, too, for Hannah was thickly made up. But these things were simple showmanship. Willard’s insistence that the Fat Lady was gaffed rose from an occupational disability of Fat Ladies; this is copious sweating, which results, in a person whose bodily creases may be twelve inches deep, in troublesome chafing. Three or four times a day Hannah had to retire to the women’s part of the dressing tent, and there Gus stripped her down and powdered her in these difficult areas with cornstarch. Very early in my experience on the show I peeped through a gap in the lacing of the canvas partition that divided the men’s dressing-room from the women’s, and was much amazed by what I saw; Hannah, who looked fairly jolly sitting on her platform, in a suit of pink cotton rompers, was a sorry mass of blubber when she was bent forward, her hands on the back of a chair; she had collops of fat on her flanks, like the wicked man in the Book of Job; her monstrous abdomen hung almost to her knees, the smart wig concealed an iron-grey crewcut, and her breasts hung like great half-filled wallets of suet far down on her belly. I have seen nothing like her since, except for an effigy of Smet Smet, the Hippopotamus Goddess, in an exhibition of African art Liesl made me attend a few years ago. The gaffing consisted of two large bathtowels, which were rolled and tucked under her breasts, giving them what was, in comparison with the reality, a buxom contour. These towels were great matters of contention between Hannah and Willard, for she insisted that they were sanitary necessities, and he said they were gross impostures on the public. He cared nothing about gaffing; it was Hannah who made it a moral issue and drew a sharp line between gaffed Talent, like Abdullah, and honest Talent, like Fat Ladies.

“They wrangled about it a good deal. Hannah was voluble and she had a quality of shrewishness that came strangely from one whose professional personality depended on an impression of sunny good nature. She would nag about it for half an hour at a stretch, as we travelled on the train, until at last the usually taciturn Willard would say, in a low, ugly voice: ‘Listen, Miz Hannah, you shut your goddam trap or next time we got a big crowd I’m gonna tell ’em about those gaffed tits of yours. See? Now shut up, I tell ya!’

“He would never have done it, of course. It would have been unforgivable professional conduct, and even Charlie would not have been able to keep Gus from throwing him off the show. But the menace in his voice would silence Hannah for a few hours.

“I was entranced by the World of Wonders during those early weeks and I had plenty of time to study it, for it was part of the agreement under which I lived that I must never be seen during working hours, except when real necessity demanded a quick journey to the donniker, between tricks. I often ate in the seclusion of Abdullah. The hours of the show were from eleven in the morning until eleven at night, and so I ate as big a breakfast as I could get, and depended on a hot dog or something of the sort being brought to me at noon and toward evening. Willard was supposed to attend to it, but he often forgot, and it was good-hearted Emily Dark who saw that I did not starve. Willard never ate much, and like so many people he could not believe that anyone wanted more than himself. There was an agreement of some sort between Willard and Gus as to what my status was; I know he got extra money for me, but I never saw any of it; I know Gus made him promise he would look after me and treat me well, but I don’t think he had any idea of what such words meant, and from time to time Gus would give him a dressing down about the condition I was in; for years I never had any clothes except those Gus bought me, stopping the money out of Willard’s pay, but Gus had no idea of how to dress a child, and always bought everything too big, so that I would have lots of room to grow into it. Not that I needed many clothes; inside Abdullah I wore nothing but cotton shorts. I see now that it was a miserable life, and it is a wonder it didn’t kill me; but at the time I accepted it as children must accept the world made for them by their guardians.

“At the beginning I was beglamoured by the show, and peeped at it out of Abdullah’s bosom with unresting excitement. There was one full show an hour, and the whole of it was known as a trick. The trick began outside the tent on a platform beside the ticket-seller’s box, and this part of it was called the bally. Not ballyhoo, which was an expression I had heard in the carnival world in my time. Gus usually sold the tickets, though there was someone to spell her when she had other business to attend to. Charlie was the outside talker, not a barker, which is another expression I did not hear until a movie or a play made it popular. He roared through a megaphone to tell the crowd about what was to be seen inside the tent. Charlie was a flashy dresser and handsome in a flashy way, and he did his job well, most of the time.

“High outside the tent hung the banners, which were the big painted signs advertising the Talent; each performer had to pay for his own banner, though Gus ordered them from the artist and assured that there would be a pleasing similarity of style. As well as the banners, some of the Talent had to appear on the bally, and this boring job usually fell to the lesser artistes; Molza ate a little fire, Sonny heaved a few weights, the Professor would lie on his back and write ‘Pumpkin Centre, Agricultural Capital of Pumpkin County’ on a huge piece of paper with his feet, and this piece of paper was thrown into the crowd, for whoever could grab it; Zovene the Midget Juggler did a few stunts, and now and then if business was slow Zitta would take out a few snakes, and the Darks would have to show themselves. But the essence of the bally was to create an appetite for what was inside the tent, not to give away entertainment, and Charlie pushed the purchase of tickets as hard as he could.

“After Abdullah was put on the show, which was as soon as we could get a fine banner sent up from New York, Willard did not have to take a turn on the bally.

“The bally and the sale of tickets took about twenty minutes, after which a lesser outside talker than Charlie did what he could to collect a crowd, and Charlie hurried inside, carrying a little cane he used as a pointer. Once in the tent he took on another role, which was called the lecturer, because everything in the World of Wonders was supposed to be improving and educational; Charlie’s style underwent a change, too, for outside he was a great joker, whereas inside he was professorial, as he understood the word.

“I was much impressed by the fact that almost all the Talent spoke two versions of English—whatever was most comfortable when they were off duty, and a gaudy, begemmed, and gilded rhetoric when they were before the public. Charlie was a master of the impressive introduction when he presented the Talent to an audience.

“As spectators bought their tickets they were permitted into the tent, where they walked around and stared until the show began. Sometimes they asked questions, especially of Happy Hannah. ‘You will assuredly hear everything in due season,’ she would reply. The show was not supposed to begin without Charlie. When he pranced into the tent—he had an exaggeratedly youthful, high-stepping gait—he would summon the crowd around him and begin by introducing Sonny, the Strongest Man you have ever seen, ladies and gentlemen, and the best-natured giant in the known world. Poor old Sonny wasn’t allowed to speak, because he had a strong German accent, and Germans were not popular characters in rural Canada in the late summer of 1918. Sonny was not allowed to linger over his demonstration, either, because Charlie was hustling the crowd toward Molza the Human Salamander, who thrust a lighted torch into his mouth, and then blew out a jet of flame which ignited a piece of newspaper Charlie held in his hand; Molza then swallowed swords until he had four of them stuck in his gullet. When I came to know him I got him to show me how to do it, and I can still swallow a paper-knife, or anything not too sharp. But swallowing swords and eating fire are hard ways to get a living, and dangerous after a few years. Then Professor Spencer wrote with his feet, having first demonstrated with some soap and a safety-razor with no blade in it how he shaved himself every day; the Professor would write the name of anybody who wished it; with his right foot he would write from left to right, and at the same time, underneath it and with his left foot, he would write the name from right to left. He wrote with great speed in a beautiful hand—or foot, I should say. It was quite a showy act, but the Professor never had his full due, I thought, because people were rather embarrassed by him. Then the Darks did their knife-throwing act.

“It was a very good act, and if only Joe had possessed some instinct of showmanship it would have been much better. But Joe was a very simple soul, a decent, honest fellow who ought to have been a workman of some sort. His talent for throwing knives was one of those freakish things that are sometimes found in people who are otherwise utterly unremarkable. His wife, Emily, was ambitious for him; she wanted him to be a veterinary, and when we were on the train she kept him pegging away at a correspondence course which would, when it was completed, bring him a diploma from some cutrate college deep in the States. But it was obvious to everybody but Emily that it would never be completed, because Joe couldn’t get anything into his head from a printed page. He could throw knives, and that was that. They both wore tacky home-made costumes, which bunched unbecomingly in the wrong places, and Emily stood in front of a pine board while Joe outlined her pleasant figure in knives. Nice people: minor Talent.

“By this time the audience had climbed the ladder of marvels to Rango the Missing Link, exhibited by Heinie Bayer. Rango was an orang-outang, who could walk a tightrope carrying a parasol; at the mid-point, he would suddenly swing downward, clinging to the rope with his toes, and reflectively eat bananas; then he would whirl upright, throw away the skin, and complete his journey. After that he sat at a table, and rang a bell, and Heinie, dressed as a clown waiter, served him a meal, which Rango ate with affected elegance, until he was displeased with a badly prepared dish, and pelted Heinie with food. Rango was surefire. Everybody loved him, and I was of their number until I tried to make friends with him and Rango spat some chewed-up nuts in my face. It was part of Heinie’s deal with the management that Rango had to share a berth with him in our Pullman; although he was house-trained he was a nuisance because he was a bad sleeper, and likely to stick his hand into your berth in the night and pinch you—a very mean, twisting pinch. It was uncanny to poke your head out of your berth and see Rango swinging along the car, holding on to the tops of the green curtains, as if they were part of his native jungle.

“After Rango came Zitta the Jungle Queen. Snake acts are all the same. She pulled the snakes around her neck, wound them around her arms, and as a topper she knelt down and charmed her cobra by no other power than that of the unaided human eye, with which she exerts hypnotic dominance over this most dreaded of jungle monsters, as Charlie said, and ended by kissing it on its ugly snout.

“This was good showmanship. First the sunny side of nature, then the ominous side of nature. The trick, I learned, was that Zitta leaned down to the cobra from above its head; cobras cannot strike upwards. It was a thrill, and Zitta had to know her business. As I grew older and more cynical I sometimes wondered what it would be like if Zitta exercised her hypnotic powers on Rango, and kissed him, for a change. I don’t think Rango was a lady’s man.

“This left only Willard, Andro the Hermaphrodite, and Happy Hannah to complete the show; Zovene the Midget Juggler was only useful to get the audience out of the tent. On the basis of public attraction it was acknowledged that Willard must have the place of honour once Abdullah was on display. Charlie was in favour of giving Andro the place just before Abdullah but Happy Hannah would have none of it. She was clamorous. If a natural, educational wonder like herself, without any gaff about her, didn’t take precedence over a gaffed monsterosity she was prepared to leave carnival life and despair of the human race. She made herself so unpleasant that she won the argument; Andro became very shrewish when he was under attack, but he lacked Hannah’s large, embracing, Biblical flow of condemnation. When he had said that Hannah was a fat, loud-mouthed old bitch his store of abuse was exhausted; but she sailed into him with all guns firing.

“ ‘Don’t think I hold it against you personally, Andro. No, I know you for what you are. I know the rock from whence ye are hewn—that no-good bunch o’ Boston Greek fish-peddlers and small-time thieves; and I likewise know the hole of the Pit whence ye are digged—offering yourself to stand bare-naked in front of artists, some of ’em women, at fifty cents an hour. So know it isn’t really you that’s speaking against me; it’s the spirit of an unclean devil inside of you, crying with a loud voice; and rebuke it just as our dear Lord did; I’m sitting right here, crying, “Hold thy peace and come out of him!” ’

“This was Hannah’s strength. All her immense bulk was crammed with Bible knowledge and quotations and it oozed out of her like currant-juice oozing out of a jelly-bag. She offered herself to the public as a biblical marvel, a sort of she-Leviathan. She would not allow Charlie to speak for her. As soon as he had given her a lead—And now, ladies and gentlemen, I present Happy Hannah, four hundred and eighty-seven pounds of good humour and chuckles—she would burst in, ‘Yes friends, and I’m the living proof of how fat a person can get and still bear it gladly in the Lord’s name. I hope every person here knows his Bible and if they do, they know the comforting message of Proverbs eleven, twenty-five: The liberal soul shall be made fat. Yes friends, I am here not as a curiosity and certainly not as a monsterosity but to attest in my daily life and my public career to the Lord’s abounding grace. I don’t hafta be here; many offers from missionary societies and the biggest evangelists have been turned down in order that I may get around this whole continent and talk to the biggest possible audience of the real people, God’s own folks, and attest to the Faith. Portraits of me as you see me now, each one individually autographed by my own hand, may be purchased at twenty-five cents apiece, and for another mere quarter I will include a priceless treasure, this copy of the New Testament which fits in the pocket and in which each and every word uttered by our Lord Jesus Christ during his earthly ministry is printed in RED. No Testament sold except with a portrait. Don’t miss this great offer which is made by me at a financial sacrifice in order that the Lord’s will may be done more abundantly here in Pumpkin Centre. Don’t hang back folks; grab what I’m giving to you; I been made fat and when you possess this portrait of me as you see me now and this New Testament you’ll hafta admit that I’m certainly the Liberal Soul. Come on, now, who’s gonna be the first?’

“Hannah was able to hawk her pictures and her Testaments because of an arrangement written into every artiste’s contract that they should be allowed to sell something at every show. They made their offer, or Charlie made it for them, as the crowd was about to move on to the next Wonder. The price was always twenty-five cents. Sonny had a book on body-building; Molza had only a picture of himself with his throat full of swords—a very slow item in terms of sales; Professor Spencer offered his personally written visiting cards, which were a nuisance because they took quite a while to prepare; Em Dark sold throwing knives Joe made in his spare time out of small files—a throwing knife has no edge, only a point; Heinie sold pictures of Rango; Zitta offered belts and bracelets which she made out of the skins of the snakes she had mauled to death—though Charlie didn’t put it quite like that; Andro was another seller of pictures; Willard sold a pamphlet called Secrets of Gamblers Revealed, which was offered by Charlie as an infallible protection against dishonest card-players you might meet on trains; a lot of people bought them who didn’t look like great travellers, and I judged they wanted to know the secrets of gamblers for some purpose of their own. I read it several times, and it was a stupefyingly uncommunicative little book, written at least thirty years before 1918. The agreement was that each Wonder offered his picture or whatever it might be after he had been exhibited, and that when the show had been completed, except for the Midget Juggler, Charlie would invite the audience once again not to leave without one of these valuable mementoes of a unique and unforgettable personal experience and educational benefit.

“From being an extremely innocent little boy it did not take me long to become a very knowing little boy. I picked up a great deal as we travelled from village to village on the train, for our Pullman was an educational benefit and certainly, for me, an unforgettable personal experience. I had an upper berth at the very end of the car, at some distance from Willard, whose importance in the show secured him a lower in the area where the shock of the frequent shuntings and accordion-like contractions of the train were least felt. I came to know who had bottles of liquor, and also who was generous with it and who kept it for his own use. I knew that neither Joe nor Em Dark drank, because it would have been a ruinous indulgence for a knife-thrower. The Darks, however, were young and vigorous, and sometimes the noises from their berth were enough to raise comment from the other Talent. I remember one night when Heinie, who shared his bottle with Rango, put Rango up to opening the curtains of the Darks’ upper; Em screamed, and Joe grabbed Rango and threw him down into the aisle so hard that Rango screamed; Heinie offered to fight Joe, and Joe, stark naked and very angry, chased Heinie back to his berth and pummelled him. It took a full hour to soothe Rango; Heinie assured us that Rango was used to love and could not bear rough usage; Rango had to have at least two strong swigs of straight rye before he could sleep. But in the rough-and-tumble I had had a good look at Em Dark naked, and it was very different from Happy Hannah, I can assure you. All sorts of things that I had never heard of began, within a month, to whirl and surge and combine in my mind.

“A weekly event of some significance in our Pullman was Hannah’s Saturday-night bath. She lived in continual hope of managing it without attracting attention, but that was ridiculous. First Gus would bustle down the aisle with a large tarpaulin and an armful of towels. Then Hannah, in an orange mobcap and a red dressing-gown, would lurch and stumble down the car; she was too big to fall into anybody’s berth, but she sometimes came near to dragging down the green curtains when we were going around a bend. We all knew what happened in the Ladies’ Retiring Room; Gus spread the tarpaulin, Hannah stood on it hanging onto the wash-basin, and Gus swabbed her down with a large sponge. It was for this service of Christian charity that she was called Elephant Gus when she was out of earshot. Drying Hannah took a long time, because there were large portions of her that she could not reach herself, and Gus used to towel her down, making a hissing noise between her teeth, like a groom.

“Sometimes Charlie and Heinie and Willard would be sitting up having a game of poker, and while the bath was in progress they would sing a hymn, ‘Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow’. If they were high they had another version—

This infuriated Hannah, and on her return trip she would favour them with a few Biblical admonitions; she had a good deal to say about lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, games of hazard, and abominable idolatries, out of First Peter. But she hocussed the text. There is no mention of ‘games of hazard’ or gambling anywhere in the Bible. She put that in for her own particular satisfaction. I knew it, and I soon recognized Hannah as my first hypocrite. A boy’s first recognition of hypocrisy is, or ought to be, more significant than the onset of puberty. By the time Gus had stowed her into her special lower, which was supported from beneath with a few fence-posts, she was so refreshed by anger that she fell asleep at once, and snored so that she could be heard above the noise of the train.

“Very soon I became aware that the World of Wonders which had been a revelation to me, and I suppose to countless other country village people, was a weary bore to the Talent. This is the gnawing canker of carnival life: it is monstrously boring.

“Consider. We did ten complete shows a day; we had an hour off for midday food and another hour between six and seven; otherwise it was unremitting. We played an average of five days a week, which means fifty shows. We began our season as early as we could, but nothing much was stirring in the outdoor carnival line till mid-May, and after that we traipsed across country playing anywhere and everywhere—I soon stopped trying to know the name of the towns, and called them all Pumpkin Centre, like Willard—until late October. That makes something over a thousand shows. No wonder the Talent was bored. No wonder Charlie’s talks began to sound as if he was thinking about something else.

“The only person who wasn’t bored was Professor Spencer. He was a decent man, and couldn’t give way to boredom, because his affliction meant perpetual improvisation in the details of his life. For instance, he had to get somebody to help him in the donniker, which most of us were ready to do, but wouldn’t have done if he had not always been cheerful and fresh. He offered to teach me some lessons, because he said it was shame for a boy to leave school as early as I had done. So he taught me writing, and arithmetic, and an astonishing amount of geography. He was the one man on the show who had to know where we were, what the population of the town was, the name of the mayor, and other things that he wrote on his blackboard as part of his show. He was a good friend to me, was Professor Spencer. Indeed, it was he who persuaded Willard to teach me magic.

