World of Wonders

(1)

Because of Jurgen Lind’s slow methods of work, it took longer to get Un Hommage à Robert-Houdin into a final form than we had expected, and it was nearly three months later when Eisengrim, Liesl, and I journeyed to London to see what it looked like. The polite invitation suggested that criticism would be welcome. Eisengrim was the star, and Liesl had put up a good deal of the money for the venture, expecting to get it back over the next two or three years, with substantial gains, but I think we all knew that criticism of Lind would not be gratefully received. A decent pretence was to be kept up, all the same.

We three rarely travelled together; when we did there was always a good deal of haggling about where we should stay. I favoured small, modest hotels; Liesl felt a Swiss nationalist pull toward any hotel, anywhere, that was called the Ritz; Eisengrim wanted to stop at the Savoy.

The suite we occupied at the Savoy was precisely to his taste. It had been decorated in the twenties, and not changed since; the rooms were large, and the walls were in that most dismal of decorators’ colours, “off-white”; below the ceiling of the drawing-room was a nine-inch border of looking-glass; there was an Art Moderne fireplace with an electric fire in it which, when in use, gave off a heavy smell of roasted dust and reminiscences of mice; the furniture was big, and clumsy in the twenties mode. The windows looked out on what I called an alley, and what even Liesl called “a mean street”, but to our amazement Magnus came up with the comment that nobody who called himself a gentleman ever looked out of the window. (What did he know about the fine points of upper-class behaviour?) There was a master bedroom of astonishing size, and Magnus grabbed it for himself, saying that Liesl might have the other bed in it. My room, not quite so large but still a big room, was nearer the bathroom. That chamber was gorgeous in a style long forgotten, with what seemed to be Roman tiling, a sunken bath, and a giantess’s bidet. The daily rate for this grandeur startled me even when I had divided it by three, but I held my peace, and hoped we would not stay long. I am not a stingy man, but I think a decent prudence becoming even in the very rich, like Liesl. Also, I knew enough about the very rich to understand that I should not be let off with a penny less than my full third of whatever was spent.

Magnus was taking his new position as a film star—even though it was only as the star of a television “special”—with a seriousness that seemed to me absurd. The very first night he insisted on having Lind and his gang join us for what he called a snack in our drawing-room. Snack! Solomon and the Queen of Sheba would have been happy with such a snack; when I saw it laid out by the waiters I was so oppressed by the thought of what a third of it would come to that I wondered if I should be able to touch a morsel. But the others ate and drank hugely, and almost as soon as they entered the room began hinting that Magnus should continue the story he had begun at Sorgenfrei. That was what I wanted, too, and as it was plain that I was going to pay dear to hear it, I overcame my scruple and made sure of my share of the feast.

The showing of Hommage had been arranged for the following afternoon at three o’clock. “Good,” said Magnus; “that will allow me the morning to make a little sentimental pilgrimage I have in mind.”

Polite interest from Ingestree, and delicately inquisitive probings as to what this pilgrimage might be.

“Something associated with a turning-point in my life,” said Magnus. “I feel that one should not be neglectful of such observances.”

Was it anything with which the B.B.C. could be helpful, Ingestree asked.

“No, not at all,” said Magnus. “I simply want to lay some flowers at the foot of a monument.”

Surely, Ingestree persisted, Magnus would permit somebody from the publicity department, or from a newspaper, to get a picture of this charming moment? It could be so helpful later, when it was necessary to work up enthusiasm for the film.

Magnus was coy. He would prefer not to make public a private act of gratitude and respect. But he was willing to admit, among friends, that what he meant to do was part of the subtext of the film; an act related to his own career; something he did whenever he found himself in London.

He had now gone so far that it was plain he wanted to be coaxed, and Ingestree coaxed him with a mixture of affection and respect that was worthy of admiration. It was plain to be seen how Ingestree had not merely survived, but thriven, in the desperate world of television. It was not long before Magnus yielded, as I suppose he meant to do from the beginning.

“It’s nothing in the least extraordinary. I’m going to lay a few yellow roses—I hope I can get yellow ones—at the foot of the monument to Henry Irving behind the National Portrait Gallery. You know it. It’s one of the best-known monuments in London. Irving, splendid and gracious, in his academical robes, looking up Charing Cross Road. I promised Milady I’d do that, in her name and my own, if I ever came to the point in life where I could afford such gestures. And I have. And so I shall.”

“Now you really mustn’t tease us any more,” said Ingestree. “We must be told. Who is Milady?”

“Lady Tresize,” said Magnus, and there was no hint of banter in his voice any longer. He was solemn. But Ingestree hooted with laughter.

“My God!” he said, “You don’t mean Old Mother Tresize? Old Nan? You knew her?”

“Better than you apparently did,” said Magnus. “She was a dear friend of mine, and very good to me when I needed a friend. She was one of Irving’s protégées, and in her name I do honour to his memory.”

“Well—I apologize. I apologize profoundly. I never knew her well, though I saw something of her. You’ll admit she was rather a joke as an actress.”

“Perhaps. Though I saw her give some remarkable performances. She didn’t always get parts that were suited to her.”

“I can’t imagine what parts could ever have suited her. It’s usually admitted she held the old man back. Dragged him down, in fact. He really may have been good, once. If he’d had a decent leading lady he mightn’t have ended up as he did.”

“I didn’t know that he had ended up badly. Indeed I know for a fact that he had quite a happy retirement, and was happier because he shared it with her. Are we talking about the same people?”

“I suppose it depends on how one looks at it. I’d better shut up.”

“No, no,” said Lind. “This is just the time to keep on. Who are these people called Tresize? Theatre people, I suppose?”

“Sir John Tresize was one of the most popular romantic actors of his day,” said Magnus.

“But in an absolutely appalling repertoire,” said Ingestree, who seemed unable to hold his tongue. “He went on into the twenties acting stuff that was moth-eaten when Irving died. You should have seen it, Jurgen! The Lyons Mail, The Corsican Brothers, and that interminable Master of Ballantrae; seeing him in repertory was a peep into the dark backward and abysm of time, let me tell you!”

“That’s not true,” said Magnus, and I knew how hot he was by the coolness with which he spoke. “He did some fine things, if you would take the trouble to find out. Some admired Shakespearean performances; a notable Hamlet. The money he made on The Master of Ballantrae he spent on introducing the work of Maeterlinck to England.”

“Maeterlinck’s frightfully old hat,” said Ingestree.

“Now, perhaps. But fashions change. And when Sir John Tresize introduced Maeterlinck to England he was an innovator. Have you no charity toward the past?”

“Not a scrap.”

“I think less of you for it.”

“Oh, come off it! You’re an immensely accomplished actor yourself. You know how the theatre is. Of all the arts it has least patience with bygones.”

“You have said several times that I am a good actor, because I can put up a decent show as Robert-Houdin. I’m glad you think so. Have you ever asked yourself where I learned to do that? One of the things that has given my work a special flavour is that I give my audiences something to look at apart from good tricks. They like the way I act the part of a conjuror. They say it has romantic flair. What they really mean is that it is projected with a skilled nineteenth-century technique. And where did I learn that?”

“Well, obviously you’re going to tell me you learned it from old Tresize. But it isn’t the same, you know. I mean, I remember him. He was lousy.”

“Depends on the point of view, I suppose. Perhaps you had some reason not to like him.”

“Not at all.”

“You said you knew him.”

“Oh, very slightly.”

“Then you missed a chance to know him better. I had that chance and I took it. Probably I needed it more than you did. I took it, and I paid for it, because knowing Sir John didn’t come cheap. And Milady was a great woman. So tomorrow morning—yellow roses.”

“You’ll let us send a photographer?”

“Not after what you’ve been saying. I don’t pretend to an overwhelming delicacy, but I have some. So keep away, please, and if you disobey me I won’t finish the few shots you still have to make on Hommage. Is that clear?”

It was clear, and after lingering a few minutes, just to show that they could not be easily dismissed, Ingestree, and Jurgen Lind, and Kinghovn left us.

(2)

Both Liesl and I went with Magnus the following morning on his sentimental expedition. Liesl wanted to know who Milady was; her curiosity was aroused by the tenderness and reverence with which he spoke of the woman who appeared to Ingestree to be a figure of fun. I was curious about everything concerning him. After all, I had my document to consider. So we both went with him to buy the roses. Liesl protested when he bought an expensive bunch of two dozen. “If you leave them in the street, somebody will steal them,” she said; “the gesture is the same whether it’s one rose or a bundle. Don’t waste your money.” Once again I had occasion to be surprised at the way very rich people think about money; a costly apartment at the Savoy, and a haggle about a few roses! But Eisengrim was not to be changed from his purpose. “Nobody will steal them, and you’ll find out why,” said he. So off we went on foot along the Strand, because Magnus felt that taking a taxi would lessen the solemnity of his pilgrimage.

The Irving monument stands in quite a large piece of open pavement; near by a pavement artist was chalking busily on the flagstones. Beside the monument itself a street performer was unpacking some ropes and chains, and a woman was helping him to get ready for his performance. Magnus took off his hat, laid the flowers at the foot of the statue, arranged them to suit himself, stepped back, looked up at the statue, smiled, and said something under his breath. Then he said to the street performer: “Going to do a few escapes, are you?”

“Right you are,” said the man.

“Will you be here long?”

“Long as anybody wants to watch me.”

“I’d like you to keep an eye on those flowers. They’re for the Guvnor, you see. Here’s a pound. I’ll be back before lunch, and if they’re still there, and if you’re still here, I’ll have another pound for you. I want them to stay where they are for at least three hours; after that anybody who wants them can have them. Now let’s see your show.”

The busker and the woman went to work. She rattled a tambourine, and he shook the chains and defied the passers-by to tie him up so that he couldn’t escape. A few loungers gathered, but none of them seemed anxious to oblige the escape-artist by tying him up. At last Magnus did it himself.

I didn’t know what he had in mind, and I wondered if he meant to humiliate the poor fellow by tying him up and leaving him to struggle; after all, Magnus had been a distinguished escape-artist himself in his time, and as he was a man of scornful mind such a trick would not have been outside his range. He made a thorough job of it, and before he had done there was a crowd of fifteen or twenty people gathered to see the fun. It is not every day that one of these shabby street performers has a beautifully dressed and distinguished person as an assistant. I saw a policeman halt at the back of the crowd, and began to worry. My philosophical indifference to human suffering is not as complete as I wish it were. If Magnus tied up the poor wretch and left him, what should I do? Interfere, or run away? Or would I simply hang around and see what happened?

At last Magnus was contented with his work, and stepped away from the busker, who was now a bundle of chains and ropes. The man dropped to the ground, writhed and grovelled for a few seconds, worked himself up on his knees, bent his head and tried to get at one of the ropes with his teeth, and in doing so fell forward and seemed to hurt himself badly. The crowd murmured sympathetically, and pressed a bit nearer. Then, suddenly, the busker gave a triumphant cry, and leapt to his feet, as chains and ropes fell in a tangle on the pavement.

Magnus led the applause. The woman passed the tattered cap that served as a collection bag. Some copper and a few silver coins were dropped in it. Liesl contributed a fifty-penny piece, and I found another. It was a good round for the busker; astonishingly good, I imagine, for the first show of the day.

When the crowd had dispersed, the busker said softly to Magnus: “Pro, ain’t yer?”

“Yes, I’m a pro.”

“Knew it. You couldn’t of done them ties without bein’ a pro. You playin’ in town?”

“No, but I have done. Years ago, I used to give a show right where we’re standing now.”

“You did! Christ, you’ve done well.”

“Yes. And I started here under the Guvnor’s statue. You’ll keep an eye on his flowers, won’t you?”

“Too right I will! And thanks!”

We walked away, Magnus smiling and big with mystery. He knew how much we wanted to know what lay behind what we had just seen, and was determined to make us beg. Liesl, who has less pride about such things than I, spoke before we had passed the pornography shops into Leicester Square.

“Come along, Magnus. Enough of this. We want to know and you want to tell. I can feel it. When did you ever perform in the London streets?”

“After I got away from France, and the travelling circus, and the shadow of Willard. I came to London, which was dangerous with the kind of passport I carried, but I managed it. What was I to do? You don’t get jobs in variety theatres just by hanging around the stage doors. It’s a matter of agents, and having press cuttings, and being known to somebody. And I was down and out. I hadn’t a penny. No, that’s not quite true; I had forty-two shillings and that was just enough to buy a few old ropes and chains. So I took a look around the West End, and soon found out that the choice position for open-air shows was the place we’ve just visited. But even that wasn’t free; street-artists of long standing had first call on the space. I tried to do my little act when they weren’t busy, and three of them took me up an alley and convinced me that I had been tactless. Nevertheless, with a black eye I managed to show them a little magic that persuaded one of them to let me add something to his own show, and for that I got a very small daily sum. Still, I was seen, and it wasn’t more than a few days before I was taken to Milady, and after that everything was glorious.”

“Why should Milady want to see you? Really, Magnus, you are intolerable. You are going to tell us, so why don’t you do it without making me corkscrew every word out of you?”

“If I tell you now, in the street, don’t you think I am being rather unfair to Lind? He wants to know too, you know.”

“Last night you virtually ordered Lind and his friends out of the hotel. Do you mean you are going to change your mind about that?”

“I was annoyed with Ingestree.”

“Yes, I know that. But what’s so bad about Ingestree? He doesn’t agree with you about Milady. Is the man to have no mind of his own? Must everybody agree with you? Ingestree isn’t a bad fellow.”

“Not a bad fellow. A fool perhaps.”

“Since when is it a criminal offence to be a fool? You’re rather a fool yourself, especially about women. I insist on knowing whatever there is to know about Milady.”

“And so you shall, my dear Liesl. So you shall. You have only to wait until this evening. I guarantee that when we go back to the Savoy we shall find that Lind has called, that Ingestree is ready to apologize, and that we are all three asked to dinner tonight so that I may very graciously go on with my subtext to Hommage. Which I am perfectly willing to do. And Ramsay will be pleased, because the free dinner he gets tonight will somewhat offset the cost of the dinner he had to share in giving last night. You see, all things work together for good to them that love God.”

“Sometimes I wish I were a professing Christian, so that I would have the right to tell you how much your blasphemous quoting of Scripture annoys me. And you mustn’t torment Ramsay. He hasn’t had your advantages. He’s never been really poor, and that is a terrible drawback to a man.—Will you promise to be decent to Ingestree?”

An unwonted sound: Eisengrim laughed aloud: Merlin’s laugh, if ever I heard it.

(3)

Magnus was having one of his tiresome spells, during which he was right about everything. We were indeed asked to dine as Lind’s guests after the showing of Hommage. What we saw in the poky little viewing-room was a version of the film that was almost complete; everything that was to be cut out had been removed, but a few shots—close-ups of Magnus—had still to be taken and incorporated. It was a source of astonishment, for I saw nothing that I had not seen while it was being filmed; but the skill of the cutting, and the juxtapositions, and the varieties of pace that had been achieved, were marvels to me. Clearly much of what had been done owed its power to the art of Harry Kinghovn, but the unmistakable impress of Lind’s mind was on it, as well. His films possessed a weight of implication—in St Paul’s phrase, “the evidence of things not seen”—that was entirely his own.