“Willard had not been interested in doing that, or indeed anything, for me. I was necessary, but I was a nuisance. I have never met anyone in my life who was so bleakly and unconsciously selfish as Willard, and for one whose life has been spent in the theatre and carnival world that is a strong statement. But Professor Spencer nagged him into it—you could not shame or bully or cajole Willard into anything, but he was open to nagging—and he began to show me a few things with cards and coins. As my years with the World of Wonders wore on, I think what he taught me saved my reason. Certainly it is at the root of anything I can do now.

“Whoever taught Willard did it very well. He never gave names to the things he taught me, and I am sure he didn’t know them. But since that time I have found that he taught me all there is to know about shuffling, forcing, and passing cards, and palming, ruffling, changing, and bridging, and the wonders of the biseauté pack, which is really the only trick pack worth having. With coins he taught me all the basic work of palming and passing, the French drop, La Pincette, La Coulée, and all the other really good ones. His ideal among magicians was Nelson Downs, whose great act, The Miser’s Dream, he had seen at the Palace Theatre, New York, which was the paradise of his limited imagination. Indeed, it was a very much debased version of The Miser’s Dream that he had been doing when I first saw him. He now did little conjuring in the World of Wonders, because of the ease of managing Abdullah.

“Inside Abdullah I was busy for perhaps five minutes in every hour. My movement was greatly restricted; I could not make a noise. What was I to do? I practised my magic, and for hours on end I palmed coins and developed my hands in the dark, and that is how I gained the technique which has earned me the compliment of this film you gentlemen are making. I recommend the method to young magicians; get yourself into a close-fitting prison for ten hours a day, and do nothing but manipulate cards and coins; keep that up for a few years and, unless you are constitutionally incapable, like poor Ramsay here, you should develop some adroitness, and you will at least have no chance to acquire the principal fault of the bad magician, which is looking at your hands as you work. That was how I avoided boredom: constant practice, and entranced observation, through Abdullah’s bosom, of the public and the Talent of the World of Wonders.

“Boredom is rich soil for every kind of rancour and ugliness. In my first months on the show this attached almost entirely to the fortunes of the War. I knew nothing about the War, although as a schoolchild I had been urged to bring all my family’s peachstones to school, where they were collected for some war-like purpose. Knowing boys said that a terrible poison gas was made from them. Every morning in prayers our teacher mentioned the Allied Forces, and especially the Canadians. Once again knowing boys said you could always tell where her brother Jim was by the prayer, which was likely to contain a special reference to ‘our boys at the Front’, and later, ‘our boys in the rest camps’, and later still, ‘our boys in the hospitals’. The War hung over my life like the clouds in the sky, and I heeded it as little. Once I saw Ramsay in the street, in what I later realized was the uniform of a recruit, but at the time I couldn’t understand why he was wearing such queer clothes. I saw men in the streets with black bands on their arms, and asked my father why they wore them, but I can’t remember what he answered.

“In the World of Wonders the War seemed likely at times to tear the show to pieces. The only music on the fairgrounds where we appeared came from the merry-go-round; tunes were fed into its calliope by the agency of large steel discs, perforated with rectangular holes; they worked on the same principle as the roll of a player-piano, but were much more durable, and rotated instead of uncoiling. Most of the music was of the variety we associate with merry-go-rounds. Who wrote it? Italians, I suspect, for it always had a gentle, quaintly melodious quality, except for one new tune which Steve, who ran the machine, had bought to give the show a modern air. It was the American war song—by that noisy fellow Cohan, was it?—called ‘Over There!’ It was less than warlike on a calliope, played at merry-go-round tempo, but everybody recognized it, and now and then some Canadian wag would sing loudly, to the final phrase—

If Hannah heard this, she became furious, for she was an inflamed American patriot and the War, for her, had begun when the Americans entered it in 1917. The Darks were Canadians, and not as tactful as Canadians usually are when dealing with their American cousins. I remember Em Dark, who was a most unlikely person to tell a joke, saying one midday, in September of 1918, when the Talent was in the dressing tent, eating its hasty picnic: ‘I heard a good one yesterday. This fellow says, Say, why are the American troops called Doughboys? And the other fellow says, Gee, I dunno; why? And the first fellow says, It’s because they were needed in 1914 but they didn’t rise till 1917. Do you get it? Needed, you see, like kneading bread, and—’ But Em wasn’t able to continue with her explanation of the joke because Hannah threw a sandwich at her and told her to knead that, and she was sick and tired of ingratitude from the folks in a little, two-bit backwoods country where they still had to pay taxes to the English King, and hadn’t Em heard about the Argonne and the American blood that was being shed there by the bucketful, and how did Em think they would make the Hun say Uncle anyways with a lot of fat-headed Englishmen and Frenchmen messing it all up, and what they needed over there was American efficiency and American spunk?

“Em didn’t have a chance to reply, because Hannah was immediately in trouble with Sonnenfels and Heinie Bayer, who smouldered under a conviction that Germany was hideously wronged and that everybody was piling on the Fatherland without any cause at all, and though they were just as good Americans as anybody they were damn well sick of it and hoped the German troops would show Pershing something new about efficiency. Charlie tried to quiet them down by saying that everybody knew the War was a put-up job and nobody was getting anything out of it but the Big Interests. This was a mistake, because Sonny and Heinie turned on him and told him that they knew why he was so glad to be in Canada, and if they were younger men they’d be in the scrap and they weren’t going to say which side they’d be on, neither, but if they met anything like Charlie on the battlefield they’d just put a chain on him and show him off beside Rango.

“The battle went on for weeks, during which Joe Dark suffered the humiliation of having Em tell everybody that he wasn’t in the Canadian Army because he had flat feet, and Hannah replying that you didn’t need feet to fly a plane, but you sure needed brains. The only reasonable voice was that of Professor Spencer, who was a great reader of the papers, and an independent thinker; he was all for an immediate armistice and a peace conference. But as nobody wanted to listen to him, he lectured me, instead, so that I still have a very confused idea of the causes of that War, and the way it was fought. Hannah got a Stars and Stripes from somewhere, and stuck it up on her little platform. She said it made her feel good just to have it there.

“It all came about because of boredom. Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in. But a worse and more lasting source of trouble was the final show in each village, which was called the Last Trick.

“It was agreed that the Last Trick ought to be livelier than the other nine shows of the day. The fair was at its end, the serious matters like the judging of animals and fancy-work had been completed, and most of the old folks had gone home, leaving young men and their girls, and the village cutups on the fairground. It was then that the true, age-old Spirit of Carnival descended on Wanless’s World of Wonders, but of course it didn’t affect everybody in the same way. Outside, the calliope was playing its favourite tune, ‘The Poor Butterfly Waltz’; supposedly unknown to Gus, the man who ran the cat-rack had slipped in the gaff, so that the eager suitor who was trying to win a kewpie doll for the girl of his heart by throwing baseballs found that the stuffed pussy-cats wouldn’t be knocked down. It was a sleazier, crookeder fair altogether than the one the local Fair Board had planned, but there was always a young crowd that liked it that way.

“On the bally, Charlie allowed his wit a freer play. As Zovene juggled with his spangled Indian clubs, Charlie would say, in a pretended undertone which carried well beyond his audience: ‘Pretty good, eh? He isn’t big, but he’s good. Anyways, how big would you be if you’d been strained through a silk handkerchief?’ The young bloods would guffaw at this, and their girls would clamour to have it explained to them. And when Zitta showed her snakes, she would drag the old cobra suggestively between her legs and up her front, while Charlie whispered, ‘Boys-oh-boys, who wouldn’t be a snake?’

“Inside the tent Charlie urged the young men to model themselves on Sonnenfels, so that all the girls would be after them, and they’d be up to the job. And when he came to Andro he would ogle his hearers and say, ‘He’s the only guy in the world who’s glad to wake up in the morning and find he’s beside himself.’ He particularly delighted in tormenting Hannah. She did her own talking, but as she shrieked her devotion to the Lord Jesus, Charlie would lean down low, and say, in a carrying whisper, ‘She hasn’t seen her ace o’ spades in twenty years.’ The burst of laughter made Hannah furious, though she never caught what was said. She knew, however, that it was something dirty. However often she complained to Gus, and however often Gus harangued Charlie, the Spirit of Carnival was always too much for him. Nor was Gus whole-hearted in her complaints; what pleased the crowd was what Gus liked.

“Hannah attempted to fight fire with fire. She often made it known, in the Pullman, that in her opinion these modern kids weren’t bad kids, and if you gave them a chance they didn’t want this Sex and all like that. Sure, they wanted fun, and she knew how to give ’em fun. She was just as fond of fun as anybody, but she didn’t see the fun in all this Smut and Filth. So she gave ’em fun.

“ ‘Lots o’ fun in your Bible, boys and girls,’ she would shout. ‘Didn’t you know that? Didya think the Good Book was all serious? You just haven’t read it with the Liberal Heart, that’s all. Come on now! Come on now, all of you! Who can tell me why you wouldn’t dare to take a drink outa the first river in Eden? Come on, I bet ya know. Sure ya know. You’re just too shy to say. Why wouldn’t ya take a drink outa the first river in Eden?—Because it was Pison, that’s why! If you don’t believe me, look in Genesis two, eleven.’ Then she would go off into a burst of wheezing laughter.

“Or she would point—and with an arm like hers, pointing was no trifling effort—at Zovene, shouting: ‘You call him small? Say, he’s a regular Goliath compared with the shortest man in the Bible. Who was he? Come on, who was he?—He was Bildad the Shu-hite, Job two, eleven. See, the Liberal Heart can even get a laugh outa one of Job’s Comforters. I betcha never thought of that, eh?’ And again, one of her terrible bursts of laughter.

“Hannah understood nothing of the art of the comedian. It is dangerous to laugh at your own jokes, but if you must, it is great mistake to laugh first. Fat people, when laughing, are awesome sights, enough to strike gravity into the onlooker. But Hannah was a whole World of Wonders in herself when she laughed. She forced her laughter, for after all, when you have told people for weeks that the only man in the Bible with no parents was Joshua, the son of Nun, the joke loses some of its savour. So she pushed laughter out of herself in wheezing, whooping cries, and her face became unpleasantly marbled with dabs of a darker red under the rouge she wore. Her collops wobbled uncontrollably, her vast belly heaved and trembled as she sucked breath, and sometimes she attempted to slap her thigh, producing a wet splat of sound. Fat Ladies ought not to tell jokes; their mirth is of the flesh, not of the mind. Fat Ladies ought not to laugh; a chuckle is all they can manage without putting a dangerous strain on their breathing and circulatory system. But Hannah would not listen to reason. She was determined to drive Smut back into its loathsome den with assaults of Clean Fun, and if she damaged herself in the battle, her wounds would be honourable.

“Sometimes she had an encouraging measure of success. Quite often there would be in the crowd some young man who was of a serious, religious turn of mind, and usually he was accompanied by a girl who had preacher’s daughter written all over her. They had been embarrassed by Charlie’s jokes when they understood them. They had been even more embarrassed when Rango, at a secret signal from Heinie, left his pretended restaurant table and urinated in a corner, while Heinie pantomimed a waiter’s dismay. But with that camaraderie which exists among religious people just as it does among tinhorns and crooks, they recognized Hannah as a benign influence, and laughed with her, and urged her on to greater flights. She gave them her best. ‘What eight fellas in the Bible milked a bear? You know! You musta read it a dozen times. D’ya give it up? Well, listen carefully: Huz, Buz, Kemuel, Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethuel—these eight did Milcah bear to Nahor, Abraham’s brother. Didya never think of it that way? Eh? Didn’t ya? Well, it’s in Genesis twenty-two.’

“When one of these obviously sanctified couples appeared, it was Hannah’s pleasure to single them out and hold them up to the rest of the crowd as great cutups. ‘Oh, I see ya,’ she would shout; ‘it’s the garden of Eden all over again; the trouble isn’t with the apple in the tree, it’s with that pair on the ground.’ And she would point at them, and they would blush and laugh and be grateful to be given a reputation for wickedness without having to do anything to acquire it.

“All of this cost Hannah dearly. After a big Saturday night, when she had exhausted her store of Bible riddles, she was almost too used up for her ritual bath. But she had worked herself up into a shocking sweat, and sometimes the smell of wet cornstarch from her sopping body spread a smell like a gigantic nursery pudding through the whole of the tent, and bathed she had to be, or there would be trouble with chafing.

“Her performance on these occasions made Willard deeply, cruelly angry. He would stand beside Abdullah and I could hear him swearing, repetitively but with growing menace, as she carried on. The worst of it was, if she secured any sort of success, she was not willing to stop; even when the crowd had passed on to see Abdullah, she would continue, at somewhat lesser pitch, with a few lingerers, who hoped for more Bible fun. In the Last Trick it was Willard’s custom to have three people cut the cards for the automaton, instead of the usual one, and he wanted the undivided attention of the crowd. He hated Hannah, and from my advantageous peephole I was not long in coming to the conclusion that Hannah hated him.

“There were plenty of places in southern Ontario at that time where religious young people were numerous, and in these communities Hannah did not scruple to give a short speech in which she looked forward to seeing them next year, and implored them to join her in a parting hymn. ‘God be with you till we meet again’, she would strike up, in her thin, piercing voice, like a violin string played unskilfully and without a vibrato, and there were always those who, from religious zeal or just because they liked to sing, would join her. Nor was one verse enough. Charlie would strike in, as boldly as he could: And now, ladies and gentlemen, our Master Marvel of the World of Wonders—Willard the Wizard and his Card-Playing Automaton, Abdullah, as soon to be exhibited on the stage of the Palace Theatre, New York—but Hannah would simply put on more steam, and slow down, and nearly everybody in the tent would be wailing—

And then the whole dismal chorus. It was a hymn of hate, and Willard met it with such hate as I have rarely seen.

“As for me, I was only a child, and my experience of hatred was slight, but so far as I could, and with what intensity of spirit I could muster, I hated them both. Hate and bitterness were becoming the elements in which I lived.”

Eisengrim had a fine feeling for a good exit-line, and at this point he rose to go to bed. We rose, as well, and he went solemnly around the circle, shaking hands with us all in the European manner. Lind and Kinghovn even bowed as they did so, and when Magnus turned at the door to give us a final nod, they bowed again.

“Now why do you suppose we accord these royal courtesies to a man who has declared that he was Nobody for so many years,” said Ingestree, when we had sat down again. “Because it is so very plain that he is not Nobody now. He is almost oppressively Somebody. Are we rising, and grinning, and even bowing out of pity? Are we trying to make it up to a man who suffered a dreadful denial of personality by assuring him that now we are quite certain he is a real person, just like us? Decidedly not. We defer to him, and hop around like courtiers because we can’t help it. Why? Ramsay, do you know why?”

“No,” said I; “I don’t, and it doesn’t trouble me much. I rather enjoy Magnus’s lordly airs. He can come off his perch when he thinks proper. Perhaps we do it because we know he doesn’t take it seriously; it’s part of a game. If he insisted, we’d rebel.”

“And when you rebelled, you would see a very different side of his nature,” said Liesl.

“You play the game with him, I observe,” said Ingestree. “You stand up when His Supreme Self-Assurance leaves the company. Yet you are mistress here, and we are your guests. Now why is that?”

“Because I am not quite sure who he is,” said Liesl.

“You don’t believe this story he’s telling us?”

“Yes. I think that he has come to the time of his life when he feels the urge to tell. Many people feel it. It is the impulse behind a hundred bad autobiographies every year. I think he is being as honest as he can. I hope that when he finishes his story—if he does finish it—I shall know rather more. But I may not have my answer then.”

“I don’t follow; you hope to hear his story out, but you don’t think it certain that you will know who he is even then, although you think he is being honest. What is this mystery?”

“Who is anybody? For me, he is whatever he is to me. Biographical facts may be of help, but they don’t explain that. Are you married, Mr. Ingestree?”

“Well, no, actually, I’m not.”

“The way you phrase your reply speaks volumes. But suppose you were married; do you think that your wife would be to you precisely what she was to her women friends, her men friends, her doctor, lawyer, and hairdresser? Of course not. To you she would be something special, and to you that would be the reality of her. I have not yet found out what Magnus is to me, although we have been business associates and friendly intimates for a long time. If I had been the sort of person who is somebody’s mistress, I would have been his mistress, but I’ve never cared for the mistress role. I am too rich for it. Mistresses have incomes, and valuable possessions, but not fortunes. Nor can I say we have been lovers, because that is a messy expression people use when they are having sexual intercourse on fairly regular terms, without getting married. But I have had many a jolly night with Magnus, and many an exciting day with him. I still have to decide what he is to me. If humouring his foible for royal treatment helps me to come to a conclusion, I have no objection.”

“Well, what about you, Ramsay? He keeps referring to you as his first teacher of magic. You knew him from childhood, then? You could surely say who he was?”

“I was almost present at his birth. But does that mean anything? An infant is a seed. Is it an oak seed or a cabbage seed? Who knows? All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages. I would be the last man to pretend that knowing somebody as a child gave any real clue to who he is as a man. I can tell you this: he jokes about the lessons I gave him when he was a child, but he didn’t think them funny then; he had a great gift for something I couldn’t do at all, or could do with absurd effort. He was deadly serious during our lessons, and for a good reason. I could read the books and he couldn’t. I think that may throw some light on what we have been hearing about the World of Wonders, which he presents as a kind of joke. I am perfectly certain it wasn’t a joke at the time.”

“I am sure he wasn’t joking when he spoke of hatred,” said Lind. “He was funny, or ironic, or whatever you want to call it, about the World of Wonders. We all know why people talk in that way; if we are amusing about our trials in the past, it is as if we say, ‘See what I overcame—now I treat it as a joke—see how strong I have been and ask yourself if you could have overcome what I overcame?’ But when he spoke of hatred, there was no joking.”