The greatest surprise was the way in which Eisengrim emerged. His unique skill as a conjuror was there, of course, but somehow magic is not so impressive on the screen as it is in direct experience, just as he had said himself at Sorgenfrei. No, it was as an actor that he seemed like a new person. I suppose I had grown used to him over the years, and had seen too much of his backstage personality, which was that of the theatre martinet, the watchful, scolding, impatient star of the Soirée of Illusions. The distinguished, high-bred, romantic figure I saw on the screen was someone I felt I did not know. The waif I had known when we were boys in Deptford, the carnival charlatan I had seen in Austria as Faustus LeGrand in Le grand Cirque forain de St Vite, the successful stage performer, and the amusing but testy and incalculable permanent guest at Sorgenfrei could not be reconciled with this fascinating creature, and it couldn’t all be the art of Lind and Kinghovn. I must know more. My document demanded it.

Liesl, too, was impressed, and I am sure she was as curious as I. So far as I knew, she had at some time met Magnus, admired him, befriended him, and financed him. They had toured the world together with their Soirée of Illusions, combining his art as a public performer with her skill as a technician, a contriver of magical apparatus, and her artistic taste, which was far beyond his own. If he was indeed the greatest conjuror of his time, or of any time, she was responsible for at least half of whatever had made him so. Moreover, she had educated him, in so far as he was formally educated, and had transformed him from a tough little carnie into someone who could put up a show of cultivation. Or was that the whole truth? She seemed as surprised by his new persona on the screen as I was.

This was clearly one of Magnus’s great days. The film people were delighted with him, as entrepreneurs always are with anybody who looks as if he could draw in money, and at dinner he was clearly the guest of honour.

We went to the Café Royal, where a table had been reserved in the old room with the red plush benches against the wall, and the lush girls with naked breasts holding up the ceiling, and the flattering looking-glasses. We ate and drank like people who were darlings of Fortune. Ingestree was on his best behaviour, and it was not until we had arrived at brandy and cigars that he said—

“I passed the Irving statue this afternoon. Quite by chance. Nothing premeditated. But I saw your flowers. And I want to repeat how sorry I am to have spoken slightingly about your old friend Lady Tresize. May we toast her now?”

“Here’s to Milady,” said Magnus, and emptied his glass.

“Why was she called that?” said Liesl. “It sounds terribly pretentious if she was simply the wife of a theatrical knight. Or it sounds frowsily romantic, like a Dumas novel. Or it sounds as if you were making fun of her. Or was she a cult figure in the theatre? The Madonna of the Greasepaint? You might tell us, Magnus.”

“I suppose it was all of those things. Some people thought her pretentious, and some thought the romance that surrounded her was frowsy, and people always made a certain amount of fun of her, and she was a cult figure as well. In addition she was a wonderfully kind, wise, courageous person who was not easy to understand. I’ve been thinking a lot about her today. I told you that I was a busker beside the Irving statue when I came to London. It was there Holroyd picked me up and took me to Milady. She decided I should have a job, and made Sir John give me one, which he didn’t want to do.”

“Magnus, do please, I implore you, stop being mysterious. You know very well you mean to tell us all about it. You want to, and furthermore, you must. Do it to please me.” Liesl was laying herself out to be irresistible, and I have never known a woman who was better at the work.

“Do it for the sake of the subtext,” said Ingestree, who was also making himself charming, like a naughty boy who has been forgiven.

“All right. So I shall. My show under the shadow of Irving was not extensive. The buskers I was working with wouldn’t give me much of a chance, but they allowed me to draw a crowd by making some showy passes with cards. It was stuff I had learned long ago with Willard—shooting a deck into the air and making it slide back into my hand like a beautiful waterfall, and that sort of thing. It can be done with a deck that is mounted on a rubber string, but I could do it with any deck. It’s simply a matter of hours of practice, and confidence that you can do it. I don’t call it conjuring. More like juggling. But it makes people gape.

“One day, a week or two after I had begun in this underpaid, miserable work, I noticed a man hanging around at the back of the crowd, watching me very closely. He wore a long overcoat, though it wasn’t a day for such a coat, and he had a pipe stuck in his mouth as if it had grown there. He worried me because, as you know, my passport wasn’t all it should have been. I thought he might be a detective. So as soon as I had done my short trick, I made for a near-by alley. He was right behind me. ‘Hi!’ he shouted, ‘I want a word with you.’ There was no getting away, so I faced him. ‘Are you interested in a better job than that?’ he asked. I said I was. ‘Can you do a bit of juggling?’ said he. Yes, I could do juggling, though I wouldn’t call myself a juggler. ‘Any experience walking a tightrope?’ Because of the work I had done with Duparc I was able to say I could. ‘Then you come to this address tomorrow morning at twelve,’ said he, and gave me a card on which was his name—James Holroyd—and he had scribbled a direction on it.

“Of course I was there, next day at noon. The place was a pub called The Crown and Two Chairmen, and when I asked for Mr Holroyd I was directed upstairs to a big room, in which there were a few people. Holroyd was one of them, and he nodded to me to wait.

“Queer room. Just an empty space, with some chairs piled in a corner, and a few odds and ends of pillars, and obelisks and altar-like boxes, which I knew were Masonic paraphernalia, also stacked against a wall. It was one of those rooms common enough in London, where lodges met, and little clubs had their gatherings, and which theatrical people rented by the day for rehearsal space.

“The people who were there were grouped around a man who was plainly the boss. He was short, but by God he had presence; you would have noticed him anywhere. He wore a hat, but not as I had ever seen a hat worn before. Willard and Charlie were hat men, but somehow their hats always looked sharp and dishonest—you know, too much down on one side? Holroyd wore a hat, a hard hat of the kind that Winston Churchill made famous later; a sort of top hat that had lost courage and hadn’t grown the last three inches, or acquired any gloss. As I came to know Holroyd I sometimes wondered if he had been born in that hat and overcoat, because I hardly ever saw him without both. But this little man’s hat looked as if it should have had a plume in it. It was a perfectly ordinary, expensive felt hat, but he gave it an air of costume, and when he looked from under the brim you felt he was sizing up your costume, too. And that was what he was doing. He took a look at me and said, in a kind of mumble, ‘That’s your find, eh? Doesn’t look much, does he, mph? Not quite as if he might pass for your humble, what? Eh, Holroyd? Mph?’

“ ‘That’s for you to say, of course,’ said Holroyd.

“ ‘Then I say no. Must look again. Must be something better than that, eh?’

“ ‘Won’t you see him do a few tricks?’

“ ‘Need I? Surely the appearance is everything, mph?’

“ ‘Not everything, Guvnor. The tricks are pretty important. At least the way you’ve laid it out makes the tricks very important. And the tightrope, too. He’d look quite different dressed up.’

“ ‘Of course. But I don’t think he’ll do. Look again, eh, like a good chap?’

“ ‘Whatever you say, Guvnor. But I’d have bet money on this one. Let him flash a trick or two, just to see.’

“The little man wasn’t anxious to waste time on me, but I didn’t mean to waste time either. I threw a couple of decks in the air, made them do a fancy twirl, and let them slip back into my hands. Then I twirled on my toes, and made the decks do it again, in a spiral, which looks harder than it is. There was clapping from a corner—the kind of soft clapping women produce by clapping in gloves they don’t want to split. I bowed toward the corner, and that was the first time I saw Milady.

“It was a time when women’s clothes were plain; the line of the silhouette was supposed to be simple. There was nothing plain or simple about Milady’s clothes. Drapes and swags and swishes, and scraps of fur everywhere, and the colours and fabrics were more like upholstery than garments. She had a hat, like a witch’s, but with more style to it, and some soft stuff wrapped around the crown dangled over the brim to one shoulder. She was heavily made up—really she wore an extraordinary amount of make-up—in colours that were too emphatic for daylight. But neither she nor the little man seemed to be meant for daylight; I didn’t realize it at the time, but they always looked as if they were ready to step on the stage. Their clothes, and manner and demeanour all spoke of the stage.”

“The Crummles touch,” said Ingestree. “They were about the last to have it.”

“I don’t know who Crummles was,” said Magnus. “Ramsay will tell me later. But I must make it clear that these two didn’t look in the least funny to me. Odd, certainly, and unlike anything I had ever seen, but not funny. In fact, ten years later I still didn’t think them funny, though I know lots of people laughed. But those people didn’t know them as I did. And as I’ve told you I first saw Milady when she was applauding my tricks with the cards, so she looked very good to me.

“ ‘Let him show what he can do, Jack,’ she said. And then to me, with great politeness, ‘You do juggling, don’t you? Let us see you juggle.’

“I had nothing to juggle with, but I didn’t mean to be beaten. And I wanted to prove to the lady that I was worth her kindness. So with speed and I hope a reasonable amount of politeness I took her umbrella, and the little man’s wonderful hat, and Holroyd’s hat and the soft cap I was wearing myself, and balanced the brolly on my nose and juggled the three hats in an arch over it. Not easy, let me tell you, for all the hats were of different sizes and weights, and Holroyd’s hefted like iron. But I did it, and the lady clapped again. Then she whispered to the little man she called Jack.

“ ‘I see what you mean, Nan,’ he said, ‘but there must be some sort of resemblance. I hope I’m not vain, but I can’t persuade myself we can manage a resemblance, mphm?’

“I put on a little more steam. I did some clown juggling, pretending every time the circle went round that I was about to drop Holroyd’s hat, and recovering it with a swoop, and at last keeping that one in the air with my right foot. That made the little man laugh, and I knew I had had a lucky inspiration. Obviously Holroyd’s hat was rather a joke among them. ‘Come here, m’boy,’ said the boss. ‘Stand back to back with me.’ So I did, and we were exactly of a height. ‘Extraordinary,’ said the boss; ‘I’d have sworn he was shorter.’

“ ‘He’s a little shorter, Guvnor,’ said Holroyd, ‘but we can put him in lifts.’

“ ‘Aha, but what will you do about the face?’ said the boss. ‘Can you get away with the face?’

“ ‘I’ll show him what to do about the face,’ said the lady. ‘Give him his chance, Jack. I’m sure he’s lucky for us and I’m never wrong. After all, where did Holroyd find him?’

“So I got the job, though I hadn’t any idea what the job was, and nobody thought to tell me. But the boss said I was to come to rehearsal the following Monday, which was five days away. In the meantime, he said, I was to give up my present job, and keep out of sight. I would have accepted that, but again the lady interfered.

“ ‘You can’t ask him to do that, Jack,’ she said. ‘What’s he to live on in the meantime?’

“ ‘Holroyd will attend to it,’ said the little man. Then he offered the lady his arm, and put his hat back on his head (after Holroyd had dusted it, quite needlessly) and they swept out of that grubby assembly room in the Crown and Two Chairmen as if it were a palace.

“I said to Holroyd, ‘What’s this about lifts? I’m as tall as he is; perhaps a bit taller.’

“ ‘If you want this job, m’boy, you’ll be shorter and stay shorter,’ said Holroyd. Then he gave me thirty shillings, explaining that it was an advance on salary. He also asked for a pledge in return, just so that I wouldn’t make off with the thirty shillings; I gave him my old silver watch. I respected Holroyd for that; he belonged to my world. It was clear that it was time for me to go, but I still didn’t know what the job was, or what I was letting myself in for. That was obviously the style around there. Nobody explained anything. You were supposed to know.

“So, not being a fool, I set to work to find out. I discovered downstairs in the bar that Sir John Tresize and his company were rehearsing above, which left me not much wiser, except that it was some sort of theatricals. But when I went back to the buskers and told them I was quitting, and why, they were impressed, but not pleased.

“ ‘You gone legit on us,’ said the boss of the group, who was an escape-man, like the one we saw this morning. ‘You and your Sir John-bloody-Tresize. Amlet and Oh Thello and the like of them. If you want my opinion, you’ve got above yourself, and when they find out, don’t come whinin’ back to me, that’s all. Don’t come whinin’ bloody back here.’ Then he kicked me pretty hard in the backside, and that was the end of my engagement as an open-air entertainer.

“I didn’t bother to resent the kick. I had a feeling something important had happened to me, and I celebrated by taking a vacation. Living for five days on thirty shillings was luxury to me at that time. I thought of augmenting my money by doing a bit of pocket-picking, but I rejected the idea for a reason that will show you what had happened to me; I thought such behaviour would be unsuitable to one who had been given a job because of the interference of a richly-dressed lady with an eye for talent.

“The image of the woman called Nan by Sir John Tresize dominated my mind. Her umbrella, as I balanced it on my nose, gave forth an expensive smell of perfume, and I could recall it even in the petrol stink of London streets. I was like a boy who is in love for the first time. But I wasn’t a boy; it was 1930, so I must have been twenty-two, and I was a thorough young tough—side-show performer, vaudeville rat, pickpocket, dope-pusher, a forger in a modest way, and for a good many years the despised utensil of an arse-bandit. Women, to me, were members of a race who were either old and tougher than the men who work in carnivals, or the flabby, pallid strumpets I had occasionally seen in Charlie’s room when I went to rouse him to come to the aid of Willard. But so far as any sexual association with a woman went, I was a virgin. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I was a hoor from the back and a virgin from the front, and so far as romance was concerned I was as pure as the lily in the dell. And there I was, over my ears in love with Lady Tresize, professionally known as Miss Annette de la Borderie, who cannot have been far off sixty and was, as Ingestree is eager to tell you, not a beauty. But she had been kind to me and said she would show me what to do about my face—whatever that meant—and I loved her.

“What do I mean? That I was constantly aware of her, and what I believed to be her spirit transfigured everything around me. I held wonderful mental conversations with her, and although they didn’t make much sense they gave me a new attitude toward myself. I told you I put aside any notion of picking a pocket in order to refresh my exchequer because of her. What was stranger was that I felt in quite a different way about the poor slut that helped the escape-artist who kicked me; he was rough with her, I knew, and I pitied her, though I had taken no notice of her before then. It was the dawn of chivalry in me, coming rather late in life. Most men, unless they are assembled on the lowest, turnip-like principle, have a spell of chivalry at some time in their lives. Usually it comes at about sixteen. I understand boys quite often wish they had a chance to die for the one they love, to show that their devotion stops at nothing. Dying wasn’t my line; a good religious start in life had given me too much respect for death to permit any extravagance of that sort. But I wanted to live for Lady Tresize, and I was overjoyed by the notion that, if I could do whatever Holroyd and Sir John wanted, I might be able to manage it.

“It wasn’t lunacy. She had that effect, in lesser measure, on a lot of people, as I found out when I joined the Tresize Company. Everybody called Sir John ‘Guvnor’, because that was his style; lots of heads of theatrical companies were called Guvnor. But they called Lady Tresize ‘Milady’. It would have been reasonable enough for her maid to do that, but everybody did it, and it was respectful, and affectionately mocking at the same time. She understood both the affection and the mockery, because Milady was no fool.

“Five days is a long time to be cut off from Paradise, and I had nothing to occupy my time. I suppose I walked close to a hundred miles through the London streets. What else was there to do? I bummed around the Victoria and Albert Museum quite a lot, looking at the clocks and watches, but I wasn’t dressed for it and I suppose a young tough who hung around for hours made the guards nervous. I looked like a ruffian, and I suppose I was one, and I held no grudge when I was politely warned away. I saw a few free sights—churches and the like—but they meant little to me. I liked the streets best, so I walked and stared, and slept in a Salvation Army hostel for indigents. But I was no indigent; I was rich in feeling, and that was a luxury I had rarely known.

“As the Monday drew near when I was to present myself again I worried a lot about my clothes. All I owned was what I stood up in, and my very poor things were a good protective covering in the streets, where I looked like a thousand others, but they weren’t what I needed for a great step upward in the theatrical world. There was nothing to be done, and with my experience I knew my best plan was to present an appearance of honest poverty, so I spent some money on a bath, and washed the handkerchief I wore around my throat in the bathwater, and got a street shoeshine boy to do what he could with my dreadful shoes, which were almost falling apart.

“When the day came, I was well ahead of time, and had my first taste of a theatrical rehearsal. Milady didn’t appear at it, and that was a heavy disappointment, but there was plenty to take in, all the same.

“It was education by observation. Nobody paid any heed to me. Holroyd nodded when I went into the room, and told me to keep out of the way, so I sat on a windowsill and watched. Men and women appeared very promptly to time, and a stage manager set out a few chairs to mark entrances and limits to the stage on the bare floor. Bang on the stroke of ten Sir John came in, and sat down in a chair behind a table, tapped twice with a silver pencil, and they went to work.

“You know what early rehearsals are like. You would never guess they were getting up a play. People wandered on and off the stage area, reading from sheets of paper that were bound up in brown covers; they mumbled and made mistakes as if they had never seen print before. Sir John mumbled worse than anyone. He had a way of talking that I could hardly believe belonged to a human being, because almost everything he said was cast in an interrogative tone, and was muddled up with a lot of ‘Eh?’ and ‘Mphm?’ and a queer noise he made high up in the back of his nose that sounded like ‘Quonk?’ But the actors seemed used to it and amid all the muttering and quonking a good deal of work seemed to be done. Now and then Sir John himself would appear in a scene, and then the muttering sank almost to inaudibility. Very soon I was bored.

“It was not my plan to be bored, so I looked for something to do. I was a handy fellow, and a lot younger than the stage manager, so when the chairs had to be arranged in a different pattem I nipped forward and gave him a hand, which he allowed me to do without comment. Before the rehearsal was finished I was an established chair lifter, and that was how I became an assistant stage manager. My immediate boss was a man called Macgregor, whose feet hurt; he had those solid feet that seem to be all in one piece, encased in heavy boots; he was glad enough to have somebody who would run around for him. It was from him, during a break in the work, that I found out what we were doing.

“ ‘It’s the new piece,’ he explained. ‘Scaramouche. From the novel by Rafael Sabatini. You’ll have heard of Rafael Sabatini? You haven’t? Well, keep your lugs open and you’ll get the drift of it. Verra romantic, of course.’

“ ‘What am I to do, Mr Macgregor?’ I asked.

“ ‘Nobody’s told me,’ he said. ‘But from the cut of your jib I’d imagine you were the Double.’

“ ‘Double what?’

“ ‘The Double in Two, two,’ he said, in a very Scotch way. I learned long ago, from you, Ramsay, that it’s no use asking questions of a Scot when he speaks like that—dry as an old soda biscuit. So I held my peace.

“I picked up a little information by listening and asking an occasional question when some of the lesser actors went downstairs to the bar for a modest lunch. After three or four days I knew that Scaramouche was laid in the period of the French Revolution, though when that was I did not know. I had never heard that the French had a revolution. I knew the Americans had had one, but so far as detail went it could have been because George Washington shot Lincoln. I was pretty strong on the kings of Israel; later history was closed to me. But the story of the play leaked out in dribbles. Sir John was a young Frenchman who was ‘born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad’; that was what one of the other actors said about him. The astonishing thing was that nobody thought it strange that Sir John was so far into middle age that he was very near to emerging from the far side of it. This young Frenchman got himself into trouble with the nobility because he had advanced notions. To conceal himself he joined a troupe of travelling actors, but his revolutionary zeal was so great that he could not hold his tongue, and denounced the aristocracy from the stage, to the scandal of everyone. When the Revolution came, which it did right on time when it was needed, he became a revolutionary leader, and was about to revenge himself on the nobleman who had vilely slain his best friend and nabbed his girl, when an elderly noblewoman was forced to declare that she was his mother and then, much against her will, further compelled to tell him that his deadly enemy whom he held at the sword’s point was—his father!

“Verra romantic, as Macgregor said, but not so foolish as I have perhaps led you to think. I give it to you as it appeared to me on early acquaintance. I was only interested in what I was supposed to do to earn my salary. Because I now had a salary—or half a salary, because that was the pay for the rehearsal period. Holroyd had presented me with a couple of pages of wretchedly typed stuff, which was my contract. I signed it Jules LeGrand, so that it agreed with my passport. Holroyd looked a little askew at the name, and asked me if I spoke French. I was glad that I could say yes, but he gave me a pretty strong hint that I might consider finding some less foreign name for use on the stage. I couldn’t imagine why that should be, but I found out when we reached Act Two, scene two.

“We had approached this critical point—critical for me, that’s to say—two or three times during the first week of rehearsal, and Sir John had asked the actors to ‘walk through’ it, without doing more than find their places on the stage. It was a scene in which the young revolutionary lawyer, whose name was André-Louis, was appearing on the stage with the travelling actors. They were a troupe of Italian Comedians, all of whom played strongly marked characters such as Polichinelle the old father, Climene the beautiful leading lady, Rhodomont the braggart, Leandre the lover, Pasquariel, and other figures from the Commedia dell’ Arte. I didn’t know what that was, but picked up the general idea, and it wasn’t so far away from vaudeville as you might suppose. Indeed, some of it reminded me of poor Zovene, the wretched juggler. André-Louis (that was Sir John) had assumed the role of Scaramouche, a dashing, witty scoundrel.

“In Act Two, scene two, the Italian Comedians were giving a performance, and at the very beginning of it Scaramouche had to do some flashy juggling tricks. Later, he seized his chance to make a revolutionary speech which was not in the play as the Comedians had rehearsed it; when his great enemy and some aristocratic chums stormed the stage to punish him, he escaped by walking across the stage on a tightrope, far above their heads, making jeering gestures as he did so. Very showy. And clearly not for Sir John. So I was to appear in a costume exactly like his, do the tricks, get out of the way so Sir John could make his revolutionary speech, and take over again when it was time to walk the tightrope.

“This would take some neat managing. When Macgregor said, ‘Curtain up,’ I leapt onto the stage area from the audience’s right, and danced toward the left, juggling some plates; when Polichinelle broke the plates with his stick, causing a lot of clatter and uproar, I pretended to dodge behind his cloak, and Sir John popped into sight immediately afterward. Sounds simple, but as we had to pretend to have the plates, and the cloak, and everything else, I found it confusing. The tightrope trick was ‘walked’ in the same way; Sir John was always talking about ‘walking’ something when we weren’t ready to do it in reality. At the critical moment when the aristocrats rushed the stage, Sir John retreated slowly toward the left side, keeping them off with a stick; then he hopped backward onto a chair—which I must say he did with astonishing spryness—and there was a flurry of cloaks, during which he got out of the way and I emerged above on the tightrope, having stepped out on it from the wings. Easy, you would say, for an old carnival hand? But it wasn’t easy at all, and after a few days it looked as if I would lose my job. Even when we were ‘walking’, I couldn’t satisfy Sir John.

“As usual, nobody said anything to me, but I knew what was up one morning when Holroyd appeared with a fellow who was obviously an acrobat and Sir John talked with him. I hung around, officiously helping Macgregor, and heard what was said, or enough of it. The acrobat seemed to be very set on something he wanted, and it wasn’t long before he was on his way, and Sir John was in an exceedingly bad temper. All through the rehearsal he bullied everybody. He bullied Miss Adele Chesterton, the pretty girl who played the second romantic interest; she was new to the stage and a natural focus for temper. He bullied old Frank Moore, who played Polichinelle, and was a very old hand and an extraordinarily nice person. He was crusty with Holroyd and chivvied Macgregor. He didn’t shout or swear, but he was impatient and exacting, and his annoyance was so thick it cut down the visibility in the room to about half, like dark smoke. When the time came to rehearse Two, two, he said he would leave it out for that day, and he brought the rehearsal to an early close. Holroyd asked me to wait after the others had gone, but not to hang around. So I kept out of the way near the door while Sir John, Holroyd, and Milady held a summit conference at the farther end of the room.

“I couldn’t hear much of what they said, but it was about me, and it was hottish. Holroyd kept saying things like, ‘You won’t get a real pro to agree to leaving his name off the bills,’ and ‘It’s not as easy to get a fair resemblance as you might suppose—not under the conditions.’ Milady had a real stage voice, and when she spoke her lowest it was still as clear as a bell at my end of the room, and her talk was all variations on ‘Give the poor fellow chance, Jack—everybody must have at least one chance.’ But of Sir John I could hear nothing. He had a stage voice, too, and knew how far it could be heard, so when he was being confidential he mumbled on purpose and threw in a lot of Eh and Quonk, which seemed to convey meaning to people who knew him.

“After ten minutes Milady said, so loudly that there could be no pretence that I was not to hear, ‘Trust me, Jack. He’s lucky for us. He has a lucky face. I’m never wrong. And if I can’t get him right, we’ll say no more about it.’ Then she swept down the room to me, using the umbrella, with more style than you’d think possible, as a walking-stick, and said, ‘Come with me, my dear boy; we must have a very intimate talk.’ Then something struck her, and she turned to the two men; ‘I haven’t a penny,’ she said, and from the way both Sir John and Holroyd jumped forward to press pound notes on her you could tell they were both devoted to her. That made me feel warmly toward them, even though they had been talking about sacking me a minute before.

“Milady led the way, and I tagged behind. We went downstairs, where she poked her head into the Public Bar, which was just opening and said, in a surprisingly genial voice, considering that she was Lady Tresize talking to a barman, ‘Do you think I could have Rab Noolas for a private talk, for about half an hour, Joey?’, and the barman shouted back, ‘Whatever you say, Milady,’ and she led me into a gloomy pen, surrounded on three sides by dingy etched glass, with Saloon Bar on the door. When I closed the door behind us this appeared in reverse and I understood that we were now in Rab Noolas. The barman came behind the counter on our fourth side and asked us what it would be. ‘A pink gin, Joey,’ said Milady, and I said I’d have the same, not knowing what it was. Joey produced them, and we sat down, and from the way Milady did so I knew it was a big moment. Fraught, as they say, with consequence.

“ ‘Let us be very frank. And I’ll be frank first, because I’m the oldest. You simply have no notion of the wonderful opportunity you have in Scaramouche. Such a superb little cameo. I say to all beginners: they aren’t tiny parts, they’re little cameos, and the way you carve them is the sign of what your whole career will be. Show me a young player who can give a superb cameo in a small part, and I’ll show you a star of the future. And yours is one of the very finest opportunities I have ever seen in my life in the theatre, because you must be so marvellous that nobody—not the sharpest-eyed critic or the most adoring fan—can distinguish you from my husband. Suddenly, before their very eyes, stands Sir John, juggling marvellously, and of course they adore him. Then, a few minutes later, they see Sir John walking the tightrope, and they see half a dozen of his little special tricks of gesture and turns of the head, and they are thunderstruck because they can’t believe that he has learned to walk the tightrope. And the marvel of it, you see, is that it’s you, all the time! You must use your imagination, my dear boy. You must see what a stunning effect it is. And what makes it possible? You do!’

“ ‘Oh I do see all that, Milady,’ I said. ‘But Sir John isn’t pleased. I wish I knew why. I’m honestly doing the very best I can, considering that we haven’t anything to juggle with, or any tightrope. How can I do better?’

“ ‘Ah, but you’ve put your finger on it, dear boy. I knew from the moment I saw you that you had great, great understanding—not to speak of a lucky face. You have said it yourself. You’re doing the best you can. But that’s not what’s wanted, you see. You must do the best Sir John can.’

“ ‘But—Sir John can’t do anything,’ I said. ‘He can’t juggle and he can’t walk rope. Otherwise why would he want me?’

“ ‘No, no; you haven’t understood. Sir John can, and will, do something absolutely extraordinary: he will make the public—the great audiences of people who come to see him in everything—believe he is doing those splendid, skilful things. He can make them want to believe he can do anything. They will quite happily accept you as him, if you can get the right rhythm.’

“ ‘But I still don’t understand. People aren’t as stupid as that. They’ll guess it’s a trick.’

“ ‘A few, perhaps. But most of them will prefer to believe it’s a reality. That’s what the theatre’s about, you see. People want to believe that what they see is true, even if only for the time they’re in the playhouse. That’s what theatre is, don’t you understand? Showing people what they wish were true.’

“Then I began to get the idea. I had seen that look in the faces of the people who watched Abdullah, and who saw Willard swallow needles and thread and pull it out of his mouth with the needles all dangling from the thread. I nervously asked Milady if she would like another pink gin. She said she certainly would, and gave me a pound note to pay for it. When I demurred she said, ‘No, no; you must let me pay. I’ve got more money than you, and I won’t presume on your gallantry—though I value it, my dear, don’t imagine I don’t value it.’

“When the gins came, she continued: ‘Let us be very, very frank. Your marvellous cameo must be a great secret. If we tell everybody, we stifle some of their pleasure. You saw that young man who came this morning, and argued so tiresomely? He could juggle and he could walk the rope, quite as well as you, I expect, but he was no use whatever, because he had the spirit of a circus person; he wanted his name on the program, and he wanted featured billing. Wanted his name to come at the bottom of the bills, you see, after all the cast had been listed, “AND Trebelli”. An absurd request. Everybody would want to know who Trebelli was and they would see at once that he was the juggler and rope-walker. And Romance would fly right up the chimney. Besides which I could see that he would never deceive anyone for an instant that he was Sir John. He had a brassy, horrid personality. Now you, my dear, have the splendid qualification of having very little personality. One hardly notices you. You are almost a tabula rasa.’

“ ‘Excuse me, Milady, but I don’t know what that is.’

“ ‘No? Well, it’s a—it’s a common expression. I’ve never really had to define it. It’s a sort of charming nothing; a dear, sweet little zero, in which one can paint any face one chooses. An invaluable possession, don’t you see? One says it of children when one’s going to teach them something perfectly splendid. They’re wide open for teaching.’

“ ‘I want to be taught. What do you want me to learn?’

“ ‘I knew you were quite extraordinarily intelligent. More than intelligent, really. Intelligent people are so often thoroughly horrid. You are truly sensitive. I want you to learn to be exactly like Sir John.’

“ ‘Imitate him, you mean?’

“ ‘Imitations are no good. There have been people on the music-halls who have imitated him. No: if the thing is to work as we all want it to work, you must quite simply be him.’

“ ‘How, if I don’t imitate him?’