“I don’t agree,” said Ingestree. “I think joking about the past is a way of suggesting that it wasn’t really important. A way of veiling its horror, perhaps. We shudder when we hear of yesterday’s plane accident, in which seventy people were killed; but we become increasingly philosophical about horrors that are further away. What is the Charge of the Light Brigade now? We remember it as a military blunder and we use it as a stick to beat military commanders, who are all popularly supposed to be blunderers. It has become a poem by Tennyson that embarrasses us by its exaltation of unthinking obedience. We joke about the historical fact and the poetic artifact. But how many people ever think of the young men who charged? Who takes five minutes to summon up in his mind what they felt as they rushed to death? It is the fate of the past to be fuel for humour.”

“Have you put your finger on it?” said Lind. “Perhaps you have. Jokes dissemble horrors and make them seem unimportant. And why? Is it in order that more horrors may come? In order that we may never learn anything from experience? I have never been very fond of jokes. I begin to wonder if they are not evil.”

“Oh rubbish, Jurgen,” said Ingestree. “I was only talking about one aspect of humour. It’s absolutely vital to life. It’s one of the marks of civilization. Mankind wouldn’t be mankind without it.”

“I know that the English set a special value on humour,” said Lind. “They have a very fine sense of humour and sometimes they think theirs the best in the world, like their marmalade. Which reminds me that during the First World War some of the English troops used to go over the top shouting, ‘Marmalade!’ in humorously chivalrous voices, as if it were a heroic battle-cry. The Germans could never get used to it. They puzzled tirelessly to solve the mystery. Because a German cannot conceive that a man in battle would want to be funny, you see. But I think the English were dissembling the horror of their situation so that they would not notice how close they were to Death. Again, humour was essentially evil. If they had thought of the truth of their situation, they might not have gone over the top. And that might have been a good thing.”

“Let’s not theorize about humour, Jurgen,” said Ingestree; “it’s utterly fruitless and makes the very dullest kind of conversation.”

“Now it’s my turn to disagree,” I said. “This notion that nobody can explain humour, or even talk sensibly about it, is one of humour’s greatest cover-ups. I’ve been thinking a great deal about the Devil lately, and I have been wondering if humour isn’t one of the most brilliant inventions of the Devil. What have you just been saying about it? It diminishes the horrors of the past, and it veils the horrors of the present, and therefore it prevents us from seeing straight, and perhaps from learning things we ought to know. Who profits from that? Not mankind, certainly. Only the Devil could devise such a subtle agency and persuade mankind to value it.”

“No, no, no, Ramsay,” said Liesl. “You are in one of your theological moods. I’ve watched you for days, and you have been moping as you do only when you are grinding one of your home-made theological axes. Humour is quite as often the pointer to truth as it is a cloud over truth. Have you never heard the Jewish legend—it’s in the Talmud, isn’t it?—that at the time of Creation the Creator displayed his masterwork, Man, to the Heavenly Host, and only the Devil was so tactless as to make a joke about it. And that was why he was thrown out of Heaven, with all the angels who had been unable to suppress their laughter. So they set up Hell as a kind of jokers’ club, and thereby complicated the universe in a way that must often embarrass God.”

“No,” I said; “I’ve never heard that and as legends are my speciality I don’t believe it. Talmud my foot! I suspect you made that legend up here and now.”

Liesl laughed loud and long, and pushed the brandy bottle toward me. “You are almost as clever as I am, and I love you, Dunstan Ramsay,” she said.

“New or old, it’s a very good legend,” said Ingestree. “Because that’s always one of the puzzles of religion—no humour. Not a scrap. What is the basis of our faith, when we have a faith? The Bible. The Bible contains precisely one joke, and that is a schoolmasterish pun attributed to Christ when he told Peter that he was the rock on which the Church was founded. Very probably a later interpolation by some Church Father who thought it was a real rib-binder. But monotheism leaves no room for jokes, and I’ve thought for a long time that is what is wrong with it. Monotheism is too po-faced for the sort of world we find ourselves in. What have we heard tonight? A great deal about how Happy Hannah tried to squeeze jokes out of the Bible in the hope of catching a few young people who were brimming with life. Frightful puns; the kind of bricks you make without straw. Whereas the Devil, when he is represented in literature, is full of excellent jokes, and we can’t resist him because he and his jokes make so much sense. To twist an old saying, if the Devil had not existed, we should have had to invent him. He is the only explanation of the appalling ambiguities of life. I give you the Devil!”

He raised his glass, but only he and Liesl drank the toast. Kinghovn, who had been getting into the brandy very heavily, was almost asleep. Lind was musing, and no sign of amusement appeared on his long face. I couldn’t possibly have drunk such a toast, offered in such a spirit. Ingestree was annoyed.

“You don’t drink,” said he.

“Perhaps I shall do so later, when I have had time to think it over,” said Lind. “Private toasts are out of fashion in the English-speaking world; you only drink them on formal occasions, as part of the decorum of stupidity. But we Scandinavians have still one foot in Odin’s realm, and when we drink a toast we mean something quite serious. When I drink to the Devil I shall want to be quite serious.”

“I hesitate to say so, Roland,” I said, “but I wish you hadn’t done that. I quite agree that the Devil is a great joker, but don’t think it is particularly jolly to be the butt of one of his jokes. You have called his attention to you in what I must call a frivolous way—damned silly, to be really frank. I wish you hadn’t done that.”

“You mean he’ll do something to me? You mean that from henceforth I’m a Fated Man? You know, I’ve always fancied the role of Fated Man. What do you think it’ll be? Car accident? Loss of job? Even a nasty death?”

“Who am I to probe the mind of a World Spirit?” I said. “But if I were the Devil—which, God be thanked, I am not—I might throw a joke or two in your direction that would test your sense of humour. I don’t suppose you’re a Fated Man.”

“You mean I’m too small fry for that?” said Ingestree. He was smiling, but he didn’t like my serious tone and was inviting me to insult him. Luckily Kinghovn woke up, slightly slurred in speech but full of opinion.

“You’re all out of your heads,” he shouted. “No humour in the Bible. All right. Scrub out the Bible. Use the script Eisengrim has given us. Film the subtext. Then I’ll show you some humour: that Fat Woman—let me give you a peep-shot of her groaning in the donniker, or being swilled down by Gus; let me show her shrieking her bloody-awful jokes while the Last Trick gets dirtier and dirtier. Then you’ll hear some laughter. You’re all mad for words. Words are just farts from a lot of fools who have swallowed too many books. Give me things! Give me the appearance of a thing, and I’ll show you the way to photograph it so the reality comes right out in front of your eyes. The Devil? Balls! God? Balls! Get me that Fat Woman and I’ll photograph her one way and you’ll know the Devil made her, then I’ll photograph her another way and you’ll swear you see the work of God! Light! That’s the whole secret. Light! And who understands it? I do!”

Lind and Ingestree decided it was time to take him to his bed. As they manhandled him down the long entry-steps of Sorgenfrei he was shouting, “Light! Let there be light! Who said that? I said it!”

(8)

The film-makers were drawing near the end of their work. All but a few special scenes of Un Hommage à Robert-Houdin were “in the can”; what remained was to arrange backstage shots of Eisengrim being put into his “gaffed” conjuror’s evening coat by the actor who played the conjuror’s son and assistant; of assistants working quietly and deftly while the great magician produced astonishing effects on the stage; of Mme Robert-Houdin putting the special padded covers over the precious and delicate automata; of the son-assistant gently loading a dozen doves, or three rabbits, or even a couple of ducks into a space which seemed incapable of holding them; of all the splendidly efficient organization which was needed to produce the effect of the illogical and incredible. That night, therefore, Eisengrim moved his narrative along a little faster.

“You don’t want a chronological account of my seven years as the mechanism of Abdullah,” he said, “and indeed it would be impossible for me to give you one. Something was happening all the time, but only two or three matters were of any importance. We were continually travelling and seeing new places, but in fact we saw nothing. We brought excitement and perhaps a whisper of magic into thousands of rural Canadian lives, but our own lives were vast unbroken prairies of boredom. We were continually on the alert, sizing up the Rubes and trying to match what we gave to what they wanted, but no serious level of our minds was ever put to work.

“For Sonnenfels, Molza, and poor old Professor Spencer it was the only life they knew or could expect to have; the first two kept themselves going by nursing some elaborate, inexhaustible, ill-defined personal grievance which they shared; Spencer fed himself on complex, unworkable economic theories, and he would jaw you half to death about bimetallism, or Social Credit, if you gave him a chance. The Fat Woman had her untiring crusade against smut and irreligion; she could not reconcile herself to being simply fat, and I suppose this suggests some kind of mental or spiritual life in her. I saw hope dying in poor Em Dark, as Joe proved his incapacity to learn anything that would get them out of carnival life. Zitta was continually on the lookout for somebody to marry; she couldn’t make any money, because she had to spend so much on new, doctored snakes; but how do you get a sucker to the altar if you are always on the move? She would have snatched at Charlie, but Charlie liked something fresher, and anyhow Gus was vigilant to save Charlie from designing women. Zovene was locked in the misery of dwarfdom; he wasn’t really a midget, because a midget has to be perfectly formed, and he had a small but unmistakable hump; he was a sour little fellow, and deeply unhappy, I’m sure. Heinie Bayer had lived so long with Rango that he was more like Rango than like a man; they did not bring out the best in each other.

“Like a lot of monkeys Rango was a great masturbator, and when Happy Hannah complained about it Heinie would snicker and say, ‘It’s natural, ain’t it?’ and encourage Rango to do it during the Last Trick, where the young people would see him. Then Hannah would shout across the tent, ‘Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ But the youngsters can’t have been believers in the sense of the text, for they hung around Rango, some snickering, some ashamedly curious, and some of the girls obviously unable to understand what was happening. Gus tried to put a stop to this, but even Gus had no power over Rango, except to put him off the show, and he was too solid a draw for that. Hannah decided that Rango was a type of natural, unredeemed man, and held forth at length on that theme. She predicted that Rango would go mad, if he had any brains to go mad with. But Rango died unredeemed.

“So far as I was concerned, the whole of Wanless’s World of Wonders was unredeemed. Did Christ die for these, I asked myself, hidden in the shell of Abdullah. I decided that He didn’t. I now think I was mistaken, but you must remember that I began these reflections when I was ten years old, and deep in misery. I was in a world which seemed to me to be filthy in every way; I had grown up in a world where there was little love, but much concern about goodness. Here I could see no goodness, and felt no goodness.”

Lind intervened. “Excuse me if I am prying,” he said, “but you have been very frank with us, and my question is one of deep concern, not simple curiosity. You were swept into the carnival because Willard had raped you; was there any more of that?”

“Yes, much more of it. I cannot pretend to explain Willard, and I think such people must be rare. I know very well that homosexuality includes love of all sorts, but in Willard it was just a perverse drive, untouched by affection or any concern at all, except for himself. At least once every week we repeated that first act. Places had to be found, and when it happened it was quick and usually done in silence except for occasional whimpers from me and—this was very strange—something very like whimpers from Willard.”

“And you never complained, or told anybody?”

“I was a child. I knew in my bones that what Willard did to me was very wrong, and he was careful to let me know that it was my fault. If I said a word to anybody, he told me, I would at once find myself in the hands of the law. And what would the law do to a boy who did what I did? Terrible things. When I dared to ask what the law would do to him, he said the law couldn’t touch him; he knew highly placed people everywhere.”

“How can you have continued to believe that?”

“Oh, you people who are so fortunately born, so well placed, so sure the policeman is your friend! Do you remember my home, Ramsay?”

“Very well.”

“An abode of love, was it?”

“Your mother loved you very much.”

“My mother was a madwoman. Why? Ramsay has very fine theories about her; he had a special touch with her. But to me she was a perpetual reproach because I knew that her madness was my fault. My father told me that she had gone mad at the time of my birth, and because of it. I was born in 1908, when all sorts of extraordinary things were still believed about childbirth, especially in places like Deptford. Those were the sunset days of the great legend of motherhood. When your mother bore you, she went down in her anguish to the very gates of Death, in order that you might have life. Nothing that you could do subsequently would work off your birth-debt to her. No degree of obedience, no unfailing love, could put the account straight. Your guilt toward her was a burden you carried all your life. Christ, I can hear Charlie now, standing on the stage of a thousand rotten little vaude houses, giving out that message in a tremulous voice, while the pianist played ‘In a Monastery Garden’—

That was the accepted attitude toward mothers, at that time, in the world I belonged to. Well? Imagine what it was like to grow up with a mother who had to be tied up every morning before my father could go off to his work as an accountant at the planing-mill; he was a parson no longer because her disgrace had made it impossible for him to continue his ministry. What was her disgrace? Something that made my schoolmates shout ‘Hoor!’ when they passed our house. Something that made them call out filthy jokes about hoors when they saw me. So there you have it. A disgraced and ruined home, and for what reason? Because I was born into it. That was the reason.

“That wasn’t all. I said that when Willard used me he whimpered. Sometimes he spoke in his whimpering, and what he said then was, ‘You goddam little hoor!’ And when it was over, more than once he slapped me mercilessly around the head, saying, ‘Hoor! You’re nothing but a hoor!’ It wasn’t really condemnation; it seemed to be part of his fulfilment, his ecstasy. Don’t you understand? ‘Hoor’ was what my mother was, and what had brought our family down because of my birth. ‘Hoor’ was what I was. I was the filthiest thing alive. And I was Nobody. Now do you ask me why I didn’t complain to someone about ill usage? What rights had I? I hadn’t even a conception of what ‘rights’ were.”

“Could this go on without anybody knowing, or at least suspecting?” Lind was pale; he was taking this hard; I had not thought of him as having so much compassionate feeling.

“Of course they knew. But Willard was crafty and they had no proof. They’d have had to be very simple not to know that something was going on, and carnival people weren’t ignorant about perversion. They hinted, and sometimes they were nasty, especially Sonnenfels and Molza. Heinie and Zovene thought it was a great joke. Em Dark had spells of being sorry for me, but Joe didn’t want her to mix herself up in anything that concerned Willard, because Willard was a power in the World of Wonders. He and Charlie were very thick, and if Charlie turned against any of the Talent, there were all kinds of ways he could reduce their importance in the show, and then Gus might get the idea that some new Talent was wanted.

“Furthermore, I was thought to be bad luck by most of the Talent, and show people are greatly involved with the idea of luck. Early in my time on the show I got into awful trouble with Molza because I inadvertently shifted his trunk a few inches in the dressing tent. It was on a bit of board I wanted to use in my writing-lesson with Professor Spencer. Suddenly Molza was on me, storming incomprehensibly, and Spencer had trouble quieting him down. Then Spencer warned me against ever moving a trunk, which is very bad luck indeed; when the handlers bring it in from the baggage wagon they put it where it ought to go, and there it stays until they take it back to the train. I had to go through a complicated ceremony to ward off the bad luck, and Molza fussed all day.

“The idea of the Jonah is strong with show people. A bringer of ill luck can blight a show. Some of the Talent were sure I was a Jonah, which was just a way of focussing their detestation of what I represented, and of Willard, whom they all hated.

“Only the Fat Woman ever spoke to me directly about who and what I was. I forget exactly when it was, but it was fairly early in my experience on the show. It might have been during my second or third year, when I was twelve or thereabouts. One morning before the first trick, and even before the calliope began its toot-up, which was the signal that the World of Wonders and its adjuncts were opening for business, she was sitting on her throne and I was doing something to Abdullah, which I checked carefully every day for possible trouble.

“ ‘Come here, kid,’ she said. ‘I wanta talk to you. And I wanta talk mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches. Them words mean anything to you?’

“ ‘That’s from Numbers,’ I said.

“ ‘Numbers is right; Numbers twelve, verse eight. How do you know that?’

“ ‘I just know it.’

“ ‘No, you don’t just know it. You been taught it. And you been taught it by somebody who cared for your soul’s salvation. Was it your Ma?’

“ ‘My Pa,’ I said.

“ ‘Then did he ever teach you Deuteronomy twenty-three, verse ten?’

“ ‘Is that about uncleanness in the night?’

“ ‘That’s it. You been well taught. Did he ever teach you Genesis thirteen, verse thirteen? That’s one of the unluckiest verses in the Bible.’

“ ‘I don’t remember.’

“ ‘Not that the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly?’

“ ‘I don’t remember.’

“ ‘I bet you remember Leviticus twenty, thirteen.’

“ ‘I don’t remember.’

“ ‘You do so remember! If a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.’

“I said nothing, but I am sure my face gave me away. It was one of Willard’s most terrible threats that if I were caught I should certainly be hanged. But I was mute before the Fat Woman.

“ ‘You know what that means, dontcha?’

“Oh, I knew what it meant. In my time on the show I had already learned a great deal about mankind lying with women, because Charlie talked about little else when he sat on the train with Willard. It was a very dark matter, for all I knew about it was the parody of this act which I was compelled to go through with Willard, and I assumed that the two must be equally horrible. But I clung to the child’s refuge: silence.

“ ‘You know where that leads, dontcha? Right slap to Hell, where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.’

“From me, nothing but silence.

“ ‘You’re in a place where no kid ought to be. I don’t mean the show, naturally. The show contains a lotta what’s good. But that Abdullah! That’s an idol, and that Willard and Charlie encourage the good folks that come in here for an honest show to bow down and worship almost before it, and they won’t be held guiltless. No sirree! Nor you, neither, because you’re the works of an idol and just as guilty as they are.’

“ ‘I just do what I’m told,’ I managed to say.

“ ‘That’s what many a sinner’s said, right up to the time when it’s no good saying it any longer. And those tricks. You’re learning tricks, aren’t you? What do you want tricks for?’

“I had a happy inspiration. I looked her straight in the eye. ‘I count them but dung, that I may win Christ,’ I said.