“ ‘It’s a very deep thing. Of course you must imitate him, but be careful he doesn’t catch you at it, because he doesn’t like it. Nobody does, do they? What I mean is—oh, dear, it’s so dreadfully difficult to say what one really means—you must catch his walk, and his turn of the head, and his gestures and all of that, but the vital thing is that you must catch his rhythm.’

“ ‘How would I start to do that?’

“ ‘Model yourself on him. Make yourself like a marvellously sensitive telegraph wire that takes messages from him. Or perhaps like wireless, that picks up things out of the air. Do what he did with the Guvnor.’

“ ‘I thought he was the Guvnor.’

“ ‘He is now, of course. But when we both worked under the dear old Guvnor at the Lyceum Sir John absolutely adored him, and laid himself open to him like Danae to the shower of gold—you know about that, of course?—and became astonishingly like him in a lot of ways. Of course Sir John is not so tall as the Guvnor; but you’re not tall either, are you? It was the Guvnor’s romantic splendour he caught. Which is what you must do. So that when you dance out before the audience juggling those plates they don’t feel as if the electricity had suddenly been cut off. Another pink gin, if you please.’

“I didn’t greatly like pink gin. In those days I couldn’t afford to drink anything, and pink gin is a bad start. But I would have drunk hot fat to prolong this conversation. So we had another one each, and Milady dealt with hers much better than I did. A pink gin later—call it ten minutes—I was thoroughly confused, except that I wanted to please her, and must find out somehow what she was talking about.

“When she wanted to leave I rushed to call her a taxi, but Holroyd was ahead of me, and in much better condition. He must have been in the Public Bar. We both bowed her into the cab—I seem to remember having one foot in the gutter and the other on the pavement and wondering what had happened to my legs—and when she drove off he took me by the arm and steered me back into the Public Bar, where we tucked into a corner with old Frank Moore.

“ ‘She’s been giving him advice and pink gin,’ said Holroyd.

“ ‘Better give him a good honest pint of half-and-half to straighten him out,’ said Frank, and signalled to the barman.

“They seemed to know what Milady had been up to, and were ready to put it in language that I could understand, which was kind of them. They made it seem very simple: I was to imitate Sir John, but I was to do it with more style than I had been showing. I was supposed to be imitating a great actor who was imitating an eighteenth-century gentleman who was imitating a Commedia dell’ Arte comedian—that’s how simple it was. And I was doing everything too bloody fast, and slick and cheap, so I was to drop that and catch Sir John’s rhythm.

“ ‘But I don’t get it about all this rhythm,’ I said. ‘I guess I know about rhythm in juggling; it’s getting everything under control so you don’t have to worry about dropping things because the things are behaving properly. But what the hell’s all this human rhythm? You mean like dancing?’

“ ‘Not like any dancing I suppose you know,’ said Holroyd. ‘But yes—a bit like dancing. Not like this Charleston and all that jerky stuff. More a fine kind of complicated—well, rhythm.’

“ ‘I don’t get it at all,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get Sir John’s rhythm. Sir John got his rhythm from somebody called the Guvnor. What Guvnor? Is the whole theatre full of Guvnors?’

“ ‘Ah, now we’re getting to it,’ said old Frank. ‘Milady talked about the Guvnor, did she? The Guvnor was Irving, you muggins. You’ve heard of Irving?’

“ ‘Never,’ I said.

“Old Frank looked wonderingly at Holroyd. ‘Never heard of Irving. He’s quite a case, isn’t he?’

“ ‘Not such a case as you might think, Frank,’ said Holroyd. ‘These kids today have never heard of anybody. And I suppose we’ve got to remember that Irving’s been dead for twenty-five years. You remember him. You played with him. I just remember him. But what’s he got to do with a lad like this?—Well, now just hold on a minute. Milady thinks there’s a connection. You know how she goes on. Like a loony, sometimes. But just when you can’t stand it any more she proves to be right, and righter than any of us. You remember where I found you?’ he said to me.

“ ‘In the street. I was doing a few passes with the cards.’

“ ‘Yes, but don’t you remember where? I do. I saw you and I came back to rehearsal and said to Sir John, I think I’ve got what we want. Found him under the Guvnor’s statue, picking up a few pennies as a conjuror. And that was when Milady pricked up her ears. Oh Jack, she said, it’s a lucky sign! Let’s see him at once. And when Sir John wanted to ask perfectly reasonable questions about whether you would do for height, and whether a resemblance could be contrived between you and him, she kept nattering on about how you must be a lucky find because I saw you, as she put it, working the streets under Irving’s protection. You know how the Guvnor stood up for all the little people of the theatre, Jack, she said. I’m sure this boy is a lucky find. Do let’s have him. And she’s stood up for you ever since, though I don’t suppose you’ll be surprised to hear that Sir John wants to get rid of you.’

“The pint of half-and-half had found its way to the four pink gins, and I was having something like a French Revolution in my innards. I was feeling sorry for myself. ‘Why does he hate me so,’ I said, snivelling a bit. ‘I’m doing everything I know to please him.’

“ ‘You’d better have it straight,’ said Holroyd. ‘The resemblance is a bit too good. You look too much like him.’

“ ‘Just what I said when I first set eyes on you,’ said old Frank. ‘My God, I said, what a Double! You might have been spit out of his mouth.’

“ ‘Well, isn’t that what they want?’ I said.

“ ‘You have to look at it reasonable,’ said Holroyd. ‘Put it like this: you’re a famous actor, getting maybe just the tiniest bit past your prime—though still a top-notcher, mind you—and for thirty years everybody’s said how distinguished you are, and what a beautiful expressive face you have, and how Maeterlinck damn near threw up his lunch when you walked on the stage in one of his plays, and said to the papers that you had stolen his soul, you were so good—meaning spiritual, romantic, poetic, and generally gorgeous. You still get lots of fan letters from people who find some kind of ideal in you. You’ve had all the devotion—a bit cracked some of it, but mostly very real and touching—that a great actor inspires in people, most of whom have had some kind of short-change experience in life. So: you want a Double. And when the Double comes—and such a Double that you can’t deny him—he’s a seedy little carnie, with the shifty eyes of a pickpocket and the breath of somebody that eats the cheapest food, and you wouldn’t trust him with sixpenn’orth of copper, and every time you look at him you heave. He looks like everything inside yourself that you’ve choked off and shut out in order to be what you are now. And he looks at you all the time—you do this, you know—as if he knew something about you you didn’t know yourself. Now: fair’s fair. Wouldn’t you want to get rid of him? Yet here’s your wife, who’s stood by you through thick and thin, and held you up when you were ready to sink under debts and bad luck, and whom you love so much everybody can see it, and thinks you’re marvellous because of it, and what does she say? She says this nasty mess of a Double is lucky, and has to be given his chance. You follow me? Try to be objective. I don’t want to say hard things about you, but truth’s truth and must be served. You’re not anybody’s first pick for a Double, but there you are. Sir John’s dead spit, as Frank here says.’

“Very soon I was going to have to leave them. My stomach was heaving. But I was still determined to find out whatever I could to keep my job. I wanted it now more desperately than before. ‘So what do I do?’ I asked.

“Holroyd puffed at his pipe, groping for an answer, and it was old Frank who spoke. He spoke very kindly. ‘You just keep on keeping on,’ he said. ‘Try to find the rhythm. Try to get inside Sir John.’

“These were fatal words. I rushed out into the street, and threw up noisily and copiously in the gutter. Try to get inside Sir John! Was this to be another Abdullah?

“It was, but in a way I could not have foreseen. Experience never repeats itself in quite the same way. I was beginning another servitude, much more dangerous and potentially ruinous, but far removed from the squalor of my experience with Willard. I had entered upon a long apprenticeship to an egoism.

“Please notice that I say egoism, not egotism, and I am prepared to be pernickety about the distinction. An egotist is a self-absorbed creature, delighted with himself and ready to tell the world about his enthralling love affair. But an egoist, like Sir John, is a much more serious being, who makes himself, his instincts, yearnings, and tastes the touchstone of every experience. The world, truly, is his creation. Outwardly he may be courteous, modest, and charming—and certainly when you knew him Sir John was all of these—but beneath the velvet is the steel; if anything comes along that will not yield to the steel, the steel will retreat from it and ignore its existence. The egotist is all surface; underneath is a pulpy mess and a lot of self-doubt. But the egoist may be yielding and even deferential in things he doesn’t consider important; in anything that touches his core he is remorseless.

“Many of us have some touch of egoism. We who sit at this table are no strangers to it. You, I should think, Jurgen, are a substantial egoist, and so are you, Harry. About Ingestree I can’t say. But Liesl is certainly an egoist and you, Ramsay, are a ferocious egoist battling with your demon because you would like to be a saint. But none of you begins to approach the egoism of Sir John. His egoism was fed by the devotion of his wife, and the applause he could call forth in the theatre. I have never known anyone who came near him in the truly absorbing and damning sin of egoism.”

“Damning?” I leapt on the word.

“We were both brought up to believe in damnation, Dunny,” said Eisengrim, and he was deeply serious. “What does it mean? Does it mean shut off from the promptings of compassion; untouched by the feelings of others except in so far as they can serve us; blind and deaf to anything that is not grist to our mill? If that is what it means, and if that is a form of damnation, I have used the word rightly.

“Don’t misunderstand. Sir John wasn’t cruel, or dishonourable or overreaching in common ways; but he was all of these things where his own interest as an artist was concerned; within that broad realm he was without bowels. He didn’t make Adele Chesterton cry at every rehearsal because he was a brute. He hadn’t brought Holroyd—who was a tough nut in every other way—to a condition of total subjection to his will because he liked to domineer over a fellow-being. He hadn’t turned Milady into a kind of human oilcan who went about cooling wheels he had worn red-hot because he didn’t know that she was a woman of rare spirit and fine sensitivity. He did these things and a thousand others because he was wholly devoted to an ideal of theatrical art that was contained—so far as he was concerned—within himself. I think he knew perfectly well what he did, and he thought it worth the doing. It served his art, and his art demanded a remorseless egoism.

“He was one of the last of a kind that has now vanished. He was an actor-manager. There was no Arts Council to keep him afloat when he failed, or pick up the bill for an artistic experiment or act of daring. He had to find the money for his ventures, and if the money was lost on one production he had to get it back from another, or he would soon appeal to investors in vain. Part of him was a financier. He asked people to invest in his craft and skill and sense of business.

Beyond that, he asked people to invest in his personality and charm, and the formidable technique he had acquired to make personality and charm vivid to hundreds of thousands of people who bought theatre seats. In justice it must be said that he had a particular sort of taste and flair that lifted him above the top level of actors to the very small group of stars with an assured following. He wasn’t personally greedy, though he liked to live well. He did what he did for art. His egoism lay in his belief that art, as he embodied it, was worth any sacrifice on his part and on the part of people who worked with him.

“When I became part of his company the fight against time had begun. Not simply the fight against the approach of age, because he was not deluded about that. It was the fight against the change in the times, the fight to maintain a nineteenth-century idea of theatre in the twentieth century. He believed devoutly in what he did; he believed in Romance, and he couldn’t understand that the concept of Romance was changing.

“Romance changes all the time. His plays, in which a well-graced hero moved through a succession of splendid adventures and came out on top—even when that meant dying for some noble cause—were becoming old hat. Romance at that time meant Private Lives, which was brand-new. It didn’t look to its audiences like Romance, but that was what it was. Our notion of Romance, which is so often exploration of squalor and degradation, will become old hat, too. Romance is a mode of feeling that puts enormous emphasis—but not quite a tragic emphasis—on individual experience. Tragedy puts something above humanity; so does Comedy; Romance puts humanity first. The people who liked Sir John’s kind of Romance were middle-aged, or old. Oh, lots of young people came to see him, but they weren’t the most interesting kind of young people. Perhaps they weren’t really young. The interesting young people were going to see a different sort of play. They were flocking to Private Lives. You couldn’t expect Sir John to understand. His ideal of Romance was far from that, and he had shaped a formidable egoism to serve his ideal.”

“It’s the peril of the actor,” said Ingestree. “Do you remember what Aldous Huxley said? ‘Acting inflames the ego in a way which few other professions do. For the sake of enjoying regular emotional self-abuse, our societies condemn a considerable class of men and women to a perpetual inability to achieve non-attachment. It seems a high price to pay for our amusements.’ A profound comment. I used to be deeply influenced by Huxley.”

“I gather you got over it,” said Eisengrim, “or you wouldn’t be talking about non-attachment over the ruins of a tremendous meal and a huge cigar you have been sucking like a child at its mother’s breast.”

“I thought you had forgiven me,” said Ingestree, being as winsome as his age and appearance allowed. “I don’t pretend to have set aside the delights of this world; I tried that and it was no good. But I have my intellectual fopperies, and they pop out now and then. Do go on about Sir John and his egoism.”

“So I shall,” said Magnus, “but at another time. The waiters are hovering and I perceive the delicate fluttering of paper in the hands of the chief bandit yonder.”

I watched with envy as Ingestree signed the bill without batting an eyelash. I suppose it was company money he was spending. We went out into the London rain and called for cabs.

(4)

In the days that followed, Magnus was busy filming the last scraps of Hommage in a studio near London; these were close-ups, chiefly of his hands, as he did intricate things with cards and coins, but he insisted on wearing full costume and make-up. There was also a time-taking quarrel with a fashionable photographer who was to provide publicity pictures, and who kept assuring Magnus that he wanted to catch “the real you”. But Magnus didn’t want candid pictures of himself, and he was rather personal in his insistence that the photographer, a bearded fanatic who wore sandals, was not likely to capture with his camera something he had taken pains to conceal for more than thirty years. So we went to a very famous photographer who was celebrated for his pictures of royalty, and he and Magnus plotted some portraits, taken in a splendid old theatre, that satisfied both of them. All of this took time, until there was no longer any reason for us to stay in London. But Lind and Ingestree, and to a lesser degree Kinghovn, were determined to hear the remainder of Magnus’s story, and after a good deal of teasing and protesting that there was really nothing to it, and that he was tired of talking about himself, it was agreed that they should spend our last day in London with us, and have their way.

“I’m doing it for Ingestree, really,” said Magnus, and I thought it an odd remark, as he and Roly had not been on the best of terms since they first met at Sorgenfrei. Inquisitive, as always, I found a time to mention this to Roly, who was puzzled and flattered. “Can’t imagine why he said that,” was his comment; “but there’s something about him that rouses more than ordinary curiosity in me. He’s terribly like someone I’ve known, but I can’t say who it is. And I’m fascinated by his crusty defence of old Tresize and his wife. I know a bit about Sir John that puts him in a very different light from the rosy glow Magnus spreads over his memories. These recollections of old actors, you know—awful old hams, most of them. It’s the most perishable of the arts. Have you ever had the experience of seeing a film you saw thirty or even forty years ago and thought wonderful? Avoid it, I urge you. Appallingly disillusioning. One remembers something that never had any reality. No, old actors should be let die.”

“What about old conjurors?” I said; “why Hommage? Why don’t you leave Robert-Houdin in his grave?”

“That’s precisely where he is. You don’t think this film we’re making is really anything like the old boy, do you? With every modern technique at our command, and Jurgen Lind sifting every shot through his own marvellously contemporary concept of magic—no, no, if you could be whisked back in time and see Robert-Houdin you’d see something terribly tacky in comparison with what we’re offering. He’s just a peg on which Jurgen is hanging a fine modern creation. We need all the research and reconstruction and whatnot to produce something inescapably contemporary; a paradox, but that’s how it is.”

“Then you believe that there is no time but the present moment, and that everything in the past is diminished by the simple fact that it is irrecoverable? I suppose there’s a name for that point of view, but at present I can’t put my tongue to it.”

“Yes, that’s pretty much what I believe. Eisengrim’s raptures about Sir John and Milady interest me as a phenomenon of the present; I’m fascinated that he should think as he does at this moment, and put so much feeling into expressing what he feels. I can’t be persuaded for an instant that those two old spooks were anything very special.”

“You realize, of course, that you condemn yourself to the same treatment? You’ve done some work that people have admired and admire still. Are you agreed that it should be judged as you judge Magnus’s idols?”

“Of course. Let it all go! I’ll have my whack and that’ll be the end of me. I don’t expect any yellow roses on my monument. Nor a monument, as a matter of fact. But I’m keenly interested in other monument-worshippers. Magnus loves the past simply because it feeds his present, and that’s all there is to it. It’s the piety and ancestor-worship of a chap who, as he’s told us, had a nasty family and a horrid childhood and has had to dig up a better one. Before he’s finished he’ll tell us the Tresizes were his real parents, or his parents in art, or something of that sort. Want to bet?”

I never bet, and I wouldn’t have risked money on that, because I thought that Ingestree was probably right.

(5)

Our last day was a Saturday, and the three film-makers appeared in time for lunch at the Savoy. Liesl had arranged that we should have one of the good tables looking out over the Embankment, and it was a splendid autumn day. The light, as it fell on our table, could not have been improved on by Kinghovn himself. Magnus never ate very much, and today he confined himself to some cold beef and a dish of rice pudding. It gave him a perverse pleasure to order these nursery dishes in restaurants where other people gorged on luxuries, and he insisted that the Savoy served the best rice pudding in London. The others ate heartily, Ingestree with naked and rather touching relish, Kinghovn like a man who has not seen food for a week, and Lind with a curious detachment, as though he were eating to oblige somebody else, and did not mean to disappoint them. Liesl was in one of her ogress moods and ordered steak tartare, which seemed to me no better than raw meat. I had the set lunch; excellent value.

“You spoke of Tresize’s egoism when last we dealt with the subtext,” said Lind, champing his great jaws on a lamb chop.

“I did, and I may have misled you. Shortly after I had my talk with Milady, we stopped rehearsing at the Crown and Two Chairmen, and moved into the theatre where Scaramouche was to appear. It was the Globe. We needed a theatre with plenty of backstage room because it was a pretty elaborate show. Sir John still held to the custom of opening in London with a new piece; no out-of-town tour to get things shaken down. It was an eye-opener to me to walk into a theatre that was better than the decrepit vaudeville houses where I had appeared with Willard; there was a discipline and a formality I had never met with. I was hired as an assistant stage manager (with a proviso that I should act ‘as cast’ if required) and I had everything to learn about the job. Luckily old Macgregor was a patient and thorough teacher. I had lots to do. That was before the time when the stagehands’ union was strict about people who were not members moving and arranging things, and some of my work was heavy. I was on good terms with the stage crew at once, and I quickly found out that this put a barrier between me and the actors, although I had to become a member of Actors’ Equity. But I was ‘crew’, and although everybody was friendly I was not quite on the level of ‘company’. What was I? I was necessary, and even important, to the play, but I found out that my name was to appear on the programme simply as Macgregor’s assistant. I had no place in the list of the cast.

“Yet I was rehearsed carefully, and it seemed to me that I was doing well. I was trying to capture Sir John’s rhythm, and now, to my surprise, he was helping me. We spent quite a lot of time on Two, two. I did my juggling with my back to the audience, but as I was to wear a costume identical with Sir John’s, the audience would assume that was who I was, if I could bring off another sort of resemblance.

“That was an eye-opener. I was vaudeville trained, and my one idea of stage deportment was to be fast and gaudy. That wasn’t Sir John’s way at all. ‘Deliberately: deliberately,’ he would say, over and over again. ‘Let them see what you’re doing. Don’t be flashy and confusing. Do it like this.’ And then he would caper across the stage, making motions like a man juggling plates, but at a pace I thought impossibly slow. ‘It’s not keeping the plates in the air that’s important,’ he would say. ‘Of course you can do that. It’s being Scaramouche that’s important. It’s the character you must get across. Eh? You understand the character, don’t you? Eh? Have you looked at the Callots?’

“No, I hadn’t looked at the Callots, and didn’t know what they were. ‘Here m’boy; look here,’ he said, showing me some funny little pictures of people dressed as Scaramouche, and Polichinelle and other Commedia characters. ‘Get it like that! Make that real! You must be a Callot in motion!’

“It was new and hard work for me to catch the idea of making myself like a picture, but I was falling under Sir John’s spell and was ready to give it a try. So I capered and pointed my toes, and struck exaggerated postures like the little pictures, and did my best.

“ ‘Hands! Hands!’ he would shout, warningly, when I had my work cut out to make the plates dance. ‘Not like hooks, m’boy, like this! See! Keep ’em like this!’ And then he would demonstrate what he wanted, which was a queer trick for a juggler, because he wanted me to hold my hands with the little finger and the forefinger extended, and the two middle fingers held together. It looked fine as he did it, but it wasn’t my style at all. And all the time he kept me dancing with my toes stuck out and my heels lifted, and he wanted me to get into positions which even I could see were picturesque, but couldn’t copy.

“ ‘Sorry, Sir John,’ I said one day. ‘It’s just that it feels a bit loony.’

“ ‘Aha, you’re getting it at last!’ he shouted, and for the first time he smiled at me. ‘That’s what I want! I want it a bit loony. Like Scaramouche, you see. Like a charlatan in a travelling show.’

“I could have told him a few things about charlatans in travelling shows, and the way their looniness takes them, but it wouldn’t have done. I see now that it was Romance he was after, not realism, but it was all a mystery to me then. I don’t think I was a slow learner, and in our second rehearsal in the theatre, where we had the plates, and the cloaks, and the tightrope to walk, I got my first real inkling of what it was all about, and where I was wrong and Sir John—in terms of Romance—was right.

“I told you I had to caper across the tightrope, as Scaramouche escaping from the angry aristocrats. I was high above their heads, and as I had only about thirty feet to go, at the farthest, I had to take quite a while over it while pretending to be quick. Sir John wanted the rope—it was a wire, really—to be slackish, so that it rocked and swayed. Apparently that was the Callot style. For balance I carried a long stick that I was supposed to have snatched from Polichinelle. I was doing it circus-fashion, making it look as hard as possible, but that wouldn’t do: I was to rock on the wire, and be very much at ease, and when I was halfway across the stage I was to thumb my nose at the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr, my chief enemy. I could thumb my nose. Not the least trouble. But the way I did it didn’t please Sir John. ‘Like this,’ he would say, and put an elegant thumb to his long, elegant nose, and twiddle the fingers. I did it several times, and he shook his head. Then an idea seemed to strike him.

“ ‘M’boy, what does that gesture mean to you?’ he asked, fixing me with a lustrous brown eye.

“ ‘Kiss my arse, Sir John,’ said I, bashfully: I wasn’t sure he would know such a rude word. He looked grave, and shook his head slowly from side to side three or four times.

“ ‘You have the essence of it, but only in the sense that the snail on the garden wall is the essence of Escargots à la Niçoise. What you convey by that gesture is all too plainly the grossly derisive invitation expressed by your phrase, Kiss my arse; it doesn’t even get as far as Baisez mon cul. What I want is a Rabelaisian splendour of contempt linked with a Callotesque elegance of grotesquerie. What it boils down to is that you’re not thinking it right. You’re thinking Kiss my arse with a strong American accent, when what you ought to be thinking is—’ and suddenly, though he was standing on the stage, he swayed perilously and confidently as though he were on the wire, and raised one eyebrow and opened his mouth in a grin like a leering wolf, and allowed no more than the tip of a very sharp red tongue to loll out on his lips and there it was! Kiss my arse with class, and God knows how many years of actor’s technique and a vivid memory of Henry Irving all backing it up.

“ ‘I think I get it,’ I said, and had a try. He was pleased. Again. Better pleased. ‘You’re getting close,’ he said; ‘now, tell me what you’re thinking when you do that? Mph? Kiss my arse, quonk? But what kind of Kiss my arse? Quonk? Quonk?’

“I didn’t know what to tell him, but I couldn’t be silent. ‘Not Kiss my arse at all,’ I said.

“ ‘What then? What are you thinking? Eh? You must be thinking something, because you’re getting what I want. Tell me what it is?’

“Better be truthful, I thought. He sees right into me and he’ll spot a lie at once. I took my courage in my hand. ‘I was thinking that I must be born again,’ I said. ‘Quite right, m’boy; born again and born different, as Mrs Poyser very wisely said,’ was Sir John’s comment. (Who was Mrs Poyser? I suppose it’s the kind of thing Ramsay knows.)

“Born again! I’d always thought of it, when I thought about it at all, as a spiritual thing; you went through a conversion, or you found Christ, or whatever it was, and from that time you were different and never looked back. But to get inside Sir John I had to be born again physically, and if the spiritual trick is harder than that, Heaven must be thinly populated. I spent hours capering about in quiet places offstage, whenever Macgregor didn’t need me, trying to be like Sir John, trying to get style even into Kiss my arse. What was the result? Next time we rehearsed Two, two, I was awful. I nearly dropped a plate, and for a juggler that’s a shattering experience. (Don’t laugh! I don’t mean it as a joke.) But worse was to come. At the right moment I stepped out on the swaying wire, capered toward middle stage, thumbed my nose at Gordon Barnard, who was playing the Marquis, lost my balance, and fell off; Duparc’s training stood by me, and I caught the wire with my hands, swung in mid-air for a couple of seconds, and then heaved myself back up and got my footing, and scampered to the opposite side. The actors who were rehearsing that day applauded, but I was destroyed with shame, and Sir John was grinning exactly like Scaramouche, with an inch of red tongue between his lips.

“ ‘Don’t think they’ll quite accept you as me if you do that, m’boy,’ said he. ‘Eh, Holroyd? Eh, Barnard? Quonk? Try it again.’

“I tried it again, and didn’t fall, but I knew was I hopeless; I hadn’t found Sir John’s style and I was losing my own. After another bad try Sir John moved on to another scene, but Milady beckoned me away into a box, from which she was watching the rehearsal. I was full of apologies.

“ ‘Of course you fell,’ she said. ‘But it was a good fall. Laudable pus, I call it. You’re learning.’

“Laudable pus! What in God’s name did she mean! I thought I would never get used to Milady’s lingo. But she saw the bewilderment in my face, and explained.

“ ‘It’s a medical expression. Out of fashion now, I expect. But my grandfather was rather a distinguished physician and he used it often. In those days, you know, when someone had a wound, they couldn’t heal it as quickly as they do now; they dressed it and probed it every few days to see how it was getting on. If it was healing well, from the bottom, there was a lot of nasty stuff near the surface, and that was evidence of proper healing. They called it laudable pus. I know you’re trying your very best to please Sir John, and it means a sharp wound to your own personality. As the wound heals, you will be nearer what we all want. But meanwhile there’s laudable pus, and it shows itself in clumsiness and falls. When you get your new style, you’ll understand what I mean.’

“Had I time to get a new style before the play opened? I was worried sick, and I suppose it showed, because when he had a chance old Frank Moore had a word with me.

“ ‘You’re trying to catch the Guvnor’s manner and you aren’t making a bad fist of it, but there are one or two things you haven’t noticed. You’re an acrobat, good enough to walk the slackwire, but you’re tight as a drum. Look at the Guvnor: he hasn’t a taut muscle in his body, nor a slack one, either. He’s in easy control all the time. Have you noticed him standing still? When he listens to another actor, have you seen how still he is? Look at you now, listening to me; you bob about and twist and turn and nod your head with enough energy to turn a windmill. But it’s all waste, y’see. If we were in a scene, you’d be killing half the value of what I say with all that movement. Just try to sit still. Yes, there you go; you’re not still at all, you’re frozen. Stillness isn’t looking as if you were full of coiled springs. It’s repose. Intelligent repose. That’s what the Guvnor has. What I have, too, as a matter of fact. What Barnard has. What Milady has. I suppose you think repose means asleep, or dead.

“ ‘Now look, my lad, and try to see how it’s done. It’s mostly your back. Got to have a good strong back, and let it do ninety per cent of the work. Forget legs. Look at the Guvnor hopping around when he’s being Scaramouche. He’s nippier on his pins than you are. Look at me. I’m real old, but I bet I can dance a hornpipe better than you can. Look at this! Can you do a double shuffle like that? That’s legs, to look at, but it’s back in reality. Strong back. Don’t pound down into the floor at every step. Forget legs.

“ ‘How do you get a strong back? Well, it’s hard to describe it, but once you get the feel of it you’ll see what I’m talking about. The main thing is to trust your back and forget you have a front; don’t stick out your chest or your belly; let ’em look after themselves. Trust your back and lead from your back. And just let your head float on top of your neck. You’re all made of whipcord and wire. Loosen it up and take it easy. But not slump, mind! Easy.’

“Suddenly the old man grabbed me by the neck and seemed about to throttle me. I jerked away, and he laughed. ‘Just as I said, you’re all wire. When I touch your neck you tighten up like a spring. Now you try to strangle me.’ I seized him by the neck, and I thought his poor old head would come off in my hands; he sank to the floor, moaning, ‘Nay, spare m’ life!’ Then he laughed like an old loony, because I suppose I looked horrified. ‘D’you see? I just let myself go and trusted to my back. You work on that for a while and bob’s your uncle; you’ll be fit to act with the Guvnor.’

“ ‘How long do you think it will take?’ I said. ‘Oh, ten or fifteen years should see you right,’ said old Frank, and walked away, still chuckling at the trick he had played on me.

“I had no ten or fifteen years. I had a week, and much of that was spent slaving for Macgregor, who kept me busy with lesser jobs while he and Holroyd fussed about the scenery and trappings for Scaramouche. I had never seen such scenery as the stage crew began to rig from the theatre grid; the vaudeville junk I was used to didn’t belong in the same world with it. The production had all been painted by the Harker Brothers, from designs by a painter who knew exactly what Sir John wanted. It was a revelation to me then, but now I understand that it owed much to prints and paintings of France during the Revolutionary period, and a quality of late-eighteenth-century detail had been used in it, apparently in a careless and half-hidden spirit, but adding up to pictures that supported and explained the play just as did the handsome costumes. People are supposed not to like scenery now, but it could be heart-stirring stuff when it was done with love by real theatre artists.

“The first act setting was in the yard of an inn, and when it was all in place I swear you could smell the horses, and the sweet air from the fields. Nowadays they fuss a lot about light in the theatre, and even stick a lot of lamps in plain sight of the audience, so you won’t miss how artistic they are being; but Sir John didn’t trouble about light in that way—the subtle effects of light were painted on the scenery, so you knew at once what time of day it was by the way the shadows fell, and what the electricians did was to illuminate the actors, and Sir John in particular.