“ ‘That’s the right way to look at it, boy. Put first things first. If that’s the way you feel, maybe there’s some hope for you still.’ She sat a little forward in her chair, which was all she could manage, and put her podgy hands on her great knees, which were shown off to advantage by her pink rompers. ‘I’ll tell you what I always say,’ she continued; ‘there’s two things you got to be ready to do in this world, and that’s fight for what’s right, and read your Bible every day. I’m a fighter. Always have been. A mighty warrior for the Lord. And you’ve seen me on the train, reading my old Bible that’s so worn and thumbed that people say to me, “that’s a disgrace; why don’t you get yourself a decent copy of the Lord’s Word?” And I reply, “I hang on to this old Bible because it’s seen me through thick and thin, and what looks like dirt to you is the wear of love and reverence on every page.” A clean sword and a dirty Bible! That’s my war-cry in my daily crusade for the Lord: a clean sword and a dirty Bible! Now, you remember that. And you ponder on Leviticus twenty, thirteen, and cut out all that fornication and Sodom abomination before it’s too late, if it isn’t too late already.’

“I got away, and hid myself in Abdullah and thought a lot about what Happy Hannah had said. My thoughts were like those of many a convicted sinner. I was pleased with my cleverness in thinking up that text that had averted her attack. I sniggered that I had even been able to use a forbidden word like ‘dung’ in a sanctified sense. I was frightened by Leviticus twenty, thirteen, and—you see how much a child of the superstitious carnival I had already become—by the double thirteen verse from Genesis. Double thirteen! What could be more ominous! I knew I ought to repent, and I did, but I knew I could not leave off my sin, or Willard might kill me, and not only was I afraid to die, I quite simply didn’t want to die. And such is the resilience of childhood that when the first trick advanced as far as Abdullah, I was pleased to defeat a particularly obnoxious Rube.

“After that I had many a conversation with Hannah in which we matched texts. Was I a hypocrite? I don’t think so. I had simply acquired the habit of adapting myself to my audience. Anyhow, my readiness with the Bible seemed to convince her that I was not utterly damned. I had no such assurance, but I was getting used to living with damnation.

“I had a Bible. I stole it from a hotel. It was one of those sturdy copies the Gideons spread about so freely in hotel rooms. I snitched one at the first opportunity, and as Professor Spencer was teaching me to read very capably I spent many an hour with it. I felt no compunction about the theft, because theft was part of the life I lived. Willard was as good a pickpocket as I have ever known, and one of the marks of his professionalism was that he was not greedy or slapdash in his methods.

“He had an agreement with Charlie. At a point about the middle of the bally, during one of the night shows, Charlie would interrupt his description of the World of Wonders to say, very seriously, Ladies and gentlemen, I think l ought to warn you, on behalf of the management, that pickpockets may be at work at this fair. I give you my assurance that nothing is farther from the spirit of amusement and education represented by our exhibition than the utterly indefensible practice of theft. But as you know, we cannot control everything that may happen in the vicinity of our show. And therefore I urge you, as your friend and as a member of the Wanless organization which holds nothing dearer than its reputation for unimpeachable honesty, that you should keep a sharp eye, and perhaps also a hand, on your wallets. And if there should be any loss—which the Wanless organization most sincerely hopes may not be the case—we beg you to report it to us, and to your excellent local police force, so that the thief may be apprehended if that should prove to be possible. The gaff here was that when he spoke of thieves, Rubes who had a full wallet were likely to put a hand on it. Willard spotted them from the back of the crowd, and during the rest of Charlie’s pious spiel he would gently lift one from a promising Rube. It had to be very quick work. Then, when he had taken the money, he substituted a wad of newspaper of the appropriate size, and either during the bally, or when the Rube came into the tent, he would put the wallet back in place. Rubes generally carried their wallets on the left hip, and as their pants were often a tight fit, a light hand was necessary.

“Willard was never caught. If the Rube came to complain that he had been robbed, Charlie put on a show for him, shook his head sadly, and said that this was one of the problems that confronted honest show folks. Willard never pinched more than one bankroll in a town, and never robbed in the same town two years running. Willard liked best to steal from the local cop, but as cops rarely had much money this was a larcenous foppery which he did not often allow himself.

“Gus never caught on. Gus was a strangely innocent woman in everything that pertained to Charlie and his doings. Of course Charlie got a fifty per cent cut of what Willard stole.

“Willard knew I stole the Bible, and he was angry. Theft, he gave me to understand, was serious business and not for kids. Get caught stealing some piece of junk, and how were you to get back to serious theft again? Never steal anything trivial. This was perhaps the only moral precept Willard ever impressed on me.

“Anyhow, I had a hotel Bible, and I read it constantly, in many another hotel. The carnival business is a fair-weather business, and in winter it could not be pursued and the carnival had to be put to bed.

“That did not mean a cessation of work. The brother who never travelled with the carnival, but who did all our booking, was Jerry Wanless, and he handled the other side of the business, which was vaudeville booking. As soon as the carnival season was over, Willard and Abdullah were booked into countless miserable little vaudeville theatres throughout the American and Canadian Middle West.

“It was an era of vaudeville and there were thousands of acts to fill thousands of spots all over the continent. There was a hierarchy of performance, beginning with the Big Time, which was composed of top acts that played in the big theatres of big cities for a week or more at a stretch. After it came the Small Big Time, which was pretty good and played lesser houses in big and middle-sized cities. Then came the Small Time, which played smaller towns in the sticks and was confined to split weeks. Below that was a rabble of acts that nobody wanted very much, which played for rotten pay in the worst vaude houses. Nobody ever gave it a name, and those who belonged to it always referred to it as Small Time, but it was really Very Small Time. That was where Jerry Wanless booked incompetent dog acts, jugglers who were on the booze, dirty comedians, Single Women without charm or wit, singers with nodes on their vocal chords, conjurors who dropped things, quick-change artistes who looked the same in all their impersonations, and a crowd of carnies like Willard and some of the other Talent from the World of Wonders.

“It was the hardest kind of entertainment work, and we did it in theatres that seemed never to have been swept, for audiences that seemed never to have been washed. We did continuous vaudeville: six acts followed by a ‘feature’ movie, round and round and round from one o’clock in the afternoon until midnight. The audience was invited to come when it liked and stay as long as it liked. In fact, it changed completely almost every show, because there was always an act called a ‘chaser’ which was reckoned to be so awful that even the people who came to our theatres couldn’t stand it. Quite often during my years in vaudeville Zovene the Midget Juggler filled this ignominious spot. Poor old Zovene wasn’t really as awful as he appeared, but he was pretty bad and he was wholly out of fashion. He dressed in a spangled costume that was rather like the outfit worn by Mr Punch—a doublet and tight knee-breeches, with striped stockings and little pumps. He had only one outfit, and he had shed spangles for so long that he looked very shabby. There was still a wistful prettiness about him as he skipped nimbly to ‘Funiculi funicula’ and tossed coloured Indian clubs in the air. But it was a prettiness that would appeal only to an antiquarian of the theatre, and we had no such rarities in our audiences.

“There is rank and precedence everywhere, and here, on the bottom shelf of vaudeville, Willard was a headliner. He had the place of honour, just before Zovene came on to empty the house. The ‘professor’ at the piano would thump out an Oriental theme from Chu Chin Chow and the curtain would rise to reveal Abdullah, bathed in whatever passed for an eerie light in that particular house. Behind Abdullah might be a backdrop representing anything—a room in a palace, a rural glade, or one of those improbable Italian gardens, filled with bulbous balustrades and giant urns, which nobody has ever seen except a scene-painter.

“Willard would enter in evening dress, wearing a cape, which he doffed with an air, and held extended briefly at his right side; when he folded it, a shabby little table with his cards and necessaries had appeared behind it. Applause? Never! The audiences we played to rarely applauded and they expected a magician to be magical. If they were not asleep, or drunk, or pawing the woman in the next seat, they received all Willard’s tricks with cards and coins stolidly.

“They liked it better when he did a little hypnotism, asking for members of the audience to come to the stage to form a ‘committee’ which would watch his act at close quarters, and assure the rest of the audience that there was no deception. He did the conventional hypnotist’s tricks, making men saw wood that wasn’t there, fish in streams that had no existence, and sweat in sunlight that had never penetrated into that dismal theatre. Finally he would cause two of the men to start a fight, which he would stop. The fight always brought applause. Then, when the committee had gone back to their seats, came the topper of his act, Abdullah the Wonder Automaton of the Age. It was the same old business; three members of the audience chose cards, and three times Abdullah chose a higher one. Applause. Real applause, this time. Then the front-drop—the one with advertisements painted on it—came down and poor old Zovene went into his hapless act.

“The only other Talent from the World of Wonders that was booked into the places where we played were Charlie, who did a monologue, and Andro.

“Andro was becoming the worst possible kind of nuisance. He was showing real talent, and to hear Charlie and Willard talk about it you would think he was a traitor to everything that was good and pure in the world of show business. But I was interested in Andro, and watched him rehearse. He never talked to me, and probably regarded me as a company spy. There were such things, and they reported back to Jerry in Chicago what Talent was complaining about money, or slacking on the job, or black-mouthing the management. But Andro was the nearest thing to real Talent I had met with up to that time, and he fascinated me. He was a serious, unrelenting worker and perfectionist.

“Imitators of his act have been common in night-clubs for many years, and I don’t suppose he was the first to do it, but certainly he was the best of the lot. He played in the dark, except for a single spotlight, and he waltzed with himself. That is to say, on his female side he wore a red evening gown, cut very low in the back, and showing lots of his female leg in a red stocking; on his masculine side he wore only half a pair of black satin knee-breeches, a black stocking and a pump with a phoney diamond buckle. When he wrapped himself in his own arms, we saw a beautiful woman in the arms of a half-naked muscular man, whirling rhythmically around the stage in a rapturous embrace. He worked up all sorts of illusions, kissing his own hand, pressing closer what looked like two bodies, and finally whirling offstage for what must undoubtedly be further romance. He was a novelty, and even our audiences were roused from their lethargy by him. He improved every week.

“Willard and Charlie couldn’t stand it. Charlie wrote to Jerry and I heard what he said, for Charlie liked his own prose and read it aloud to Willard. Charlie deplored ‘the unseemly eroticism’ of the act, he said. It would get Jerry a bad name to book such an act into houses that catered to a family trade. Jerry wrote back telling Charlie to shut up and leave the booking business to him. He suggested that Charlie clean up his own act, of which he had received bad reports. Obviously some stool-pigeon had it in for Charlie.

“As a monologist, Charlie possessed little but the self-assurance necessary for the job. Such fellows used to appear before the audience, flashily dressed, with the air of a relative who has made good in the big city and come home to amuse the folks. ‘Friends, just before the show I went into one of your local restaurants and looked down the menoo for something tasty. I said to the waiter, Say, have you got frogs’ legs? No sir, says he, I walk like this because I got corns. You know, one of the troubles today is Prohibition. Any disagreement? No. I didn’t think there would be. But the other day I stepped into a blind pig not a thousand miles from this spot, and I said to the waiter, Bring me a couple of glasses of beer. So he did. So I drank one. Then I got up to leave, and the waiter comes running. Hey, you didn’t pay for those two glasses of beer, he said. That’s all right, I said, I drank one and left the other to settle. Then I went to keep a date with a pretty schoolteacher. She’s the kind of schoolteacher I like best—lots of class and no principle. I get on better with schoolteachers now than I did when I was a kid. My education was completed early. One day in school I put up my hand and the teacher said, What is it, and I said, Please may I leave the room? No, she says, you stay here and fill the inkwells. So I did, and she screamed, and the principal expelled me.…’ And so on, for ten or twelve minutes, and then he would say, ‘But seriously folks—’ and go into a rhapsody about his Irish mother, and a recitation of that tribute to motherhood. Then he would run off the stage quickly, laughing as if he had been enjoying himself too much to hold it in. Sometimes he got a spatter of applause. Now and then there would be dead silence, and some sighing. Vaudeville audiences in those places could give the loudest sighs I have ever heard. Prisoners in the Bastille couldn’t have touched them.

“In the monologues of people like Charlie there were endless jokes about minorities—Jews, Dutch, Squareheads, Negroes, Irish, everybody. I never heard of anybody resenting it. The sharpest jokes about Jews and Negroes were the ones we heard from Jewish and Negro comedians. Nowadays I understand that a comedian doesn’t dare to make a joke about anyone but himself, and if he does too much of that he is likely to be tagged as a masochist, playing for sympathy because he is so mean to himself. The old vaude jokes were sometimes cruel, but they were fairly funny and they were lightning-rods for the ill-will of audiences like ours, who had a plentiful supply of ill-will. We played to people who had not been generously used by life, and I suppose we reflected their state of mind.

“I spent my winters from 1918 until 1928 in vaudeville houses of the humblest kind. As I sat inside Abdullah and peeped out through the spy-hole in his bosom I learned to love these dreadful theatres. However wretched they were, they appealed to me powerfully. It was not until much later in my life that I learned what it was that spoke to me of something fine, even when the language was garbled. It was Liesl, indeed, who showed me that all theatres of that sort—the proscenium theatres that are out of favour with modern architects—took their essential form and style from the ball-rooms of great palaces, which were the theatres of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All the gold, and stucco ornamentation, the cartouches of pan-pipes and tambourines, the masks of Comedy, and the upholstery in garnet plush were democratic stabs at palatial luxury; these were the palaces of the people. Unless they were Catholics, and spent some time each week in a gaudy church, this was the finest place our audiences could enter. It was heart-breaking that they should be so tasteless and run-down and smelly, but their ancestry was a noble one. And of course the great movie and vaudeville houses where Charlie and Willard would never play, or enter except as paying customers, were real palaces of the people, built in what their owners and customers believed to be a regal mode.

“There was nothing regal about the accommodation for the Talent. The dressing-rooms were few and seemed never to be cleaned; when there were windows they were filthy, and high in the walls, and were protected on the outside by wire mesh which caught paper, leaves, and filth; as I remember them now most of the rooms had a dado of deep brown to a height of about four feet from the floor, above which the walls were painted horrible green. There were wash-basins in these rooms, but there was never more than one donniker, usually in a pitiful state of exhaustion, sighing and wheezing the hours away at the end of a corridor. But there was always a star painted on the door of one of these dismal holes, and it was in the star dressing-room that Willard, and Charlie (as a relative of the management) changed their clothes, and where I was tolerated as a dresser and helper.

“It was as a dresser that I travelled, officially. Dresser, and assistant to Willard. It was never admitted that I was the effective part of Abdullah, and we carried a screen which was set up to conceal the back of the automaton, so that the stagehands never saw me climbing into my place. They knew, of course, but they were not supposed to know, and such is the curious loyalty and discipline of even these rotten little theatres that I never heard of anyone telling the secret. Everybody backstage closed ranks against the audience, just as in the carnival we were all in league against the Rubes.

“I spent all day in the theatre, because the only alternative was the room I shared with Willard in some cheap hotel, and he didn’t want me there. My way of life could hardly have been more in contradiction of what is thought to be a proper environment for a growing boy. I saw little sunlight, and I breathed an exhausted and dusty air. My food was bad, because Willard kept me on a very small allowance of money, and as there was nobody to make me eat what I should, I ate what I liked, which was cheap pastry, candy, and soft drinks. I was not a fanatical washer, but as I shared a bed with Willard he sometimes insisted that I take a bath. By every rule of hygiene I should have died of several terrible diseases complicated with malnutrition, but I didn’t. In a special and thoroughly unsuitable way, I was happy. I even contrived to learn one or two things which were invaluable to me.

“Except for his dexterity as a conjuror, pickpocket, and card-sharp, Willard did nothing with his hands. As I told you, Abdullah had some mechanism in his base, and when Willard moved the handle that set it in motion, it was supposed to enable Abdullah to do clever things with cards. The mechanism was a fake only in so far as it related to Abdullah’s skill; otherwise it was genuine enough. But it was always breaking down, and this was embarrassing when we were on show. Early in my time with Willard I explored those wheels and springs and cogs, and very soon discovered how to set them right when they stuck. The secret was very simple; Willard never oiled the wheels, and if somebody else oiled them for him, he allowed the oil to grow thick and dirty so that it clogged the works. Quite soon I took over the care of Abdullah’s fake mechanism, and though I still did not really understand it I was capable enough at maintaining it.

“I suppose I was thirteen or so when a property man at one of the theatres where we played saw me cleaning and oiling these gaffs, and we struck up a conversation. He was interested in Abdullah, and I was nervous about letting him probe the works, fearing that he would find out that they were fakes, but I need not have worried. He knew that at a glance. ‘Funny that anybody’d take the trouble to put this class of work into an old piece of junk like this,’ he said. ‘D’you know who made it?’ I didn’t. ‘Well, I’ll bet anything you like a clock-maker made it,’ said he. ‘Lookit; I’ll show you.’ And he proceeded to give me a lecture that lasted for almost an hour about the essentials of clockwork, which is a wonderful complexity of mechanism that is, at base, quite simple and founded on a handful of principles. I won’t pretend that everybody would have understood him as well as I did, but I am not telling you this story to gain a reputation for modesty. I took to it with all the enthusiasm of a curious boy who had nothing else in the world to occupy his mind. I pestered the property man whenever he had a moment of spare time, demanding more explanation and demonstration. He had been trained as a clock- and watch-maker as a boy—I think he was a Dutchman but I never bothered to learn his name except that it was Henry—and he was a kindly fellow. The third day, which was our last stay in that town, he opened his own watch, took out the movement, and showed me how it could be taken to pieces. I felt as if Heaven had opened. My hands were by this time entirely at my command because of my hundreds of hours of practice in the deeps of Abdullah, and I begged him to let me reassemble the watch. He wouldn’t do that; he prized his watch, and though I showed some promise he was not ready to take risks. But that night, after the last show, he called me to him and handed me a watch—a big, old-fashioned turnip with a German-silver case—and told me to try my luck with that. ‘When you come back this way,’ he said, ‘let’s see how you’ve got on.’