“During all the years I worked with Sir John there was one standing direction for the electricians that was so well understood Macgregor hardly had to mention it: when the play began all lights were set at two-thirds of their power, and when Sir John was about to make his entrance they were gradually raised to full power, so that as soon as he came on the stage the audience had the sensation of seeing—and therefore understanding—much more clearly than before. Egoism, I suppose, and a little hard on the supporting actors, but Sir John’s audiences wanted him to be wonderful and he did whatever was necessary to make sure that he damned well was wonderful.

“Ah, that scenery! In the last act, which was in the salon of a great aristocratic house in Paris, there were large windows at the back, and outside those windows you saw a panorama of Paris at the time of the Revolution that conveyed, by means I don’t pretend to understand, the spirit of a great and beautiful city under appalling stress. The Harkers did it with colour; it was mostly in reddish browns highlighted with rose, and shadowed in a grey that was almost black. Busy as I was, I still found time to gape at that scenery as it was assembled.

“Costumes, too. Everybody had been fitted weeks before, but when the clothes were all assembled, and the wig-man had done his work, and the actors began to appear in carefully arranged ensembles in front of that scenery, things became clear that I had missed completely at rehearsals: things like the relation of one character to another, and of one class to another, and the Callot spirit of the travelling actors against the apparently everyday clothes of inn-servants and other minor people, and the superiority and unquestioned rank of the aristocrats. Above all, of the unquestioned supremacy of Sir John, because, though his clothes were not gorgeous, like those of Barnard as the Marquis, they had a quality of style that I did not understand until I had tried them on myself. Because, you see, as his double, I had to have a costume exactly like his when he appeared as the charlatan Scaramouche, and the first time I put it on I thought there must be some mistake, because it didn’t seem to fit at all. Sir John showed me what to do about that.

“ ‘Don’t try to drag your sleeves down m’boy; they’re intended to be short, to show your hands to advantage, mphm? Keep ’em up, like this, and if you use your hands the way I showed you, everything will fit, eh? And your hat—it’s not meant to keep off the rain, m’boy, but to show your face against the inside of the brim, quonk? Your breeches aren’t too tight; they’re not to sit down in—I don’t pay you to sit down in costume—but to stand up in, and show off your legs. Never shown your legs off before, have you? I thought as much. Well, learn to show ’em off now, and not like a bloody chorus-girl either, but like a man. Use ’em in masculine postures, but not like a butcher boy either, and if you aren’t proud of your legs they’re going to look damned stupid, eh, when you’re walking across the stage on that rope.’

“I was green as grass. Naive, though I didn’t know the word at that time. It was very good for me to feel green. I had begun to think I knew all there was about the world, and particularly the performing world, because I had won in the struggle to keep alive in Wanless’s World of Wonders, and in Le grand Cirque forain de St Vite. I had even dared in my heart to think I knew more about the world of travelling shows than Sir John. Of course I was right, because I knew a scrap of the reality. But he knew something very different, which was what the public wants to think the world of travelling shows is like. I possessed a few hard-won facts, but he had artistic imagination. My job was somehow to find my way into his world, and take a humble, responsible part in it.

“Little by little it dawned on me that I was important to Scaramouche; my two short moments, when I juggled the plates, and walked the wire and thumbed my nose at the Marquis, added a cubit to the stature of the character Sir John was creating. I had also to swallow the fact that I was to do that without anybody knowing it. Of course the public would tumble to the fact that Sir John, who was getting on for sixty, had not learned juggling and wire-walking since last they saw him, but they wouldn’t understand it until they had been thrilled by the spectacle, apparently, of the great man doing exactly those things. I was anonymous and at the same time conspicuous.

“I had to have a name. Posters with the names of the actors were already in place outside the theatre, but in the programme I must appear as Macgregor’s assistant, and I must be called something. Holroyd mentioned it now and again. My name at that time, Jules LeGrand, wouldn’t do. Too fancy and, said Holroyd, a too obvious fake.

“Here again I was puzzled. Jules LeGrand an obvious fake? What about the names of some of the other members of the company? What about Eugene Fitzwarren, who had false teeth and a wig and, I would bet any money, a name that he had not been born to? What about C. Pengelly Spickernell, a withered, middle-aged fruit, whose eyes sometimes rested warmly on my legs, when Sir John was talking about them. Had any parents, drunk or sober, with such a surname as Spickernell, ever christened a child Cuthbert Pengelly? And if it came to fancy sounds, what about Milady’s stage name? Annette de la Borderie? Macgregor assured me that it was indeed her own, and that she came from the Channel Islands, but why was it credible when Jules LeGrand was not?

“Of course I was too green to know that I did not stand on the same footing as the other actors. I was just a trick, a piece of animated scenery, when I was on the stage. Otherwise I was Macgregor’s assistant, and none too experienced at the job, and a grand name did not befit my humble station. What was I to be called?

“The question was brought to a head by Holroyd, who approached, not me, but Macgregor, in a break between an afternoon and evening rehearsal during the final week of preparation. I was at hand, but obviously not important to the discussion. ‘What are you going to call your assistant, Mac?’ said Holroyd. ‘Time’s up. He’s got to have a name.’ Macgregor looked solemn. ‘I’ve given it careful thought,’ he said, ‘and I think I’ve found the verra word for him. Y’see, what’s he to the play? He’s Sir John’s double. That and no more. A shadow, you might say. But can you call him Shadow? Nunno: absurd! And takes the eye, which is just what we don’t want to do. So where do we turn—’ Holroyd broke in here, because he was apt to be impatient when Macgregor had one of his explanatory fits. ‘Why not call him Double? Dick Double! Now there’s a good, simple name that nobody’s going to notice.’ ‘Hut!’ said Macgregor; ‘that’s a foolish name. Dick Double! It sounds like some fella in a pantomime!’ But Holroyd was not inclined to give up his flight of fancy. ‘Nothing wrong with Double,’ he persisted. ‘There’s a Double in Shakespeare. Henry IV, Part Two, don’t you remember? Is Old Double dead? So there must have been somebody called Double. The more I think of it the better I like it. I’ll put him down as Richard Double.’ But Macgregor wouldn’t have it. ‘Nay, nay, you’ll make the lad a figure of fun,’ he said. ‘Now listen to me, because I’ve worked it out verra carefully. He’s a double. And what’s a double? Well, in Scotland, when I was a boy, we had a name for such things. If a man met a creature like himself in a lane, or in town, maybe, in the dark, it was a sure sign of ill luck or even death. Not that I suggest anything of that kind here. Nunno; as I’ve often said Airt has her own rules, and they’re not the rules of common life. Now: such an uncanny creature was called a fetch. And this lad’s a fetch, and we can do no better than to name him Fetch.’ By this time old Frank Moore joined the group, and he liked the sound of Fetch. ‘But what first name will you tack on to it?’ he said. ‘I suppose he’s got to be something Fetch? Can’t be just naked, unaccommodated Fetch.’ Macgregor closed his eyes and raised a fat hand. ‘I’ve thought of that, also,’ he said. ‘Fetch being a Scots name, he’d do well to carry a Scots given name, for added authority. Now I’ve always had a fancy for the name Mungo. In my ear it has a verra firm sound. Mungo Fetch. Can we do better?’ He looked around, for applause. But Holroyd was not inclined to agree; I think he was still hankering after Double. ‘Sounds barbaric to me. A sort of cannibal-king name, to my way of thinking. If you want a Scotch name why don’t you call him Jock?’ Macgregor looked disgusted. ‘Because Jock is not a name, but a diminutive, as everybody knows well. It is the diminutive of John. And John is not a Scots name. The Scots form of that name is Ian. If you want to call him Ian Fetch, I shall say no more. Though I consider Mungo a much superior solution to the problem.’

“Holroyd nodded at me, as if he and Macgregor and Frank Moore had been generously expending their time to do me a great favour. ‘Mungo Fetch it’s to be then, is it?’ he said, and went about his business before I had time to collect my wits and say anything at all.

“That was my trouble. I was like someone living in a dream. I was active and occupied and heard what was said to me and responded reasonably, but nevertheless I seemed to be in a lowered state of consciousness. Otherwise, how could I have put up with a casual conversation that saddled me with a new name—and a name nobody in his right mind would want to possess? But not since my first days in Wanless’s World of Wonders had I been so little in command of myself, so little aware of what fate was doing to me. It was as if I were being thrust toward something I did not know by something I could not see. Part of it was love, for I was beglamoured by Milady and barely had sense enough to understand that my state was as hopeless as it could possibly be, and that my passion was in every way absurd. Part of it must have been physical, because I was getting a pretty good regular wage, and could eat better than I had done for several months. Part of it was just astonishment at the complex business of getting a play on the stage, which presented me with some new marvel every day.

“As Macgregor’s assistant I had to be everywhere and consequently I saw everything. Because of my mechanical bent I took pleasure in all the mechanism of a fine theatre, and wanted to know how the flymen and scene-shifters organized their work, how the electrician contrived his magic, and how Macgregor controlled it all with signal-lights from his little cubby-hole on the left-hand side of the stage, just inside the proscenium. I had to make up the call-lists, so that the call-boy—who was no boy but older than myself—could warn the actors when they were wanted on stage five minutes before each entrance. I watched Macgregor prepare his Prompt Book, which was an interleaved copy of the play, with every cue for light, sound, and action entered into it; he was proud of his books, and marked them in a fine round hand, in inks of different colours, and every night the book was carefully locked in a safe in his little office. I helped the property-man prepare his lists of everything that was needed in the play, so that a mass of materials from snuffboxes to hay-forks could be organized on the property-tables in the wings; my capacity to make or mend fiddling little bits of mechanism made me a favourite with him. Indeed the property-man and I worked up a neat little performance as a flock of hens who were heard clucking in the wings when the curtain rose on the inn scene. It was my job to hand C. Pengelly Spickernell the trumpet on which he sounded a fanfare just before the travelling-cart of the Commedia dell’ Arte players made its entrance into the inn-yard; to hand it to him and recover it later, and shake C. Pengelly’s spit out of it before putting it back on the property-table. There seemed to be no end to my duties.

“I had also to learn to make up my face for my brief appearance. Vaudevillian that I was, I had been accustomed to colour my face a vivid shade of salmon, and touch up my eyebrows; I had never made up my neck or my hands in my life. I quickly learned that something more subtle was expected by Sir John; his make-up was elaborate, to disguise some signs of age but even more to throw his best features into prominence. Eric Foss, a very decent fellow in the company, showed me what to do, and it was from him I learned that Sir John’s hands were always coloured an ivory shade, and that his ears were liberally touched up with carmine. Why red ears, I wanted to know. ‘The Guvnor thinks it gives an appearance of health,’ said Foss, ‘and make sure you touch up the insides of your nostrils with the same colour, because it makes your eyes look bright.’ I didn’t understand it, but I did as I was told.

“Make-up was a subject on which every actor had strong personal opinions. Gordon Barnard took almost an hour to put on his face, transforming himself from a rather ordinary-looking chap into a strikingly handsome man. Reginald Charlton, on the other hand, was of the modern school and used as little make-up as possible, because he said it made the face into a mask, and inexpressive. Grover Paskin, our comedian, put on paint almost with a trowel, and worked like a Royal Academician building up warts and nobbles and tufts of hair on his rubbery old mug. Eugene Fitzwarren strove for youth, and took enormous pains making his eyes big and lustrous, and putting white stuff on his false teeth so that they would flash to his liking.

“Old Frank Moore was the most surprising of the lot, because he had become an actor when water colours were used for make-up instead of the modern greasepaints. He washed his face with care, powdered it dead white, and then applied artist’s paints out of a large Reeves’ box, with fine brushes, until he had the effect he wanted. In the wings he looked as if his face were made of china, but under the lights the effect was splendid. I particularly marvelled at the way he put shadows where he wanted them by drawing the back of a lead spoon over the the hollows of his eyes and cheeks. It wasn’t good for his skin, and he had a hide like an alligator in private life, but it was certainly good for the stage, and he was immensely proud of the fact that Irving, who made up in the same way, had once complimented him on his art.

“So, working fourteen hours a day, but nevertheless in a dream, I made my way through the week of the final dress rehearsal, and something happened there that changed my life. I did my stage manager’s work in costume, but with a long white coat over it, to keep it clean, and when Two, two came I had to whip it off, pop on my hat, take a final look in the full-length mirror just offstage in the corridor, and dash back to the wings to be ready for my plate-juggling moment. That went as rehearsed, but when it was time for my second appearance, walking the rope, I forgot something. During the scene when André-Louis made his revolutionary speech, he began by taking off his hat, and thrusting his Scaramouche mask up on his forehead. It was a half-mask, coming down to the mouth only; it was coloured a rosy red, and had a very long nose, just as Callot would have drawn it. When Sir John thrust it up on his brow, revealing his handsome, intent revolutionary’s face, extremely picturesque, it was a fine accent of colour, and the long nose seemed to add to his height. But when I appeared on the rope I was to have the mask pulled down, and when I made my contemptuous gesture toward the Marquis it was the long red nose of the mask I was to thumb.

“I managed very well till it came to the nose-thumbing bit, when I realized with horror that it was my own nose flesh I was thumbing. I had forgotten the mask! Unforgivable! So as soon as I could get away from Macgregor during the interval for the scene-change, I rushed to find Sir John and make my apologies. He had gone out into the stalls of the theatre, and was surrounded by a group of friends, who were congratulating him in lively tones, and I didn’t need to listen for long to find out that it was his performance on the rope they were talking about. So I crept away, and waited till he came backstage again. Then I approached him and said my humble say.

“Milady was with him and she said, ‘Jack, you’d be mad to throw it away. It’s a gift from God. If it fooled Reynolds and Lucy Bellamy it will fool anyone. They’ve known you for years, and it deceived them completely. You must let him do it.’ But Sir John was not a man to excuse anything, even a happy accident, and he fixed me with a stern eye. ‘Do you swear that was by accident? You weren’t presuming? Because I won’t put up with any presumption from a member of my company.’ ‘Sir John, I swear on the soul of my mother it was a mistake,’ I said. (Odd that I should have said that, but it was a very serious oath of Zovene’s, and I needed something serious at that moment; actually, at the time I spoke, my mother was living and whatever Ramsay says to the contrary, her soul was in bad repair.) ‘Very well,’ said Sir John, ‘we’ll keep it in. In future, when you walk the rope, wear your mask up on your head, as I do mine. And you’d better come to me for a lesson in make-up. You look like Guy Fawkes. And bear in mind that this is not to be a precedent. Any other clever ideas that come to you you’d be wise to suppress. I don’t encourage original thought in my productions.’ He looked angry as he walked away. I wanted to thank Milady for intervening on my behalf, but she was off to make a costume change.

“When I went back to Macgregor I thought he looked at me very queerly. ‘You’re a lucky laddie, Mungo Fetch,’ said he, ‘but don’t press your luck too hard. Many a small talent has come to grief that way.’ I asked him what he meant, but he just made his Scotch noise—‘Hut’—and went on with his work.

“I don’t think I would have dared to carry the matter any further if Holroyd and Frank Moore had not borne down on Macgregor after the last act. ‘What do you think of your Mungo now?’ said Frank, and once again they began to talk exactly as if I were not standing beside them, busy with a time-sheet. ‘I think it would have been better to give him another name,’ said Macgregor; ‘a fetch is an uncanny thing, and I don’t want anything uncanny in any theatre where I am in a place of responsibility.’ But Holroyd was as near buoyant as I ever saw him. ‘Uncanny, my eye,’ he said; ‘it’s the cherry on the top of the cake. The Guvnor’s close friends were deceived. Coup de théâtre they called it; that’s French for a bloody good wheeze.’ ‘You don’t need to tell me it’s French,’ said Macgregor. ‘I’ve no use for last-minute inspirations and unrehearsed effects. Amateurism, that’s what that comes to.’

“I couldn’t be quiet. ‘Mr. Macgregor, I didn’t mean to do it,’ I said; ‘I swear it on the soul of my mother.’ ‘All right, all right, I believe you without your Papist oaths,’ said Macgregor, ‘and I’m just telling you not to presume on the resemblance any further, or you’ll be getting a word from me.’ ‘What resemblance?’ I said. ‘Don’t talk to us as if we’re fools, m’boy,’ said old Frank. ‘You know damned well you’re the living image of the Guvnor in that outfit. Or the living image of him when I first knew him, I’d better say. Don’t you hear what’s said to you? Didn’t I tell you a fortnight ago? You’re as like the Guvnor as if you were spit out of his mouth. You’re his fetch, right enough.’ ‘Dinna say that,’ shouted Macgregor, becoming very broad in his Scots; ‘haven’t I told you it’s uncanny?’ But I began to understand, and I was as horrified as Macgregor. The impudence of it! Me, looking like the Guvnor! ‘What’d I better do?’ I said, and Holroyd and old Frank laughed like a couple of loonies. ‘Just be tactful, that’s all,’ said Holroyd. ‘It’s very useful. You’re the best double the Guvnor’s ever had, and it’ll be a livelihood to you for quite a while, I dare say. But be tactful.’

“Easy to tell me to be tactful. When your soul is blasted by a sudden uprush of pride, it’s cruel hard work to be tactful. Within an hour my sense of terrible impertinence in daring to look like the Guvnor had given way to a bloating vanity. Sir John was handsome, right enough, but thousands of men are handsome. He was something far beyond that. He had a glowing splendour that made him unike anybody else—except me, it appeared, when the circumstances were right. I won’t say he had distinction, because the word has been chewed to death to describe all kinds of people who simply look frozen. Take almost any politician and put a special cravat on him and stick a monocle in his eye and he becomes the distinguished Sir Nincome Poop, M.P. Sir John wasn’t frozen and his air of splendour had nothing to do with oddity. I suppose living and breathing Romance through a long career had a great deal to do with it, but it can’t have been the whole thing. And I was his fetch! I hadn’t really understood it when Moore and Holroyd had told me in the Crown and Two Chairmen that I looked like him. I knew I was of the same height, and we were built much the same—shorter than anybody wants to be, but with a length of leg that made the difference between being small and being stumpy. In my terrible clothes and with my flash, carnie’s ways—outward evidence of the life I had led and the kind of thinking it begot in me—I never thought the resemblance went beyond a reasonable facsimile. But when Sir John and I were on equal terms—dressed and wigged alike, against the same scenery and under the same lights, and lifted into the high sweet air of Romance—his friends had been deceived by the likeness. That was a stupefying drink for Paul Dempster, alias Cass Fletcher, alias Jules LeGrand—cheap people, every one of them. Ask me to be tactful in the face of that! Ask the Prince of Wales to call you a taxi!

“With the first night at hand my new vanity would not have been noticed, even if I had been free to display it. Our opening was exciting, but orderly. Macgregor, splendid in a dinner jacket, was a perfect field officer and everything happened smartly on cue. Sir John’s first entrance brought the expected welcome from the audience, and in my new role as a great gentleman of the theatre I watched carefully while he accepted it. He did it in the old style, though I didn’t know that at the time: as he walked swiftly down the steps from the inn, calling for the ostler, he paused as though surprised at the burst of clapping; ‘My dear friends, is this generosity truly for me?’ he seemed to be saying, and then, as the applause reached its peak, he gave the least perceptible bow, not looking toward the house, but keeping within the character of André-Louis Moreau, and began calling once more, which brought silence. Easy to describe, but no small thing to do, as I learned when my time came to do it myself. Only the most accomplished actors know how to manage applause, and I was lucky to learn it from a great master.

“Milady was welcomed in the same way, but her entrance was showy, as his was not—except, of course, for that little vanity of the lighting, which was a great help. She came on with the troupe of strolling players, and it couldn’t have failed. There was C. Pengelly Spickernell on the trumpet, to begin with, and a lot of excited shouting from the inn-servants, and then further shouting from the Italian Comedians, as they strutted onstage with their travelling-wagon; Grover Paskin led on the horse that pulled the cart, and it was heaped high with drums and gaudy trunks, baskets and rolls of flags, and on the top of the heap sat Milady, making more racket than anybody as she waved a banner in the air. It would have brought a round from a Presbyterian General Assembly. The horse alone was a sure card, because an animal on the stage gives an air of opulence to a play no audience can resist, and this stage horse was famous Old Betsy, who did not perhaps remember Garrick but who had been in so many shows that she was an admired veteran. My heart grew big inside me at the wonder of it, as I watched from the wings, and my eyes moistened with love.

“They were not too moist to notice one or two things that followed. The other women in the troupe of players walked on foot. How slim they looked, and I saw that Milady, with every aid of costume, was not slim. How fresh and pretty they looked, and Milady, though extraordinary, was not fresh nor pretty. When Eugene Fitzwarren gave her his arm to descend from the cart I could not help seeing that she came down on the stage heavily, with an audible plop that she tried to cover with laughter, and the ankles she showed were undeniably thick. All right, I thought, in my fierce loyalty, what of it? She could act rings around any of them, and did it. But she was not young, and if I had been driven to the last extreme of honesty I should have had to admit that she was like nothing in the heavens above, nor in the earth beneath, nor in the waters under the earth. I only loved her the more, and yearned for her to show how marvellous she was, though—it had to be faced—too old for Climene. She was supposed to be the daughter of old Frank Moore as Polichinelle, but I fear she looked more like his frivolous sister.

“It was not until I read the book, years later, that I found out what sort of woman Sabatini meant Climene to be. She was a child just on the verge of love whose ambition was to find a rich protector and make the best bargain for her beauty. That wasn’t in Milady’s range, physically or temperamentally, for there was nothing calculating or cheap about her. So, by patient re-writing of the lines during rehearsals, she became a witty, large-hearted actress, as young as the audience would believe her to be, but certainly no child, and no beauty. Or should I say that? She had a beauty all her own, of that rare kind that only great comic actresses have; she had beauty of voice, boundless charm of manner, and she made you feel that merely pretty women were lesser creatures. She had also I cannot tell how many decades of technique behind her, because she had begun her career when she really was a child, in Irving’s Lyceum, and she could make even an ordinary line sound like wit.

“I saw all of that, and felt it through and through me like the conviction of religion, but still, alas, I saw that she was old, and eccentric, and there was a courageous pathos about what she was doing.

“I was bursting with loyalty—a new and disturbing emotion for me—and Two, two went just as Sir John wanted it. My reward was that when I appeared on the tightrope there was an audible gasp from the house, and the curtain came down to great applause and even a few cries of Bravo. They were for Sir John; of course I knew that and wished it to be so. But I was aware that without me that climax would have been a lesser achievement.

“The play went on, it seemed to me, from triumph to triumph, and the last act, in Madame de Plougastel’s salon, shook me as it had never done in rehearsal. When André-Louis Moreau, now a leader in the Revolution, was told by the tearful Madame de Plougastel that she was his mother and that his evil genius, the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr, was his father—this revelation drawn from her only when Moreau had his enemy at the sword’s point—it seemed to me drama could go no higher. The look that came over Sir John’s face of disillusion and defeat, before he burst into Scaramouche’s mocking laugh, I thought the perfection of acting. And so it was. It wouldn’t do now—quite out of fashion—but if you’re going to act that kind of thing, that’s the way to do it.

“Lots of curtain calls. Flowers for Milady and some for Adele Chesterton, who had not been very good but who was so pretty you wanted to eat her with a silver spoon. Sir John’s speech, which I came to know very well, in which he declared himself and Milady to be the audience’s ‘most obedient, most devoted, and most humble servants’. Then the realities of covering the furniture with dust-sheets, covering the tables of properties, checking the time-sheet with Macgregor, and watching him hobble off to put the prompt-copy to bed in the safe. Then taking off my own paint, with a feeling of exaltation and desolation combined, as if I had never been so happy before, and would certainly never be so happy again.

“It was never the custom in that company to sit up and wait to see what the newspapers said; I think that was always more New York’s style than London’s. But when I went to the theatre the following afternoon to attend to some duties, all the reports were in but those of the great Sunday thunderers, which were very important indeed. Most of the papers said kind things, but even I sensed something about these criticisms that I could have wished otherwise expressed, or not said at all. ‘Unabashed romanticism … proof positive that the Old School is still vital … dear, familiar situations, resolved in the manner hallowed by romance … Sir John’s perfect command shows no sign of diminution with the years … Lady Tresize brings a wealth of experience to a role which, in younger hands, might have seemed contrived … Sabatini is a gift to players who require the full-flavoured melodrama of an earlier day … where do we look today for acting of this scope and authority?’

“Among the notices there had been one, in the News-Chronicle, where a clever new young man was on the job, which was downright bad. PITCHER GOES TOO OFTEN TO WELL, it was headed, and it said flatly that the Tresizes were old-fashioned and hammy, and should give way to the newer theatre.

“When the Sunday papers came, the Observer took the same line as the dailies, as though they had been looking at something very fine, but through the wrong end of the binoculars; it made Scaramouche seem small and very far away. James Agate, in the Sunday Times, condemned the play, which he likened to clockwork, and used Sir John and Milady as sticks to beat modern actors who did not know how to speak or move, and were ill bred and brittle.

“ ‘Nothing there to pull ’em in,’ I heard Holroyd saying to Macgregor.

“Nevertheless, we did pull ’em in for nearly ten weeks. Business was slack at the beginning of each week, and grew from Wednesday onward; matinees were usually sold out, chiefly to women from the suburbs, in town for a look at the shops and a play. But I knew from the gossip that business like that, in a London theatre, was covering running costs at best, and the expenses of production were still on the Guvnor’s overdraft. He seemed cheerful, and I soon found out why. He was going to do the old actor-manager’s trick and play Scaramouche as long as it would last and then replace it ‘by popular request’ with a few weeks of his old war-horse, The Master of Ballantrae.”

“Oh my God!” said Ingestree, and it seemed to me that he turned a little white.

“You remember this play?” said Lind.

“Vividly,” said Roly.

“A very bad play?”

“I don’t want to hurt the feelings of our friend here, who feels so strong about the Tresizes,” said Ingestree. “It’s just that The Master of Ballantrae coincided with rather a low point in my own career. I was finding my feet in the theatre, and it wasn’t really the kind of thing I was looking for.”

“Perhaps you would like me to pass over it,” said Magnus, and although he was pretending to be solicitous I knew he was enjoying himself.

“Is it vital to your subtext?” said Ingestree, and he too was half joking.

“It is, really. But I don’t want to give pain, my dear fellow.”

“Don’t mind me. Worse things have happened since.”

“Perhaps I can be discreet,” said Magnus. “You may rely on me to be as tactful as possible.”

“For God’s sake don’t do that,” said Ingestree. “In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth. Anyhow, my recollections of that play can’t be the same as yours. My troubles were mostly private.”

“Then I shall go ahead. But please feel free to intervene whenever you feel like it. Put me right on matters of fact. Even on shades of opinion. I make no pretence of being an exact historian.”

“Shoot the works,” said Ingestree. “I’ll be as still as a mouse. I promise.”

“As you wish. Well—The Master of Ballantrae was another of the Guvnor’s romantic specials. It too was from a novel, by somebody-or-other—”

“By Robert Louis Stevenson,” said Ingestree, in an undertone, “though you wouldn’t have guessed it from what appeared on the stage. These adaptations! Butcheries would be a better word—”

“Shut up, Roly,” said Kinghovn. “You said you’d be quiet.”

“I’m no judge of what kind of adaptation it was,” said Magnus, “because I haven’t read the book and I don’t suppose I ever will. But it was a good, tight, well-caulked melodrama, and people had been eating it up since the Guvnor first brought it out, which I gathered was something like thirty years before the time I’m talking about. I told you he was an experimenter and an innovator, in his day. Well, whenever he had lost a packet on Maeterlinck, or something new by Stephen Phillips, he would pull The Master out of the storehouse and fill up the bank-account again. He could go to Birmingham, and Manchester, and Newcastle, and Glasgow, and Edinburgh or any big provincial town—and those towns had big theatres, not like the little pill-boxes in London—and pack ’em in with the The Master. Especially Edinburgh, because they seemed to take the play for their own. Macgregor told me, ‘The Master’s been a mighty get-penny for Sir John.’ When you saw him in it you knew why it was so. It was made for him.”

“It certainly was,” said Ingestree. “Made for him out of the blood and bones of poor old Stevenson. I have no special affection for Stevenson, but he didn’t deserve that.”

“As you can see, it was a play that called forth strong feeling,” said Magnus. “I never read it, myself, because Macgregor always held the prompt-copy and did the prompting himself, if anybody was so absurd as to need prompting. But of course I picked up the story as we rehearsed.

“It had a nice meaty plot. Took place in Scotland around the middle of the eighteenth century. There had been some sort of trouble—I don’t know the details—and Scottish noblemen were divided in allegiance between Bonny Prince Charlie and the King of England. The play was about a family called Durie; the old Lord of Durrisdeer had two sons, the first-born being called the Master of Ballantrae and the younger being simply Mr Henry Durie. The old Lord decided on a sneaky compromise when the trouble came, and sent the Master off to fight for Bonny Charlie, while Mr Henry remained at home to be loyal to King George. On those terms, you see, the family couldn’t lose, whichever way the cat jumped.

“The Master was a dashing, adventurous fellow, but essentially a crook, and he became a spy in Prince Charlie’s camp, leaking information to the English: Mr Henry was a scholarly, poetic sort of chap, and he stayed at home and mooned after Miss Alison Graeme; she was the old Lord’s ward, and of course she loved the dashing Master. When news came from the wars that the Master had been killed, she consented to marry Mr Henry as a matter of duty and to provide Durrisdeer with an heir. ‘But ye ken she never really likit the fella,’ as Macgregor explained it to me; her heart was always with the Master, alive or dead. But the Master wasn’t dead; he wasn’t the dying kind: he slipped away from the battle and became a pirate—not one of your low-living dirty-faced pirates, but a very classy privateer and spy. And so, when the troubles had died down and Bonny Charlie was out of the way, the Master came back to claim Miss Alison, and found that she was Mrs Henry, and the mother of a fine young laird.