“I got on wonderfully. During the next year I took that watch apart and reassembled it time after time. I tinkered and cleaned and oiled and fiddled with the old-fashioned regulator until it was as accurate a timepiece as its age and essential character allowed. I longed for greater knowledge, and one day when opportunity served I stole a wrist-watch—they were novelties still at that time—and discovered to my astonishment that it was pretty much the same inside as my old turnip, but not such good workmanship. This was the foundation of my mechanical knowledge. I soon had the gaffed works of Abdullah going like a charm, and even introduced a few improvements and replaced some worn parts. I persuaded Willard that the wheels and springs of Abdullah should be on view at all times, and not merely during his preliminary lecture; I put my own control handle inside where I could reach it and cause Abdullah’s wheels to change speed when he was about to do his clever trick. Willard didn’t like it. He disapproved of changes, and he didn’t want me to get ideas above my station.

“However, that is precisely what I did. I began to understand that Willard had serious limitations, and that perhaps his power over me was not so absolute as he pretended. But I was still much too young and frightened to challenge him in anything serious. Like all great revolutions, mine was a long time preparing. Furthermore, the sexual subjection in which I lived still had more power over me than the occasional moments of happiness I enjoyed, and which even the most miserable slaves enjoy.

“From the example of Willard and Charlie I learned a cynicism about mankind which it would be foolish to call deep, but certainly it was complete. Humanity was divided into two groups, the Wise Guys and the Rubes, the Suckers, the Patsys. The only Wise Guys within my range were Willard and Charlie. It was the law of nature that they should prey on the others.

“Their contempt for everyone else was complete, but whereas Charlie was good-natured and pleased with himself when he got the better of a Sucker, Willard merely hated the Sucker. The sourness of his nature did not display itself in harsh judgements or wisecracks; he possessed no wit at all—not even the borrowed wit with which Charlie decked his act and his private conversation. Willard simply thought that everybody but himself was a fool, and his contempt was absolute.

“Charlie wasted a good deal of time, in Willard’s opinion, chasing girls. Charlie fancied himself as a seducer, and waitresses and chambermaids and girls around the theatre were all weighed by him in terms of whether or not he would be able to ‘slip it to them’. That was his term. I don’t think he was especially successful, but he worked at his hobby and I suppose he had a measure of success. ‘Did you notice that kid in the Dancing Hallorans?’ he would ask Willard. ‘She’s got round heels. I can always tell. What do you wanta bet I slip it to her before we get outa here?’ Willard never wanted to bet about that; he liked to bet on certainties.

“The Rubes who wanted to play cards with Abdullah in the vaude houses were of a different stamp from those we met in the carnival world. The towns were bigger than the villages which supported country fairs, and in every one there were a few gamblers. They would turn up at an evening show, and it was not hard to spot them; a gambler looks like anyone else when he is not gambling, but when he takes the cards or the dice in his hands he reveals himself. They were piqued by their defeat at the hands of an automaton and wanted revenge. It was Charlie who sought them out and suggested a friendly game after the theatre was closed.

“The friendly game always began with another attempt to defeat Abdullah, and sometimes money was laid on it. After a sufficient number of defeats—three was usually enough—Willard would say, ‘You’re not going to get anywhere with the Old Boy here, and I don’t want to take your money. But how about a hand or two of Red Dog?’ He always started with Red Dog, but in the end they played whatever game the Suckers chose. There they would sit, in a corner of the stage, with a table if they could find one, or else playing on top of a box, and it would be three or four in the morning before they rose, and Willard and Charlie were always the winners.

“Willard was an accomplished card-sharp. He never bothered with any of the mechanical aids some crooks use—hold-outs, sleeve pockets, and such things—because he thought them crude and likely to be discovered, as they often are. He always played with his coat off and his sleeves rolled up, which had an honest look; he depended on his ability as a shuffler and dealer, and of course he used marked cards. Sometimes the Rubes brought their own cards, which he would not allow them to use with Abdullah—he explained that Abdullah used a sensitized deck—but which he was perfectly willing to play with in the game. If they were marked he knew it at once, and after a game or two he would say, in a quiet but firm voice, that he thought a change of deck would be pleasant, and produced a new deck fresh from a sealed package, calling attention to the fact that the cards were not marked and could not be.

“They did not remain unmarked for long, however. Willard had a left thumbnail which soon put the little bumps in the tops and sides of the cards that told him all he needed to know. He let the Rubes win for an hour or so, and then their luck changed, and sometimes big money came into Willard’s hands at the end of the game. He was the best marker of cards I have ever known except myself. Some gamblers hack their cards so that you could almost see the marks across a room, but Willard had sensitive hands and he nicked them so cleverly that a man with a magnifying glass might have missed it. Nor was he a flashy dealer; he left that to the Rubes who wanted to show off. He dealt rather slowly, but I never saw him deal from the bottom of the deck, although he certainly did so in every game. He and Charlie would sometimes move out of a town with five or six hundred dollars to split between them, Charlie being paid off as the steerer who brought in the Rubes, and Willard as the expert with the cards. Charlie sometimes appeared to be one of the losers in these games, though never so much so that it looked suspicious. The Rubes had a real Rube conviction that show folks and travelling men ought to be better at cards than the opponents they usually met.

“I watched all of this from the interior of Abdullah, because after the initial trials against the automaton it was impossible for me to escape. I was warned against falling asleep, lest I might make some sound that would give away the secret. So, heavy-eyed, but not unaware, I saw everything that was done, saw the greed on the faces of the Rubes, and saw the quiet way in which Willard dealt with the occasional quarrels. And of course I saw how much money changed hands.

“What happened to all that money? Charlie, I knew, was being paid seventy-five dollars a week for his rotten monologues, which would have been good pay if he had not had to spend so much of it on travel; part of Jerry’s arrangement was that all Talent paid for its own tickets from town to town, as well as costs of room and board. Very often we had long hops from one stand to another, and travel was a big expense. And of course Charlie spent a good deal on bootleg liquor and the girls he chased.

“Willard was paid a hundred a week, as a headliner, and because the transport of Abdullah, and myself at half-fare, cost him a good deal. But Willard never showed any sign of having much money, and this puzzled me for two or three years. But then I became aware that Willard had an expensive habit. It was morphine. This of course was before heroin became the vogue.

“Sharing a bedroom with him I could not miss the fact that he gave himself injections of something at least once a day, and he told me that it was a medicine that kept him in trim for his demanding work. Taking dope was a much more secret thing in those days than it has become since, and I had never heard of it, so I paid no attention. But I did notice that Willard was much pleasanter after he had taken his medicine than he was at other times, and it was then that he would sometimes give me a brief lesson in sleight-of-hand.

“Occasionally he would give himself a little extra treat, and then, before he fell asleep, he might talk for a while about what the future held. ‘It’ll be up to Albee,’ he might say; ‘he’ll have to make his decision. I’ll tell him—E.F., you want me at the Palace? Okay, you know my figure. And don’t tell me I have to arrange it with Martin Beck. You talk to Beck. You paid that French dame, that Bernhardt, $7,000 a week at the Palace. I’m not going to up the ante on you. That figure’ll do for me. So any time you want me, you just have to let me know, and I promise you I’ll drop everything else to oblige you—’ Even in my ignorant ears this sounded unlikely. Once I asked him if he would take Abdullah to the Palace, and he gave one of his rare, snorting laughs. ‘When I go to the Palace, I’ll go alone,’ he said; ‘the day I get the high sign from Albee, you’re on your own.’ But he didn’t hear from Albee, or any manager but Jerry Wanless.

“He began to hear fairly often from Jerry, whose stool-pigeons were reporting that Willard was sometimes vague on the stage, mistimed a trick now and then, and even dropped things, which is something a headline magician, even on Jerry’s circuit, was not supposed to do. I thought these misadventures came from not eating enough, and used to urge Willard to get himself a square meal, but he had never cared much for food, and as the years wore on he ate less and less. I thought this was why he so rarely needed to go to the donniker, and why he was so angry with me when I was compelled to do so, and it was not until years later that I learned that constipation is a symptom of Willard’s indulgence. He was usually better in health and sharper on the job when we were with the carnival, because he was in the open air, even though he worked in a tent, but during the winters he was sometimes so dozy—that was Charlie’s word for it—that Charlie was worried.

“Charlie had reason to be worried. He was Willard’s source of supply. Charlie was a wonder at discovering a doctor in every town who could be squared, because he was always on the lookout for abortionists. Not that he needed abortionists very often, but he belonged to a class of man who regards such knowledge as one of the hallmarks of the Wise Guy. An abortionist might also provide what Willard wanted, for a price, and if he didn’t, he knew someone else who would do so. Thus, without, I think, being malignant or even a very serious drug pusher, Charlie was Willard’s supplier, and a large part of Willard’s winnings in the night-long card games stuck to Charlie for expenses and recompense for the risks he took. When Willard began to be dozy, Charlie saw danger to his own income, and he tried to keep Willard’s habit within reason. But Willard was resistant to Charlie’s arguments, and became in time even thinner than he had been when first I saw him, and he was apt to be twitchy if he had not had enough. A twitchy conjuror is useless; his hands tremble, his speech is hard to understand, and he makes disturbing faces. The only way to keep Willard functioning efficiently, both as an entertainer and as a card-sharp, was to see that he had the dose he needed, and if his need increased, that was his business, according to Charlie.

“When Willard felt himself denied, it was I who had to put up with his ill temper and spite. There was only one advantage in the gradual decline of Willard so far as I was concerned, and that was that as morphine became his chief craze, his sexual approaches to me became fewer. Sharing a bed with him when he was restless was nervous work, and I usually preferred to sneak one of his blankets and lie on the floor. If the itching took him, his wriggling and scratching were dreadful, and went on until he was exhausted and fell into a stupor rather than a sleep. Sometimes he had periods of extreme sweating, which were very hard on a man who was already almost a skeleton. More than once I have had to rouse Charlie in the middle of the night, and tell him that Willard had to have some of his medicine, or he might go mad. It was always called ‘his medicine’ by me and by Charlie when he talked to me. For of course I was included in the allembracing cynicism of these two. They assumed that I was stupid, and this was only one of their serious mistakes.

“I too became cynical, with the whole-hearted, all-inclusive vigour of the very young. Why not? Was I not shut off from mankind and any chance to gain an understanding of the diversity of human temperament by the life I led and the people who dominated me? Yet I saw people, and I saw them very greatly to their disadvantage. As I sat inside Abdullah, I saw them without being seen, while they gaped at the curiosities of the World of Wonders. What I saw in most of those faces was contempt and patronage for the show folks, who got an easy living by exploiting their oddities, or doing tricks with snakes or fire. They wanted us; they needed us to mix a little leaven in their doughy lives, but they did not like us. We were outsiders, holiday people, untrustworthy, and the money they spent to see us was foolish money. But how much they revealed as they stared! When the Pharisees saw us they marvelled, but it seemed to me that their inward parts were full of ravening and wickedness. Day after day, year after year, they believed that somehow they could get the better of Abdullah, and their greed and stupidity and cunning drove them on to try their hands at it. Day after day, year after year, I defeated them, and scorned them because they could not grasp the very simple fact that if Abdullah could be defeated, Abdullah would cease to be. Those who tried their luck I despised rather less than those who hung back and let somebody else try his. The change in their loyalty was always the same; they were on the side of the daring one until he was defeated, and then they laughed at him, and sided with the idol.

“In those years I formed a very low idea of crowds. And of all those who pressed near me the ones I hated most, and wished the worst luck, were the young, the lovers, who were free and happy. Sex to me meant terrible bouts with Willard and the grubby seductions of Charlie. I did not believe in the happiness or the innocence or the goodwill of the couples who came to the fair for a good time. My reasoning was simple, and of a very common kind: if I were a hoor and a crook, were not whoredom and dishonesty the foundations on which humanity rested? If I were at the outs with God—and God never ceased to trouble my mind—was anyone else near Him? If they were, they must be cheating. I very soon came to forget that it was I who was the prisoner: I was the one who saw clearly and saw the truth because I saw without being seen. Abdullah was the face I presented to the world, and I knew that Abdullah, the undefeated, was worth no more than I.

“Suppose that Abdullah were to make a mistake? Suppose when Uncle Zeke or Swifty Dealer turned up a ten of clubs, Abdullah were to reply with a three of hearts? What would Willard say? How would he get out of his predicament? He was not a man of quick wit and as the years wore on I understood that his place in the world was even shakier than my own. I could destroy Willard.

“Of course I didn’t do it. The consequences would have been terrible. I was greatly afraid of Willard, afraid of Charlie, of Gus, and most afraid of the world into which such an insubordinate act would certainly throw me. But do we not all play, in our minds, with terrible thoughts which we would never dare to put into action? Could we live without some hidden instincts of revolt, of some protest against our fate in life, however enviable it may seem to those who do not have to bear it? I have been, for twenty years past, admittedly the greatest magician in the world. I have held my place with such style and flourish that I have raised what is really a very petty achievement to the dignity of art. Do you imagine that in my best moments when I have had very distinguished audiences—crowned heads, as all magicians love to boast—that I have not thought fleetingly of producing a full chamber-pot out of a hat, and throwing it into the royal box, just to show that it can be done? But we all hug our chains. There are no free men.

“As I sat in the belly of Abdullah, I thought often of Jonah in the belly of the great fish. Jonah, it seemed to me, had an easy time of it. ‘Out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice’; that was what Jonah said. But I cried out of the belly of hell, and nothing whatever happened. Indeed, the belly of hell grew worse and worse, for the stink of the dwarf gave place to the stink of Cass Fletcher, who was not a clean boy and ate a bad diet; we can all stand a good deal of our own stink, and there are some earthy old sayings which prove it, but after a few years Abdullah was a very nasty coffin, even for me. Jonah was a mere three days in his fish. After three years I was just beginning my sentence. What did Jonah say? ‘When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord.’ So did I. Such was the power of my early training that I never became cynical about the Lord—only about his creation. Sometimes I thought the Lord hated me; sometimes I thought he was punishing me for—for just about everything that had ever happened to me, beginning with my birth; sometimes I thought he had forgotten me, but that thought was blasphemy, and I chased it away as fast as I could. I was an odd boy, I can tell you.

“Odd, but—what is truly remarkable—not consciously unhappy. Unhappiness of the kind that is recognized and examined and brooded over is a spiritual luxury. Certainly it was a luxury beyond my means at that time. The desolation of the spirit in which I lived was in the grain of my life, and to admit its full horror would have destroyed me. Deep in my heart I knew that. Somehow I had to keep from falling into despair. So I seized upon, and treasured, every lightening of the atmosphere, everything that looked like kindness, every joke that interrupted the bleak damnation of the World of Wonders. I was a cynic about the world, but I did not dare to become a cynic about myself. Who does? Certainly not Willard or Charlie. If one becomes a cynic about oneself the next step is the physical suicide which is the other half of that form of self-destruction.

“This was the life I lived, from that ill-fated thirtieth of August in 1918 until ten years had passed. Many things happened, but the pattern was invariable; the World of Wonders from the middle of May until the middle of October, and the rest of the time in the smallest of small-time vaudeville. I ranged over all of central Canada, and just about every town of medium size in the middle of the U.S. west of Chicago. When I say that many things happened I am not talking about events of world consequence; in the carnival and the vaude houses we were isolated from the world, and this was part of the paradox of our existence. We seemed to bring a breath of something larger into country fairs and third-rate theatres, but we were little touched by the changing world. The automobile was linking the villages with towns, and the towns with cities, but we hardly noticed. In the vaude houses we knew about the League of Nations and the changing procession of American Presidents because these things provided the jokes of people like Charlie. The splendour of motherhood was losing some of its gloss, and something called the Jazz Age was upon us. So Charlie dropped mother, and substituted a recitation that was a parody of ‘Gunga Din’, which older vaudevillians were still reciting.

—he concluded, and quite often the audience laughed. As we traipsed around the middle of the Great Republic we hardly noticed that the movies were getting longer and longer, and that Hollywood was planning something that would put us all out of work. Who were the Rubes? I think we were the Rubes.

“My education continued its haphazard progress. I would do almost anything to fight the boredom of my life and the sense of doom that I had to suppress or be destroyed by it. I hung around the property-shops of theatres that possessed such things, and learned a great deal from the old men there who had been compelled, in their day, to produce anything from a workable elephant to a fake diamond ring, against time. I sometimes haunted watch-repair shops, and pestered busy men to know what they were doing; I even picked up their trick of looking through a jeweller’s loupe with one eye while surveying the world fishily through the other. I learned some not very choice Italian from Zovene, some Munich German from Sonny, and rather a lot of pretty good French from a little man who came on the show when Molza’s mouth finally became so painful that he took the extraordinary step of visiting a doctor, and came back to the World of Wonders with a very grey face, and packed up his traps. This Frenchman, whose name was Duparc, was an India Rubber Wonder, a contortionist and an uncommonly cheerful fellow. He became my teacher, so far as I had one; Professor Spencer was becoming queerer and queerer and gave up selling the visiting cards which he wrote with his feet; instead he tried to persuade the public to buy a book he had written and printed at his own expense, about monetary reform. He was, I believe, one of the last of the Single Tax men. In spite of the appearance of Duparc, and the disappearance of Andro, who had left the very small time and was now a top-liner on the Orpheum Circuit, we had all been together in the World of Wonders for too many years. But Gus was too tender-hearted to throw anybody off the show, and Jerry got us cheap, and such is the professional vanity of performers of all kinds that we didn’t notice that the little towns were growing tired of us.

“Duparc taught me French, and I knew I was learning, but I had another teacher from whom I learned without knowing. Almost everything of great value I have learned in life has been taught me by women. The woman who taught me the realities of hypnotism was Mrs Constantinescu, a strange old girl who travelled around with our show for a few years, running a mitt-camp.

“It was not part of the World of Wonders; it was a concession which Jerry rented, as he rented the right to run a hot-dog stand, a Wheel of Fortune, the cat-rack and, of course, the merry-go-round. The mitt-camp was a fortune-telling tent, with a gaudy banner outside with the signs of the zodiac on it, and an announcement that inside Zingara would reveal the Secrets of Fate. Mrs Constantinescu was Zingara, and for all I know she may have been a real gypsy, as she claimed; certainly she was a good fortune-teller. Not that she would ever admit such a thing. Fortune-telling is against the law in just about every part of Canada and the U.S. When her customers came in she would sell them a copy of Zadkiel’s Dream Book for ten cents, and offer a personal interpretation for a further fifteen cents, and a full-scale investigation of your destiny for fifty cents, Zadkiel included. Thus it was possible for her to say that she was simply selling a book, if any nosey cop interfered with her. They very rarely did so, because it was the job of our advance man to square the cops with money, bootleg hooch, or whatever their fancy might be. Her customers never complained. Zingara knew how to deliver the goods.

“She liked me, and that was a novelty. She was sorry for me, and except for Professor Spencer, nobody had been sorry for me in a very long time. But what made her really unusual in the World of Wonders was that she was interested in people; the Talent regarded the public as Rubes, to be exploited, and whether it was Willard’s kind of exploitation or Happy Hannah’s, it came to the same thing. But Zingara never tired of humanity or found it a nuisance. She enjoyed telling fortunes and truly thought that she did good by it.

“ ‘Most people have nobody to talk to,’ she said to me many times. ‘Wives and husbands don’t talk; friends don’t really talk because people don’t want to get mixed up in anything that might cost them something in the end. Nobody truly wants to hear anybody else’s worries and troubles. But everybody has worries and troubles and they don’t cover a big range of subjects. People are much more like one another than they are unlike. Did you ever think of that?

“ ‘Well? So I am somebody to talk to. I’ll talk, and I’ll be gone in the morning, and everything I know goes away with me. I don’t look like the neighbours. I don’t look like the doctor or the preacher, always judging, always tired. I’ve got mystery, and that’s what everybody wants. Maybe they’re church-goers, the people in these little dumps, but what does the church give them? Just sermons from some poor sap who doesn’t understand life any more than they do; they know him, and his salary, and his wife, and they know he’s no great magician. They want to talk, and they want the old mystery, and that’s what I give ’em. A good bargain.’

“Clearly they did want it, for though there was never any crowd around Zingara’s tent she took in twenty to twenty-five dollars a day, and after fifty a week had been paid to Jerry, that left her with more money than most of the Talent in the World of Wonders.

“ ‘You have to learn to look at people. Hardly anybody does that. They stare into people’s faces, but you have to look at the whole person. Fat or thin? Where is the fat? What about the feet? Do the feet show vanity or trouble? Does she stick out her breast or curl her shoulders to hide it? Does he stick out his chest or his stomach? Does he lean forward and peer, or backward and sneer? Hardly anybody stands straight. Knees bent, or shoved back? The bum tight or drooping? In men, look at the lump in the crotch; big or small? How tall is he when he sits down? Don’t miss hands. The face comes last. Happy? Probably not. What kind of unhappy? Worry? Failure? Where are the wrinkles? You have to look good, and quick. And you have to let them see that you’re looking. Most people aren’t used to being looked at except by the doctor, and he’s looking for something special.

“ ‘You take their hand. Hot or cold? Dry or wet? What rings? Has a woman taken off her wedding-ring before she came in? That’s always a sign she’s worried about a man, probably not the husband. A man—big Masonic or K. of C. ring? Take your time. Tell them pretty soon that they’re worried. Of course they’re worried; why else would they come to a mitt-camp at a fair? Feel around, and give them chances to talk; you know as soon as you touch the sore spot. Tell them you have to feel around because you’re trying to find the way into their lives, but they’re not ordinary and so it takes time.

“ ‘Who are they? A young woman—it’s a boy, or two boys, or no boy at all. If she’s a good girl—you know by the hair-do—probably her mother is eating her. Or her father is jealous about boys. An older woman—why isn’t my husband as romantic as I thought he was; is he tired of me; why haven’t I got a husband; is my best friend sincere; when are we going to have more money; my son or daughter is disobedient, or saucy, or wild; have I had all the best that life is going to give me?

“ ‘Suppose it’s a man; lots of men come, usually after dark. He wants money; he’s worried about his girl; his mother is eating him; he’s two-timing and can’t get rid of his mistress; his sex is wearing out and he thinks it’s the end; his business is in trouble; is this all life holds for me?

“ ‘It’s an old person. They’re worried about death; will it come soon and will it hurt? Have I got cancer? Did I invest my money right? Are my grandchildren going to make out? Have I had all life holds for me?

“ ‘Sure you get smart-alecs. Sometimes they tell you most. Flatter them. Laugh at the world with them. Say they can’t be deceived. Warn them not to let their cleverness make them hard, because they’re really very fine people and will make a big mark in the world. Look to see what they are showing to the world, then tell them they are the exact opposite. That works for almost everybody.

“ ‘Flatter everybody. Is it crooked? Most people are starved to death for a kind word. Warn everybody against something, usually something they will be let in for because they are too honest, or too good-natured. Warn against enemies; everybody’s got an enemy. Say things will take a turn for the better soon, because they will; talking to you will make things better because it takes a load off their minds.

“ ‘But not everybody can do it. You have to know how to get people to talk. That’s the big secret. That Willard! He calls himself a hypnotist, so what does he do? He stands up a half-dozen Rubes and says, I’m going to hypnotize you! Then he bugs his eyes and waves his hands and after a while they’re hypnotized. But the real hypnotism is something very different. It’s part kindness and part making them feel they’re perfectly safe with you. That you’re their friend even though they never saw you until a minute ago. You got to lull them, like you’d lull a child. That’s the real art. You mustn’t overdo it. No saying, you’re safe with me, or anything like that. You have to give it out, and they have to take it in, without a lot of direct talk. Of course you look at them hard, but not domineering-hard like vaude hypnotists. You got to look at them as if they was all you had on your mind at the moment, and you couldn’t think of anything you’d rather do. You got to look at them as if it was a long time since you met an equal. But don’t push; don’t shove it. You got to be wide open to them, or else they won’t be wide open to you.’

“Of course I wanted to have my fortune told by Mrs Constantinescu, but it was against the etiquette of carnival. We never dreamed of asking Sonnenfels to lift anything heavy, or treated the Fat Woman as if she was inconvenient company. But of course Zingara knew what I thought, and she teased me about it. ‘You want to know your future, but you don’t want to ask me? That’s right; don’t put your faith in sideshow gypsies. Crooks, the whole lot of them. What do they know about the modern world? They belong to the past. They got no place in North America.’ But one day, when I suppose I was looking blue, she did tell me a few things.

“ ‘You got an easy fortune to tell, boy. You’ll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you’ll never stop climbing. You’ll rise very high and you’ll make people treat you like a king. How do I know? Because you’re dirt right now, and it grinds your gizzard to be dirt. What makes me think you’ve got the stuff to make the world admire you? Because you couldn’t have survived the life you’re leading if you hadn’t got lots of sand. You don’t eat right and you got filthy hair and I’ll bet you’ve been lousy more than once. If it hasn’t killed you, nothing will.’

“Mrs Constantinescu was the only person who had ever talked to me about what Willard was still doing to me. The Fat Woman muttered now and then about ‘abominations’ and Sonny was sometimes very nasty to me, but nobody came right out and said anything unmistakable. But old Zingara said ‘You’re his bumboy, eh? Well, it’s not good, but it could be worse. I’ve known men who liked goats best. It gives you a notion what women got to put up with. The stories I hear! If he calls you “hoor” just think what that means. I’ve known plenty of hoors who made it a ladder to something very good. But if you don’t like it, do something about it. Get your hair cut. Keep yourself clean. Stop wiping your nose on your sleeve. If you got no money, here’s five dollars. Now you start out with a good Turkish bath. Build yourself up. If you gotta be a hoor, be a clean hoor. If you don’t want to be a hoor, don’t look like a lousy bum.’

“At that time, which was the early twenties, a favourite film star was Jackie Coogan; he played charming waifs, often with Charlie Chaplin. But I was a real waif, and sometimes when a Coogan picture was showing in the vaude houses where Willard and I appeared, I was humiliated by how far I fell short of the Coogan ideal.

“I tried a more thorough style of washing, and I got a haircut, a terrible one from a barber who wanted to make everybody look like Rudolph Valentino. I bought some pomade for my hair from him, and the whole World of Wonders laughed at me. But Mrs Constantinescu encouraged me. Later, when I was with Willard on the vaude circuit, we had three days in a town where there was a Turkish bath, and I spent a dollar and a half on one. The masseur worked on me for half an hour, and then said: ‘You know what? I never seen a dirtier guy. Jeeze, there’s still grey stuff comin’ outa ya! Look at these towels! What you do for a living, kid? Sweep chimneys?’ I developed quite a taste for Turkish baths, and stole money regularly from Willard to pay for them. I’m sure he knew I stole, but he preferred that to having me ask him for money. He was growing very careless about money, anyhow.

“I was emboldened to steal enough, over a period of a few weeks, to buy a suit. It was a dreadful suit, God knows, but I had been wearing Willard’s cast-offs, cheaply cut down, and it was a royal robe to me. Willard raised his eyebrows when he saw it, but he said nothing. He was losing his grip on the world, and losing his grip on me, and like many people who are losing their grip, he mistook it for the coming of a new wisdom in himself. But when summer came, and Mrs Constantinescu saw me, she was pleased.

“ ‘You’re doing fine,’ she said. ‘You got to get yourself ready to make a break. This carnival is running downhill. Gus is getting tired. Charlie is getting too big a boy for her to handle. He’s drunk on the show now, and she don’t even bawl him out. Bad luck is coming. How do I know? What else could be coming to a stale tent-show like this? Bad luck. You watch out. Their bad luck will be your good luck, if you’re smart. Keep your eyes open.’

“I mustn’t give the impression that Mrs Constantinescu was always at my elbow uttering gypsy warnings. I didn’t understand much of what she said, and I mistrusted some of what I understood. That business about looking at people as if you were interested in nothing else, for instance; when I tried it, I suppose I looked foolish, and Happy Hannah made a loud fuss in the Pullman one day, declaring that I was trying to learn the Evil Eye, and she knew who was teaching me. Mrs Constantinescu was very high on her list of abominations. She urged me to search Deuteronomy to learn what happened to people who had the Evil Eye; plagues wonderful, and plagues of my seed, even great plagues of long continuance, and sore sickness; that was what was in store for me unless I stopped bugging my eyes at folks who had put on the whole armour of God, that they might stand against the wiles of the Devil. Like every young person, I was abashed at the apparent power of older people to see through me. I suppose I was pitifully transparent, and Happy Hannah’s inveterate malignancy gave her extraordinary penetration. Indeed, I was inclined to think at that time that Mrs Constantinescu was a nut, but she was an interesting nut, and willing to talk. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how much good sense was in what she said.

“Of course she was right about bad luck coming to the show. It happened suddenly.

“Em Dark was a nice woman, and she tried to fight down her growing disappointment with Joe by doing everything she could for him, which included making herself attractive. She was small, and rather plump, and dressed well, making all her clothes. Joe was very proud of her appearance, and I think poor Joe was beginning to be aware that the best thing about him was his wife. So he was completely thrown off base one day, as the Pullman was carrying us from one village to another, to see a horrible caricature of Em walk past him and down the aisle toward Heinie and Sonny, who were laughing their heads off in the door of the smoking-room. It was Rango, dressed in Em’s latest and best, with a cloche hat on his head, and one of Em’s purses in his hairy hand. There is no doubt that Heinie and Sonny meant to get Joe’s goat, and to spatter the image of Em, because that was the kind of men they were, and that was what they thought funny. Joe looked like a man who has seen a ghost. He was working, as he so often was, on one of the throwing knives he sold as part of his act, and I think before he knew what he had done, he threw it, and got Rango right between the shoulders. Rango turned, with a look of dreadful pathos on his face, and fell in the aisle. The whole thing took less than thirty seconds.

“You can imagine the uproar. Heinie rushed to Rango, coddled him in his arms, wept, swore, screamed, and became hysterical. But Rango was dead. Sonny stormed and accused Joe in German; he was the kind of man who jabs with his forefinger when he is angry. Gus and Professor Spencer tried to restore order, but nobody wanted order; the excitement was the most refreshing thing that had happened to the World of Wonders in years. Everybody had a good deal to say on one side or the other, but mostly against Joe. The love between Joe and Em concentrated the malignancy of those unhappy people, but this was the first time they had been given a chance to attack it directly. Happy Hannah was seized with a determination to stop the train. What good that would have done nobody knew, but she felt that a big calamity demanded the uttermost in drama.

“I did not at first understand the full enormity of what Joe had done. To kill Rango was certainly a serious injury to Heinie, whose livelihood he was. To buy and train another orang-outang would be months of work. It was Zovene, busily crossing himself, who put the worst of the horror in words: it is a well-known fact in the carnival and circus world that if anybody kills a monkey, three people will die. Heinie wanted Joe to be first on the list, but Gus held him back; luckily for him, because in a fight Joe could have murdered anybody on the show, not excluding Sonny.

“What do you do with a dead monkey? First of all Rango had to be disentangled from Em Dark’s best outfit, which Em quite understandably didn’t want and threw off the back of the car with Rango’s blood on it. (What do you suppose the finder made of that?) Then the body had to be stowed somewhere, and Heinie would have it nowhere except in his berth, which Rango customarily shared with him. You can’t make a dead monkey look dignified, and Rango was not an impressive corpse. His eyes wouldn’t shut; one stared and the other eyelid drooped, and soon both eyes took on a bluish film; his yellow teeth showed. The Darks felt miserable, because of what Joe had done, and because their love had been held up to mockery in the naked passion and hatred of the hour after Rango’s death. Heinie had not scrupled to say that Rango was a lot more use on the show and a lot better person, even though not human, than a little floozie who just stood up and let a dummkopf of a husband throw knives at her; if Joe was so good at hitting Rango, how come he never hit that bitch of a wife of his? This led to more trouble, and it was Em who had to prevent Joe from battering Heinie. I must say that Heinie took the fullest advantage of the old notion that a man is not responsible for what he does in his grief. He got very drunk that night, and wailed and grieved all up and down the car.

“Indeed, the World of Wonders got drunk. Private bottles appeared from everywhere, and were private no more. Professor Spencer accepted a large drink, and it went a very long way with him, for he was not used to it. Indeed, even Happy Hannah took a drink, and quite shortly everyone wished she hadn’t. It had been her custom for some years to drink a lot of cider vinegar; she said it kept her blood from thickening, to the great danger of her life, and she got away with so much vinegar that she always smelled of it. Her unhappy inspiration was to spike her evening slug of vinegar with a considerable shot of bootleg hooch which Gus pressed on her, and it was hardly down before it was up again. A nauseated Fat Woman is a calamity on a monumental scale, and poor Gus had a bad night of it with Happy Hannah. Only Willard kept out of the general saturnalia; he crept into his berth, injected himself with his favourite solace, and was out of that world of sorrow, over which the corpse of Rango spread an increasing influence.

“From time to time the Talent would gather around Heinie’s berth, and toast the remains. Professor Spencer made a speech, sitting on the edge of the upper berth opposite the one which had become Rango’s bier; in this comfortable position he was able to hold his glass with a device he possessed, attached to one foot. He was drunkenly eloquent, and talked touchingly if incoherently about the link between Man and the Lesser Creation, which was nowhere so strong or so truly understood as in circuses and carnivals; had we not, through the years, come to esteem Rango as one of ourselves, a delightful Child of Nature who spoke not with the tongue of man, but through a thousand merry tricks, which now, alas, had been brought to an untimely end? (‘Rango’d of been twenty next April,’ sobbed Heinie; ‘twenty-two, more likely, but I always dated him from when I bought him.’) Professor Spencer did not want to say that Rango had been struck down by a murderer’s hand. No, that wasn’t the way he looked at it. He would speak of it more as a Cream Passional, brought on by the infinite complexity of human relationships. The Professor rambled on until he lost his audience, who took affairs into their own hands, and drank toasts to Rango as long as the booze held out, with simple cries of ‘Good luck and good-bye, Rango old pal.’

“At last Rango’s wake was over. The Darks had lain unseen in their berth ever since it had been possible to go to bed, but it was half past three when Heinie crawled in beside Rango and wept himself to sleep with the dead monkey in his arms. By now Rango was firmly advanced in rigor mortis and his tail stuck from between the curtains of the berth like a poker. But Heinie’s devotion was much admired; Gus said it warmed the cuckolds of her heart.

“Next morning, at the fairground, our first business was to bury Rango. ‘Let him lay where his life was spent for others,’ was what Heinie said. Professor Spencer, badly hung over, asked God to receive Rango. The Darks came, and brought a few flowers, which Heinie ostentatiously spurned from the grave. All Rango’s possessions—his cups and plates, the umbrella with which he coquetted on the tightrope—were buried with him.

“Was Zingara tactless, or mischievous, when she said loudly, as we broke up to go about our work: ‘Well, how long do we wait to see who’s first?’ The calliope began the toot-up—it was ‘The Poor Butterfly Waltz’—and we got ready for the first trick which, without Rango, put extra work on all of us.

“As the days passed we realized just how much extra work the absence of Rango did mean. There was nothing Heinie could do without him, and five minutes of performance time had somehow to be made up at each trick. Sonnenfels volunteered to add a minute to his act, and so did Duparc; Happy Hannah was always glad to extend the time during which she harassed her audience about religion, and it was simple for Willard to extend the doings of Abdullah for another minute; so it seemed easy. But an additional ten minutes every day was not so easy for Sonnenfels as for the others; as Strong Men go, he was growing old. Less than a fortnight after the death of Rango, at the three o’clock trick, he hoisted his heaviest bar-bell to his knee, then level with his shoulders, then dropped it with a crash and fell forward. There was a doctor on the fairground, and it was less than three minutes before he was with Sonny, but even at that he came too late. Sonny was dead.

“It is much easier to dispose of a Strong Man than it is of a monkey. Sonny had no family, but he had quite a lot of money in a belt he wore at all times, and we were able to bury him in style. He had been a stupid, evil-speaking, bad-tempered man—quite the opposite of the genial giant described by Charlie in his introduction—and no one but Heinie regretted him deeply. But he left another hole in the show, and it was only because Duparc could do a few tricks on the tightrope that the gap could be filled without making the World of Wonders seem skimpy. Heinie mourned Sonny as uproariously as he had mourned Rango, but this time his grief was not so well received by the Talent.

“Sonny’s death was proof positive that the curse of a dead monkey was a fact. Zingara was not slow to point out how short a time had been needed to set the bad luck to work. The Talent turned against Heinie with just as much extravagance of sentimentality as they had shown in pitying him. They were inclined to blame him for Sonny’s death. He was still hanging around the show, and he was still drawing a salary, because he had a contract which said nothing about the loss of his monkey by murder. He was on the booze. Gus and Charlie resented him because he cost money without bringing anything in. His presence was a perpetual reminder of bad luck, and soon he was suffering the cold shoulder that had been my lot when Happy Hannah first decided I was a Jonah. Heinie was a proven Jonah, and to look at him was to be reminded that somebody was next on the list of the three who must atone for Rango. Heinie had ceased to be Talent; his reason for being was buried with Rango. He was an outsider, and in the carnival world an outsider is very far outside indeed.

“We were near the end of the autumn season, and no more deaths occurred before we broke up for winter, some of us to our vaudeville work, and others, like Happy Hannah, to a quiet time in dime museums and Grand Congresses of Strange People in the holiday grounds of the warm south. Zingara was not the only one to remark that poor Gus was looking very yellow. Happy Hannah thought Gus must be moving into The Change, but Zingara said The Change didn’t make you belch a lot, and go off your victuals, like Gus, and whispered a word of fear. When we assembled again the following May, Gus was not with us.

“There the deaths seemed to stop, for those who were less perceptive than Zingara, and myself. But something happened during the winter season that was surely a death of a special kind.

“It was in Dodge City. Willard was fairly reliable during our act, but sometimes during the day he was perceptibly under the influence of morphine, and at other and much worse times he was feeling the want of it. I did not know how prolonged addiction works on the imagination; I was simply glad that his sexual demands on me had dropped almost to nothing. Therefore I did not know what to make of it when he seized me one afternoon in the wings of the vaude house, and accused me violently of sexual unfaithfulness to him. I was ‘at it’, he said, with a member of a Japanese acrobatic troupe on the bill, and he wasn’t going to stand for that. I was a hoor right enough, but by God I wasn’t going to be anybody else’s hoor. He cuffed me, and ordered me to get into Abdullah, and stay there, so he would know where I was; and I wasn’t to get out of the automaton any more, ever. He hadn’t kept me all these years to be cheated by any such scum as I was.

“All of this was said in a low voice, because although he was irrational, he wasn’t so far gone that he wanted the stage manager to drop on him, and perhaps fine him, for making a row in the wings during the show. I was seventeen or eighteen, I suppose—I had long ago forgotten my birthday, which had never been a festival in our house anyhow—and although I was still small I had some spirit, and it all rushed to my head when he struck me over the ear. Abdullah was standing in the wings in the place where the image was stored between shows, and I was beside it. I picked up a stage-brace, and lopped off Abdullah’s head with one strong swipe; then I took after Willard. The stage manager was soon upon us, and we scampered off to the dressing-room, where Willard and I had such a quarrel as neither of us had ever known before. It was short, but decisive, and when it ended Willard was whining to me to show him the kind of consideration he deserved, as one who had been more than a father to me, and taught me an art that would be a fortune to me; I had declared that I was going to leave him then and there.

“I did nothing of the kind. These sudden transformations of character belong to fiction, not to fact, and certainly not to the world of dependence and subservience that I had known for so many years. I was quite simply scared to leave Willard. What could I do without him? I found out very quickly.

“The stage manager had told the manager about the brief outburst in the wings, and the manager came to set us right as to what he would allow in his house. But with the manager came Charlie, who carried great weight because he was the brother of Jerry, who booked the Talent for that house. It was agreed that—just this once—the matter would be overlooked.

“Willard could not be overlooked a couple of hours later, when he was so far down in whatever world his drug took him to that it was impossible for him to go on the stage. There was all the excitement and loud talk you might expect, and the upshot was that I was ordered to take Willard’s place at the next show, and do his act as well as I could, without Abdullah. And that is what I did. I was in a rattle of nerves, because I had never appeared on a stage before, except when I was safely concealed in the body of the automaton. I didn’t know how to address an audience, how to time my tricks, or how to arrange an act. The hypnotism was beyond me, and Abdullah was a wreck. I suppose I must have been dreadful, but somehow I filled in the time, and when I had done all I could the spatter of applause was only a little less encouraging than it had been for Willard for several months past.

“When Willard recovered enough to know what had happened he was furious, but his fury simply persuaded him to seek relief from the pain of a rotten world with the needle. This was what precipitated the crisis that delivered me from Abdullah forever; Jerry was on the long-distance telephone, wrangling with Charlie, and the upshot of Charlie’s best persuasion was that Willard could finish his season if Charlie would keep him in condition to appear on the stage, and that if Willard didn’t appear, I was to do so, and I was to be made to perform a proper, well-planned act. I see now that this was very decent of Jerry, who had all the problems of an agent to trouble him. He must have been fond of Charlie. But it seemed a dreadful sentence at the time. Beginners in the entertainment world are all supposed to be panting for a chance to rush before an audience and prove themselves; I was frightened of Willard, frightened of Jerry, and most frightened of all of failure.

“As is usually the case with understudies I neither failed nor succeeded greatly. In a short time I had worked out a version of The Miser’s Dream that was certainly better than Willard’s, and on Charlie’s strong advice I did it as a mute act. I had very little voice, and what I had was a thin, ugly croak; I had no vocabulary of the kind that a magician needs; my conversation was conducted in illiterate carnival slang, varied now and then with some Biblical turn of speech that had clung to me. So I simply appeared on the stage and did my stuff without sound, while the pianist played whatever he thought appropriate. My greatest difficulty was in learning how to perform slowly enough. In my development of a technique while I was concealed in Abdullah I had become so fast and so slick that my work was incomprehensible; the quickness of the hand should certainly deceive the eye, but not so fast the eye doesn’t realize that it is being deceived.

“Abdullah simply dropped out of use. We lugged him around for a few weeks, but his transport was costly, and as I would not get inside him now he was useless baggage. So one morning, on a railway siding, Charlie and I burned him, while Willard moaned and grieved that we were destroying the greatest thing in his life, and an irreplaceable source of income.

“That was the end of Abdullah, and the happiest moment of my life up to then was when I saw the flames engulf that ugliest of images.

“In their strange way Charlie and Willard were friends, and Charlie thought the moment had come for him to reform Willard. He set about it with his usual enthusiasm, conditioned by a very simple mind. Willard must break the morphine habit. He was to cut the stuff out, at a stroke, and with no thought of looking back. Of course this meant that in a very few days Willard was a raving lunatic, rolling on the floor, the sweating, shrieking victim of crawling demons. Charlie was frightened out of his wits, brought in one of his ambiguous doctors, bought Willard a syringe to replace the one he had dramatically thrown away, and loaded him up to keep him quiet. There was no more talk of abstinence. Charlie kept assuring me that ‘somehow we’ve got to see him through it.’ But there was no way through it. Willard was a gone goose.

“I speak of this lightly now, but at the time I was just as frightened and puzzled as Charlie. I was alarmed to find how dependent on Willard I had become. I had lived with him in dreadful servitude for almost half my life, and now I didn’t know what I should do without him. Furthermore, he had been jolted by his attempt at reform into one of those dramatic changes of character which are so astonishing to people who find themselves responsible for a drug addict. He who had been domineering and ugly became embarrassingly fawning and frightened. His great dread was that Charlie and I would put him in a hospital. All he wanted was to be cared for, and supplied with enough morphine to keep him comfortable. A simple demand, wasn’t it? But somehow we managed it, and one consequence was that I became involved in the nuisance of finding suppliers of the drug, making approaches to them, and paying the substantial prices they demanded.

“By the time it was the season for rejoining the World of Wonders, I had taken over completely the job of filling Willard’s place in the vaude programmes, and Willard was an invalid who had to be dragged from date to date. It was a greatly changed carnival that season. Gus was gone, and the new manager was a tough little carnie who knew how to manage the show, but had none of Gus’s pride in it; he took his tone from Charlie, as the real representative of the owners. Charlie had finally wakened up to the fact that the day of such shows was passing, and that fair dates were harder to get. That was when he decided to add a blow-off to the World of Wonders, and as well to set up in a little business of his own, unknown to Jerry.

“A blow-off is an annex to a carnival show. Sometimes it is well-advertised, if it is a speciality that does not quite fit into the show proper, like Australian stock-whip performers, or a man and a girl who do tricks with lariats, in cowboy costume. But it can also be a part of the show that is very quietly introduced, and that is not necessarily seen during every performance. Charlie’s blow-off was of this latter kind, and the only attractions in it were Zitta and Willard.

“Zitta was now too fat and too ugly to hold a place in the main tent, but in the blow-off, which occupied a smaller tent entered through the World of Wonders, she could still do a dirty act with some snakes, a logical development from the stunts she had formerly done during the Last Trick. But it was Willard’s role that startled me. Charlie had decided to exhibit him as a Wild Man. Willard sat in ragged shirt and pants, his feet bare, in the dust. After he had gone for a few weeks without shaving he looked convincingly wild. His skin had by this time taken on the bluish tinge of the morphine addict, and his eyes, with their habitually contracted pupils, looked terrifying enough to the rural spectators. Charlie’s explanation was that Zitta and Willard came from the Deep South, and were sad evidence of what happened when fine old families, reduced from plantation splendour, became inbred. The suggestion was that Willard was the outcome of a variety of incestuous matings. I doubt if many of the people who came to see Willard believed it, but the appetite for marvels and monsters is insatiable, and he was a good eyeful for the curious. The Shame of the Old South, as the blow-off was called, did pretty good business.

“As for Charlie’s enterprise, he had become a morphine-pusher. ‘Cut out the middle man,’ he said to me by way of explanation; he now bought the stuff from even bigger pushers, and sold it at a substantial price to those who wanted it. The medical profession, he said to me, was intolerably greedy, and he didn’t see why he should always be on the paying end of a profitable trade.

“I am sorry to say that I shared Charlie’s opinion at that time, and for a while I was his junior in the business. I offer no excuses. I had become fond of the things money can buy, and keeping Willard stoked with what he wanted was very costly. So I became a supplier, rather than a purchaser, and did pretty well by it. But I never put all my eggs in one basket. I was still primarily a conjuror, and the World of Wonders, even in its reduced circumstances, paid me sixty-five dollars a week to do my version of The Miser’s Dream for five minutes an hour, twelve hours a day.

“I am going to ask you to excuse me from a detailed account of what followed during the next couple of years. It was inevitable, I suppose, that a simpleton like Charlie, with a greenhorn like myself as his lieutenant, should be caught in one of the periodic crackdowns on drug trafficking. The F.B.I. in the States and the R.C.M.P. in Canada began to pick up some of the small fry like ourselves, as leads to the bigger fish who were more important in the trade. I do not pretend that I behaved particularly well, and the upshot was that Charlie was nabbed and I was not, and that I made my escape by ship with a passport that cost me a great deal of money; I have it still, and it is a beautiful job, but it is not as official as it looks. My problem when the trouble came was what I was going to do with Willard. My solution still surprises me. When every consideration of good sense and self-preservation said that I should ditch him, and let the police find him, I decided instead to take him with me. Explain it as you will, by saying that my conscience overcame my prudence, or that there had grown up a real affection between us during all those years when I was his slave and the secret source of his professional reputation, but I decided that I must take Willard where I was going. Willard was always reminding me that he had never abandoned me when it would have been convenient to do so. So, one pleasant Friday morning in 1927, Jules LeGrand and his invalid uncle, Aristide LeGrand, sailed from Montreal on a C.P.R. ship bound for Cherbourg, and somewhat later Charlie Wanless stood trial in his native state of New York and received a substantial sentence.

“The passports and the steamship passages just about cleaned me out, but I think Willard saved me from being caught. He made a very convincing invalid in his wheelchair, and although I know the ship was watched we had no trouble. But when we arrived in France, what was to be done? Thanks to Duparc I could speak French pretty well, though I could neither read nor write the language. I was a capable conjuror, but the French theatrical world did not have the kind of third-class variety theatre into which I could make my way. However, there were small circuses, and eventually I got a place in Le grand Cirque forain de St Vite after some rough adventures during which I was compelled to exhibit Willard as a geek.

“You know what a geek is, Ramsay, but perhaps these gentlemen are not so well versed in the humbler forms of carnival performance. You let it be known that you have, concealed perhaps in a stable at the back of a village inn, a man who eats strange food. When the crowd comes—and not too much of a crowd, because the police don’t like such shows—you lecture for a while on the yearning of the geek for raw flesh and particularly for blood; you explain that it is something the medical profession knows about, but keeps quiet so that the relatives of people thus afflicted will not be put to shame. Then, if you can get a chicken, you give the geek a chicken, and he growls and gives a display of animal passion, and finally bites the chicken in the neck, and seems to drink some of its blood. If you are reduced to the point where you can’t afford even a superannuated chicken, you find a grass snake or two, or perhaps a rabbit. I was the lecturer, and Willard was the geek. It raised enough money to keep us from starvation, and to keep Willard supplied with just enough of his fancy to prevent a total breakdown.

“You discovered us under the banner of St Vite, Ramsay, when we were travelling in the Tyrol. I suppose it looked very humble to you, but it was a step on an upward path for us. I appeared, you remember, as Faustus LeGrand, the conjuror; I thought Faustus sounded well for a magician; poor old Willard was Le Solitaire des forêts, which was certainly an improvement on geeking and sounds much more elegant than Wild Man.”

“I remember it very well,” said I, “and I remember that you were not at all anxious to recognize me.”

“I wasn’t anxious to see anybody from Canada. I hadn’t seen you for—surely it must have been fourteen years. How was I to know that you had enlisted in the R.C.M.P.—possibly become the pride of the Narcotics Squad? But let that go. I was in a confused state of mind at the time. Do you know what I mean? Something is taking all your attention—something inward—and the outer world is not very real, and you deal with it hastily and badly. I was still battling in my conscience about Willard. By this time I thoroughly hated him. He was an expensive nuisance, yet I couldn’t make up my mind to get rid of him. Besides, he might just have enough energy, prompted by anger, to betray me to the police, even at the cost of his own destruction. Still, his life lay in my power. A smallish extra injection some day would have disposed of him.

“But I couldn’t do it. Or rather—I’ve said so much, and put myself so thoroughly to the bad, that I might just as well go all the way—I didn’t really want to do it because I got a special sort of satisfaction from his presence. This confused old wreck had been my master, my oppressor, the man who let me live hungry and dirty, who used my body shamefully and never let me lift my head above the shame. Now he was utterly mine; he was my thing. That was how it was now between me and Willard. I had the upper hand, and I admit frankly that it gave me a delicious satisfaction to have the upper hand. Willard had just enough sense of reality left to understand without any question of a mistake who was master. Not that I stressed it coarsely. No, no. If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink; for thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head, and the Lord shall reward thee. Indeed so. The Lord rewarded me richly, and it seemed to me the Lord’s face was dark and gleeful as he did so.

“This was Revenge, which we have all been told is a very grave sin, and in our time psychologists and sociologists have made it seem rather lower class, and unevolved, as well. Even the State, which retains so many primitive privileges that are denied to its citizens, shrinks from Revenge. If it catches a criminal the State is eager to make it clear that whatever it chooses to do is for the possible reform of that criminal, or at the very most for his restraint. Who would be so crass as to suggest that the criminal might be used as he has used his fellow man? We don’t admit the power of the Golden Rule when it seems to be working in reverse gear. Do unto others as society says they should do unto you, even when they have done something quite different. We’re all sweetness and light now, in our professions of belief. We have shut our minds against the Christ who cursed the figtree. Revenge—horrors! So there it was: I was revenging myself on Willard, and I’m not going to pretend to you that when he crunched into a grass snake to give a thrill to a stable filled with dull peasants, who despised him for doing it, I didn’t have a warm sense of satisfaction. The Lord was rewarding me. Under the banner of St Vite, the man who had once been Mephistopheles in my life was now just a tremulous, disgusting Wild Man, and if anybody was playing Mephistopheles, the role was mine. Blessed be the name of the Lord, who forgettest not his servant.

“Don’t ask me if I would do it now. I don’t suppose for a moment that I would. But I did it then. Now I am famous and rich and have delightful friends like Liesl and Ramsay; charming people like yourselves come from the B.B.C. to ask me to pretend to be Robert-Houdin. But in those days I was Paul Dempster, who had been made to forget it and take a name from the side of a barn, and be the pathic of a perverted drug-taker. Do you think I have forgotten that even now? I have a lifelong reminder. I am a sufferer from a tiresome little complaint called proctalgia fugax. Do you know it? It is a cramping pain in the anus that wakes you out of a sound sleep and gives you five minutes or so of great unease. For years I thought that Willard, by his nasty use of me, had somehow injured me irreparably. It took a little courage to go to a doctor and find out that it was quite harmless, though I suppose it has some psychogenic origin. It is useless to ask Magnus Eisengrim if he would exert himself to torment a worm like Willard the Wizard; he has the magnanimity that comes so easily to the rich and powerful. But if you had put the question to Faustus LeGrand in 1929 his answer would have been the one I have just given you.

“Yes, gentlemen, it was Revenge, and it was sweet. If I am to be damned for a sin, I expect that will be the one. Shall I tell you the cream of it—or the worst of it, according to your point of view? There came a time when Willard could stand no more. Jaunting around southern France, and the Tyrol and parts of Switzerland, even when he had absorbed the minimum dose I allowed him, was a weariness that he could no longer endure. He wanted to die, and begged me for death. ‘Just gimme a little too much, kid,’ was what he said. He was never eloquent but he managed to put a really heart-breaking yearning into those words. What did I reply? ‘I couldn’t do it, Willard. Really I couldn’t. I’d have your life on my conscience. You know we’re forbidden by every moral law to take life. If I do what you ask, not only am I a murderer, but you are a suicide. Can you face the world to come with that against you?’ Then he would curse and call me every foul name he could think of. And next day it would be the same. I didn’t kill him. Instead I withheld death from him, and it was balm to my spirit to be able to do it.

“Of course it came at last. From various evidence I judge that he was between forty and forty-five, but he looked far worse than men I have seen who were ninety. You know how such people die. He had been blue before, but for a few hours before the end he was a leaden colour, and as his mouth was open it was possible to see that it was almost black inside. His teeth were in very bad condition from geeking, and he looked like one of those terrible drawings by Daumier of a pauper corpse. The pupils of his eyes were barely perceptible. His breath was very faint, but what there was of it stank horribly. Till quite near the end he was begging for a shot of his fancy. The only other person with us was a member of the St Vite troupe, a bearded lady—you remember her, don’t you, Ramsay?—but as Willard spoke no French she didn’t know what he was saying, or if she did she gave no sign. Then a surprising thing happened; a short time before he died his pupils dilated extraordinarily, and that, with his wide-stretched mouth and his colour, gave him the look of a man dying of terror. Indeed, perhaps it was so. Was he aware of the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, where he would join the unbelieving and the abominable, the whore-mongers, sorcerers, and idolaters? I had seen Abdullah go into the fire. Was it so also with Willard?

“But he was dead, and I was free. Had I not been free for years? Free since I struck the head off Abdullah? No; freedom does not come suddenly. One has to grow into it. But now that Willard was dead, I felt truly free, and I hoped that I might throw off some of the unpleasant characteristics I had taken upon myself but not, I hoped, forever taken within myself.

“I finished my season with Le grand Cirque because I did not want to attract attention by leaving as soon as Willard was out of the way. Without his luxury to pay for I was able to give up occasional pocket-picking, and save a little money. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to get to England; I knew there were vaude houses or variety shows of some kind in England, and I thought I could get a job there.

“I remember that I took stock of myself, as cold-bloodedly as I could, but not, I think, unjustly. The Deptford parson’s son, the madwoman’s son, had become a pretty widely experienced young tough; I could pick pockets, I could push dope. I could fight with a broken bottle and I had picked up the French knack of boxing with my feet. I could now speak and read French, and a little German and Italian, and I could speak a terrible patois of English, in which I sounded like the worst of Willard and Charlie combined.

“What was there on the credit side? I was an expert conjuror, and I was beginning to have some inkling of what Mrs Constantinescu meant when she talked about real hypnotism as opposed to the sideshow kind. I was a deft mechanic, could mend anybody’s watch, and humour an old calliope. Although I had been the passive partner in countless acts of sodomy I was still, so far as my own sexual activity was concerned, a virgin, and likely to remain one, because I knew nothing about women other than Fat Ladies, Bearded Ladies, Snake Women, and mitt-camp gypsies; on the whole I liked women, but I had no wish to do to anybody I liked what Willard had done to me—and although of course I knew that the two acts differed I supposed they were pretty much the same to the recipient. I had none of Charlie’s unresting desire to ‘slip it’ to anybody. As you see, I was a muddle of toughness and innocence.

“Of course I didn’t think of myself as innocent. What young man ever does? I thought I was the toughest thing going. A verse from the Book of Psalms kept running through my head that seemed to me to describe my state perfectly. ‘I am become like a bottle in the smoke.’ It’s a verse that puzzles people who think it means a glass bottle, but my father would never have allowed me to be so ignorant as that. It means one of those old wineskins the Hebrews used; it means a goatskin that has been scraped out, and tanned, and blown up, and hung over the fire till it was as hard as a warrior’s boot. That was how I saw myself.

“I was twenty-two, so far as I could reckon, and a bottle that had been thoroughly smoked. What was life going to pour into the bottle? I didn’t know, but I was off to England to find out.

“And you are off to England in the morning gentlemen. Forgive me for holding you so long. I’ll say good-night.”

And for the last time at Sorgenfrei we went through that curious little pageant of bidding our ceremonious good-night to Magnus Eisengrim, who said his farewells with unusual geniality.

Of course the film-makers didn’t go back to their inn. They poured themselves another round of drinks and made themselves comfortable by the fire.

“What I can’t decide,” said Ingestree, “is how much of what we have heard we are to take as fact. It’s the inescapable problem of the autobiography: how much is left out, how much has been genuinely forgotten, how much has been touched up to throw the subject into striking relief? That stuff about Revenge, for instance. Can he have been as horrible as he makes out? He doesn’t seem a cruel man now. We must never forget that he’s a conjuror by profession; his lifelong pose has been demonic. I think he’d like us to believe he played the demon in reality, as well.”

“I take it seriously,” said Lind. “You are English, Roly, and the English have a temperamental pull toward cheerfulness; they don’t really believe in evil. If the Gulf Stream ever deserted their western coast, they’d think differently. Americans are supposed to be the great optimists, but the English are much more truly optimistic. I think he has done all he says he has done. I think he killed his enemy slowly and cruelly. And I think it happens oftener than is supposed by people who habitually avert their minds from evil.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of evil,” said Ingestree. “Glad to look on the dark side any time it seems necessary. But I think people dramatize themselves when they have a chance.”

“Of course you are afraid of evil,” said Lind. “You’d be a fool if you weren’t. People talk about evil frivolously, just as Eisengrim says they do; it’s a way of diminishing its power, or seeming to do so. To talk about evil as if it were just waywardness or naughtiness is very stupid and trivial. Evil is the reality of at least half the world.”

“You’re always philosophizing,” said Kinghovn; “and that’s the dope of the Northern mind. What’s evil? You don’t know. But when you want an atmosphere of evil in your films you tell me and I arrange lowering skies and funny light and find a good camera angle; if I took the same thing in blazing sunlight, from another place, it’d look like comedy.”

“You’re always playing the tough guy, the realist,” said Lind, “and that’s wonderful. I like you for it, Harry. But you’re not an artist except in your limited field, so you leave it to me to decide what’s evil and what’s comedy on the screen. That’s something that goes beyond appearances. Right now we’re talking about a man’s life.”

Liesl had said very little at any of these evening sessions, and I think the film-makers had made the mistake of supposing she had nothing to say. She struck in now.

“Which man’s life are you talking about?” she said. “That’s another of the problems of biography and autobiography, Ingestree, my dear. It can’t be managed except by casting one person as the star of the drama, and arranging everybody else as supporting players. Look at what politicians write about themselves! Churchill and Hitler and all the rest of them seem suddenly to be secondary figures surrounding Sir Numskull Poop, who is always in the limelight. Magnus is no stranger to the egotism of the successful performing artist. Time after time he has reminded us that he is the greatest creature of his kind in the world. He does it without shame. He is not held back by any middle-class notion that it would be nicer if we said it instead of himself. He knows we’re not going to say it, because nothing so destroys the sense of equality on which all pleasant social life depends as perpetual reminders that one member of the company out-ranks all the rest. When it is so, it is considered good manners for the preeminent one to keep quiet about it. Because Magnus has been talking for a couple of hours we have assumed that his emphasis is the only emphasis.

“This business of the death of Willard: if we listen to Magnus we take it for granted that Magnus killed Willard after painfully humiliating him for quite a long time. The tragedy of Willard’s death is the spirit in which Faustus LeGrand regarded it. But isn’t Willard somebody, too? As Willard lay dying, who did he think was the star of the scene? Not Magnus, I’ll bet you. And look at it from God’s point of view, or if that strains you uncomfortably, suppose that you have to make a movie of the life and death of Willard. You need Magnus, but he is not the star. He is the necessary agent who brings Willard to the end. Everybody’s life is his Passion, you know, and you can’t have much of a Passion if you haven’t got a good strong Judas. Somebody has to play Judas, and it is generally acknowledged to be a fine, meaty role. There’s a pride in being cast for it. You recall the Last Supper? Christ said that he would be betrayed by one of those who sat at the table with him. The disciples called out, Lord, is it I? And when Judas asked, Christ said it was he.

“Has it never occurred to you that there might have been just the tiniest feeling in the bosom of one of the lesser apostles—Lebbaeus, for instance, whom tradition represents as a fat man—that Judas was thrusting himself forward again? Christ died on the Cross, and Judas also had his Passion, but can anybody tell me what became of Lebbaeus? Yet he too was a man, and if he had written an autobiography do you suppose that Christ would have had the central position? There seems to have been a Bearded Lady at the deathbed of Willard, and I would like to know her point of view. Being a woman, she probably had too much intelligence to think that she was the central figure, but would she have awarded that role to Willard or to Magnus?”

“Either would do,” said Kinghovn; “but you need a point of focus, you know. Otherwise you get this cinéma vérité stuff, which is sometimes interesting but it damn well isn’t vérité because it fails utterly to convince. It’s like those shots of war you see on TV; you can’t believe anything serious is happening. If you want your film to look like truth you need somebody like Jurgen to decide what truth is, and somebody like me to shoot it so it never occurs to you that it could appear any other way. Of course what you get is not truth, but it’s probably a lot better in more ways than just the cinematic way. If you want the death of Willard shot from the point of view of the Bearded Lady I can certainly do it. And simply because I can do it to order I don’t know how you can pretend it has any special superiority as truth.”

“I suppose it’s part of that human condition silly-clever people are always grizzling about,” said Liesl. “If you want truth, I suppose you must shoot the film from God’s point of view and with God’s point of focus, whatever it may be. And I’ll bet the result won’t look much like cinéma vérité. But I don’t think either you or Jurgen are up to that job, Harry.”

“There is no God,” said Kinghovn; “and I’ve never felt the least necessity to invent one.”

“Probably that is why you have spent your life as a technician; a very fine one, but a technician,” said Lind. “It’s only by inventing a few gods that we get that uneasy sense that something is laughing at us which is one of the paths to faith.”

“Eisengrim talks a lot about God,” said Ingestree, “and God seems still to be a tremendous reality to him. But there’s no question of God laughing. The bottle in the smoke—that’s what he was. I really must read the Bible some time; there are such marvellous goodies in it, just waiting to be picked up. But even these Bibles Designed to be Read as Literature are so bloody thick! I suppose one could browse, but when I browse I never seem to find anything except tiresome stud-book stuff about Aminadab begetting Jonadab and that kind of thing.”

“We’ve only had part of the story,” I said. “Magnus has carefully pointed out to us that he is looking backward on his early life as a man who has changed decisively in the last forty years. What’s his point of focus?”

“Nobody changes so decisively that they lose all sense of the reality of their youth,” Lind said. “The days of childhood are always the most vivid. He has let us think that his childhood made him a villain. So I think we must assume that he is a villain now. A quiescent villain, but not an extinct one.”

“I think that’s a lot of romantic crap,” said Kinghovn. “I’m sick of all the twaddle about childhood. You should have seen me as a child; a flaxen-haired little darling playing in my mother’s garden in Aalborg. Where is he now? Here I sit, a very well-smoked bottle like our friend who has gone to bed. If I met that flaxen-haired child now I would probably give him a good clout over the ear. I’ve never much liked kids. Which was the greater use in the world? That child, so sweet and pure, or me, as I am now, not sweet and damned well not pure?”

“That’s a dangerous question for a man who doesn’t believe in God,” I said, “because there is no answer to it without God. I could answer it for you, if I thought you were open to anything but drink and photography, Harry, but I’m not going to waste precious argument. What I want is to defend Eisengrim against the charge of being a villain, now or at any other time. You must look at his history in the light of myth—”

“Aha, I thought we should get to myth in time,” said Liesl.

“Well, myth explains much that is otherwise inexplicable, just because myth is a boiling down of universal experience. Eisengrim’s story of his childhood and youth is as new to me as it is to you, although I knew him when he was very young—”

“Yes, and you were an influence in making him what he is,” said Liesl.

“Because you taught him conjuring?” said Lind.

“No, no; Ramsay was personally responsible for the premature birth of little Paul Dempster, and responsible also for Paul’s mother’s madness, which marked him so terribly,” said Liesl.

I gaped at her in astonishment. “This is what comes of confiding in women! Not only can they not keep a secret; they re-tell it in an utterly false way! I must put this matter right. It is true that Paul Dempster was born prematurely because his mother was hit on the head by a snowball. It is true that the snowball was meant to hit me, and it hit her instead because I dodged it. It is true that the blow on the head and the birth of the child seemed to precipitate an instability that sometimes amounted to madness. And it is true that I felt some responsibility in the matter. But that was long ago and far away, in a country which you would scarcely recognize as modern Canada. Liesl, I blush for you!”

“What a lovely old-fashioned thing to say, dear Ramsay. Thank you very much for blushing for me, because I long ago lost the trick of blushing for myself. But I didn’t spill the beans about you just to make you jump. I wanted to make the point that you are a figure in this story, too. A very strange figure, just as odd as any in your legends. You precipitated, by a single action—and who could think you guilty just because you jumped out of the way of a snowball (who, that is, but a grim Calvinist like yourself, Ramsay)—everything that we have been hearing from Magnus during these nights past. Are you a precipitating figure in Magnus’s story, or he in yours? Who could comb it all out? But get on with your myth, dear man. I want to hear what lovely twist you will give to what Magnus has told us.”

“It is not a twist, but an explication. Magnus has made it amply clear that he was brought up in a strict, unrelenting form of puritanism. In consequence he still blames himself whenever he can, and because he knows the dramatic quality of the role, he likes to play the villain. But as for his keeping Willard as a sort of hateful pet, in order to jeer at him, I simply don’t believe it was like that at all. What is the mythical element in his story? Simply the very old tale of the man who is in search of his soul, and who must struggle with a monster to secure it. All myth and Christianity—which has never been able to avoid the mythical pull of human experience—are full of similar instances, and people all around us are living out this basic human pattern every day. In the study of hagiography—”

“I knew you’d get to saints before long,” said Liesl.

“In the study of hagiography we have legends and all those splendid pictures of saints who killed dragons, and it doesn’t take much penetration to know that the dragons represent not simply evil in the world but their personal evil, as well. Of course, being saints, they are said to have killed their dragons, but we know that dragons are not killed; at best they are tamed, and kept on the chain. In the pictures we see St George, and my special favourite, St Catherine, triumphing over the horrid beast, who lies with his tongue out, looking as if he thoroughly regretted his mistaken course in life. But I am strongly of the opinion that St George and St Catherine did not kill those dragons, for then they would have been wholly good, and inhuman, and useless and probably great sources of mischief, as one-sided people always are. No, they kept the dragons as pets. Because they were Christians, and because Christianity enjoins us to seek only the good and to have nothing whatever to do with evil, they doubtless rubbed it into the dragons that it was uncommonly broadminded and decent of them to let the dragons live at all. They may even have given the dragon occasional treats: you may breathe a little fire, they might say, or you may leer desirously at that virgin yonder, but if you make one false move you’ll wish you hadn’t. You must be a thoroughly submissive dragon, and remember who’s boss. That’s the Christian way of doing things, and that’s what Magnus did with Willard. He didn’t kill Willard. The essence of Willard lives with him today. But he got the better of Willard. Didn’t you notice how he was laughing as he said good-night?”

“I certainly did,” said Ingestree. “I didn’t understand it at all. It wasn’t just the genial laughter of a man saying farewell to some guests. And certainly he didn’t seem to be laughing at us. I thought perhaps it was relief at having got something off his chest.”

“The laugh troubled me,” said Lind. “I am not good at humour, and I like to be perfectly sure what people are laughing at. Do you know what it was, Ramsay?”

“Yes,” I said, “I think I do. That was Merlin’s Laugh.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Lind.

“If Liesl will allow it, I must be mythological again. The magician Merlin had a strange laugh, and it was heard when nobody else was laughing. He laughed at the beggar who was bewailing his fate as he lay stretched on a dunghill; he laughed at the foppish young man who was making a great fuss about choosing a pair of shoes. He laughed because he knew that deep in the dunghill was a golden cup that would have made the beggar a rich man; he laughed because he knew that the pernickety young man would be stabbed in a quarrel before the soles of his new shoes were soiled. He laughed because he knew what was coming next.”

“And of course our friend knows what is coming next in his own story,” said Lind.

“Are we to take it then that there was some striking reversal of fortune awaiting him when he went to England?” said Ingestree.

“I know no more than you,” said I. “I do not hear Merlin’s Laugh very often, though I think I am more sensitive to its sound than most people. But he spoke of finding out what wine would be poured into the well-smoked bottled that he had become. I don’t know what it was.”

Ingestree was more excited than the rest. “But are we never to know? How can we find out?”

“Surely that’s up to you,” said Lind. “Aren’t you going to ask Eisengrim to come to London to see the rushes of this film we have been making? Isn’t that owing to him? Get him in London and ask him to continue.”

Ingestree looked doubtful. “Can it be squeezed out of the budget?” he said. “The corporation doesn’t like frivolous expenses. Of course I’d love to ask him, but if we run very much over budget, well, it would be as good as my place is worth, as servants used to say in the day when they knew they were servants.”

“Nonsense, you can rig it,” said Kinghovn. But Ingestree still looked like a worried, rather withered baby.

“I know what is worrying Roly,” said Liesl. “He thinks that he could squeeze Eisengrim’s expenses in London out of the B.B.C., but he knows he can’t lug in Ramsay and me, and he’s too nice a fellow to suggest that Magnus travel without us. Isn’t that it, Roly?”

Ingestree looked at her. “Bang on the head,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Liesl. “I’ll pay my own way, and even this grinding old miser Ramsay might unchain a few pennies for himself. Just let us know when to come.”

And so, at last, they went. As we came back into the large, gloomy, nineteenth-century Gothic hall of Sorgenfrei, I said to Liesl: “It was nice of you to think of Lebbaeus, tonight. People don’t mention him very often. But you’re wrong, you know, saying that there is no record of what he did after the Crucifixion. There is a non-canonical Acts of Thaddaeus—Thaddaeus was his surname, you recall—that tells all about him. It didn’t get into the Bible, but it exists.”

“What’s it like?”

“A great tale of marvels. Real Arabian Nights stuff. Puts him dead at the centre of affairs.”

“Didn’t I say so! Just like a man. I’ll bet he wrote it himself.”