“The Master tried to lure Miss Alison away from her husband: Mr Henry was noble about it, and he nobly kept mum about the Master having turned spy during the war. ‘A verra strong situation,’ as Macgregor said. Consequence, a lot of taunting talk from the Master, and an equal amount of noble endurance from Mr Henry, and at last a really good scene, of the kind Roly hates, but our audiences loved.

“The Master had picked up in his travels an Indian servant, called Secundra Dass; he knew a lot of those Eastern secrets that Western people believe in so religiously. When Mr Henry could bear things no longer, he had a fight with the Master, and seemed to kill him; but as I told you, the Master wasn’t the dying kind. So he allowed himself to be buried, having swallowed his tongue (he’d learned that from Secundra Dass) and, as it said in the play, ‘so subdued his vital forces that the spark of life, though burning low, was not wholly extinguished.’ Mr Henry, tortured by guilt, confessed his crime to his wife and the old Lord, and led them to the grove of trees where the body was buried. When the servants dug up the corpse, it was no corpse at all, but the Master, in very bad shape; the tongue-trick hadn’t worked quite as he expected—something to do with the chill of the Scottish climate, I expect—and he came to life only to cry, ‘Murderer, Henry—false, false!’ and drop dead, but not before Mr Henry shot himself. Thereupon the curtain came down to universal satisfaction.

“I haven’t described it very respectfully. I feel irreverent vibrations coming to me from Roly, the way mediums do when there is an unbeliever at a seance. But I assure you that as the Guvnor acted it, the play compelled belief and shook you up pretty bad. The beauty of the old piece, from the Guvnor’s point of view, was that it provided him with what actors used to call ‘a dual role’. He played both the Master and

Mr Henry, to the huge delight of his audiences; his fine discrimination between the two characters gave extraordinary interest to the play.

“It also meant some neat work behind the scenes, because there were times when Mr Henry had barely left the stage before the Master came swaggering on through another door. Sir John’s dresser was an expert at getting him out of one coat, waistcoat, boots, and wig and into another in a matter of seconds, and his characterization of the two men was so sharply differentiated that it was art of a very special kind.

“Twice, a double was needed, simply for a fleeting moment of illusion, and in the brief last scene the double was of uttermost importance, because it was he who stood with his back to the audience, as Mr Henry, while the Guvnor, as the Master, was being dug up and making his terrible accusation. Then—doubles don’t usually get such opportunities—it was the double’s job to put the gun to his head, fire it, and fall at the feet of Miss Alison, under the Master’s baleful eye. And I say with satisfaction that as I was an unusually successful double—or dead spit, as old Frank Moore insisted on saying—I was allowed to fall so that the audience could see something of my face, instead of dying under suspicion of being somebody else.

“Rehearsals went like silk, because some of the cast were old hands, and simply had to brush up their parts. Frank Moore had played the old Lord of Durrisdeer scores of times, and Eugene Fitzwarren was a seasoned Secundra Dass; Gordon Barnard had played Burke, the Irishman, and built it up into a very good thing; C. Pengelly Spickernell fancied himself as Fond Barnie, a loony Scot who sang scraps of song, and Grover Paskin had a good funny part as a drunken butler; Emilia Pauncefort, who played Madame de Plougastel in Scaramouche, loved herself as a Scots witch who uttered the dire Curse of Durrisdeer—

And of course the role of Alison, the unhappy bride of Mr Henry and the pining adorer of the Master, had been played by Milady since the play was new.

“That was where the difficulty lay. Sir John was still great as the Master, and looked surprisingly like himself in his earliest photographs in that part, taken thirty years before; time had been rougher with Milady. Furthermore, she had developed an emphatic style of acting which was not unacceptable in a part like Climene but which could become a little strong as a high-bred Scots lady.

“There were murmurs among the younger members of the company. Why couldn’t Milady play Auld Cursin’ Jennie instead of Emilia Pauncefort? There was a self-assertive girl in the company named Audrey Sevenhowes who let it be known that she would be ideally cast as Alison. But there were others, Holroyd and Macgregor among them, who would not hear a word against Milady. I would have been one of them too, if anybody had asked my opinion, but nobody did. Indeed, I began to feel that the company thought I was rather more than an actor who doubled for Sir John; I was a double indeed, and a company spy, so that any disloyal conversation stopped as soon as I appeared. Of course there was lots of talk; all theatrical companies chatter incessantly. On the rehearsals went, and as Sir John and Milady didn’t bother to rehearse their scenes together, nobody grasped how extreme the problem had become.

“There was another circumstance about those early rehearsals that caused some curiosity and disquiet for a while; a stranger had appeared among us whose purpose nobody seemed to know, but who sat in the stalls making notes busily, and now and then exclaiming audibly in a tone of disapproval. He was sometimes seen talking with Sir John. What could he be up to? He wasn’t an actor, certainly. He was young, and had lots of hair, but he wasn’t dressed in a way that suggested the stage. His sloppy grey flannels and tweed coat, his dark blue shirt and tie like a piece of old rope—hand-woven, I suppose—and his scuffed suede shoes made him look even younger than he was. ‘University man,’ whispered Audrey Sevenhowes, who recognized the uniform. ‘Cambridge,’ she whispered, a day later. Then came the great revelation—‘Writing a play!’ Of course she didn’t confide these things to me, but they leaked from her close friends all through the company.

“Writing a play! Rumour was busily at work. It was to be a grand new piece for Sir John’s company, and great opportunities might be secured by buttering up the playwright. Reginald Charlton and Leonard Woulds, who hadn’t much to do in Scaramouche and rather less in The Master, began standing the university genius drinks; Audrey Sevenhowes didn’t speak to him, but was frequently quite near him, laughing a silvery laugh and making herself fascinating. Old Emilia Pauncefort passed him frequently, and gave him a stately nod every time. Grover Paskin told him jokes. The genius liked it all, and in a few days was on good terms with everybody of any importance, and the secret was out. Sir John wanted a stage version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the genius was to write it. But as he had never written a play before, and had never had stage experience except with the Cambridge Marlowe Society, he was attending rehearsals, as he said to ‘get the feel of the thing’.

“The genius was free with his opinions. He thought little of The Master of Ballantrae. ‘Fustian’ was the word he used to describe it, and he made it clear that the era of fustian was over. Audiences simply wouldn’t stand it any more. A new day had dawned in the theatre, and he was a particularly bright beam from the rising sun.

“He was modest, however. There were brighter beams than he, and the brightest, most blinding beam in the literature of the time was somebody called Aldous Huxley. No, Huxley didn’t write plays. It was his outlook—wry, brilliantly witty, rooted in tremendous scholarship, and drenched in the Ironic Spirit—that the genius admired, and was about to transfer to the stage. In no time he had a tiny court, in which Charlton and Woulds and Audrey Sevenhowes were the leaders, and after rehearsals they were always to be seen in the nearest pub, laughing a great deal. With my very long ears it wasn’t long before I knew they were laughing at Milady and Frank Moore and Emilia Pauncefort, who were the very warp and woof of fustian, and who couldn’t possibly be worked into the kind of play the genius had in mind. No, he hadn’t begun writing yet, but he had a Concept, and though he hated the word ‘metaphysical’ he didn’t mind using it to give a rough idea of how the Concept would take shape.

“Sir John didn’t know about the Concept as yet, but when it was explained to him he would get a surprise. The genius was hanging around The Master of Ballantrae because it was from a novel by the same chap that had written Jekyll and Hyde. But this chap—Roly says his name was Stevenson, and I’m sure he knows—had never fully shouldered the burden of his own creative gift. This was something the genius would have to do for him. Stevenson, when he had thought of Jekyll and Hyde, had seized upon a theme that was Dostoyevskian, but he had worked it out in terms of what some people might call Romance, but the genius regretfully had to use the word fustian. The only thing the genius could do, in order to be true to his Concept, was to rework the Stevenson material in such a way that its full implications—the ones Stevenson had approached, and run away from in fright—were revealed.

“He thought it could be done with masks. The genius confessed, with a laugh at his own determination, that he would not attempt the thing at all unless he was given a completely free hand to use masks in every possible way. Not only would Jekyll and Hyde wear masks, but the whole company would wear them, and sometimes there would be eight or ten Jekylls on the stage, all wearing masks showing different aspects of that character, and we would see them exchange the masks of Jekyll—because there was to be no nonsense about realism, or pretending to the audience that what they saw had any relationship to what they foolishly thought of as real life—for masks of Hyde. There would be dialogue, of course, but mostly in the form of soliloquies, and a lot of the action would be carried out in mime—a word which the genius liked to pronounce ‘meem’, to give it the flavour he thought it needed.

“Charlton and Woulds and Audrey Sevenhowes thought this sounded wonderful, though they had some reservations, politely expressed, about the masks. They thought stylized make-up might do just as well. But the genius was rock-like in his insistence that it would be masks or he would throw up the whole project.

“When this news leaked through to the other members of the company they were disgusted. They talked about other versions of Jekyll and Hyde they had seen, which did very well without any nonsense about masks. Old Frank Moore had played with Henry Irving’s son ‘H.B.’ in a Jekyll and Hyde play where H.B. had made the transformation from the humane doctor to the villainous Hyde before the eyes of the audience, simply by ruffling up his hair and distorting his body. Old Frank showed us how he did it: first he assumed the air of a man who is about to be wafted off the ground by his own moral grandeur, then he drank the dreadful potion out of his own pot of old-and-mild, and then, with an extraordinary display of snarling and gnawing the air, he crumpled up into a hideous gnome. He did this one day in the pub and some strangers, who weren’t used to actors, left hurriedly and the landlord asked Frank, as a personal favour, not to do it again. Frank had an extraordinarily gripping quality as an actor.

“Nevertheless, as I admired his snorting and chomping depiction of evil, I was conscious that I had seen even more convincing evil in the face of Willard the Wizard, and that there it had been as immovable and calm as stone.

“Suddenly, one day at rehearsal, the genius lost stature. Sir John called to him, ‘Come along, you may as well fit in here, mphm? Give you practical experience of the stage, quonk?’, and before we knew what was happening he had the genius acting the part of one of the menservants in Lord Durrisdeer’s household. He wasn’t bad at all, and I suppose he had learned a few things in his amateur days at Cambridge. But at a critical moment Sir John said, ‘Clear away your master’s chair, m’boy; when he comes downstage to Miss Alison you take the chair back to the upstage side of the fireplace.’ Which the genius did, but not to Sir John’s liking; he put one hand under the front of the seat, and the other on the back of the armchair, and hefted it to where he had been told. Sir John said, ‘Not like that, m’boy; lift it by the arms.’ But the genius smiled and said, ‘Oh no, Sir John, that’s not the way to handle a chair; you must always put one hand under its apron, so as not to put a strain on its back.’ Sir John went rather cool, as he did when he was displeased, and said, ‘That may have been all very well in your father’s shop, m’boy, but it won’t do on my stage. Lift it as I tell you.’ And the genius turned exceedingly red, and began to argue. At which Sir John said to the other extra, ‘You do it, and show him how.’ And he ignored the genius until the end of the scene.

“Seems a trivial thing, but it rocked the genius to his foundations; after that he never seemed to be able to do anything right. And the people who had been all over him before were much cooler after that slight incident. It was the mention of the word ‘shop’. I don’t think actors are particularly snobbish, but I suppose Audrey Sevenhowes and the others had seen him as a gilded undergraduate; all of a sudden he was just a clumsy actor who had come from some sort of shop, and he never quite regained his former lustre. When we dress-rehearsed The Master it was apparent that he knew nothing about make-up; he appeared with a horrible red face and a huge pair of false red eyebrows. ‘Good God, m’boy,’ Sir John called from the front of the house, when this spook appeared, ‘what have you been doing to your face?’ The genius walked to the footlights—inexcusable, he should have spoken from his place on the stage—and began to explain that as he was playing a Scots servant he thought he should have a very fresh complexion to suggest a peasant ancestry, a childhood spent on the moors, and a good deal more along the same lines. Sir John shut him up, and told Darton Flesher, a good, useful actor, to show the boy how to put on a decent, unobtrusive face, suited to chair-lifting.

“The genius was huffy, backstage, and talked about throwing up the whole business of Jekyll and Hyde and leaving Sir John to stew in his own juice. But Audrey Sevenhowes said, ‘Oh, don’t be so silly; everybody has to learn,’ and that cooled him down. Audrey also threw him a kind word about how she couldn’t spare him because he was going to write a lovely part for her in the new play, and gave him a smile that would have melted—well, I mustn’t be extreme—that would have melted a lad down from Cambridge whose self-esteem had been wounded. It wouldn’t have melted me; I had taken Miss Sevenhowes’ number long before. But then, I was a hard case.

“Not so hard that I hadn’t a little sympathy for Adele Chesterton, whose nose was out of joint. She was still playing in Scaramouche, but she had not been cast in The Master; an actress called Felicity Larcombe had been brought in for the second leading female role in that. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen anywhere: very dark brown hair, splendid eyes, a superb slim figure, and that air of enduring a secret sorrow bravely which so many men find irresistible. What was more, she could act, which poor Adele Chesterton, who was the Persian-kitten type, could only do by fits and starts. But she was a decent kid, and I was sorry for her, because the company, without meaning it unkindly, neglected her. You know how theatre companies are: if you’re working with them, you’re real, and if you aren’t, you have only a half-life in their estimation. Adele was the waning, and Felicity the waxing, moon.

“As usual, Audrey Sevenhowes had a comment. ‘Nobody to blame but herself,’ said she; ‘made a Horlicks—an utter Horlicks—of her part. I could have shown them, but—’ Her shrug showed what she thought of the management’s taste. ‘Horlicks’ was a word she used a lot; it suggested ‘ballocks’ but avoided a direct indecency. Charlton and Woulds loved to hear her say it; it seemed delightfully daring, and sexy, and knowing. It was my first encounter with this sort of allurement, and I disliked it.

“I mentioned to Macgregor that Miss Larcombe seemed a very good, and probably expensive, actress for her small part in The Master. ‘Ah, she’ll have a great deal to do on the tour,’ he replied, and I pricked up my ears. But there was nothing more to be got out of him about the tour.

“It was all clear before we opened The Master, however; Sir John was engaging a company to make a longish winter tour in Canada, with a repertoire of some of his most successful old pieces, and Scaramouche as a novelty. Holroyd was asking people to drop into his office and talk about contracts.

“Of course the company buzzed about it. For the established actors a decision had to be made: would they absent themselves from London for the best part of a winter season? All actors under a certain age are hoping for some wonderful chance that will carry them into the front rank of their profession, and a tour in Sir John’s repertoire wasn’t exactly it. On the other hand, a tour of Canada could be a lark, because Sir John was known to be a great favourite there and they would play to big audiences, and see a new country while they did it.

“For the middle-aged actors it was attractive. Jim Hailey and his wife Gwenda Lewis jumped at it, because they had a boy to educate and it was important to them to keep in work. Frank Moore was an enthusiastic sightseer and traveller, and had toured Australia and South Africa but had not been to Canada since 1924. Grover Paskin and C. Pengelly Spickernell were old standbys of Sir John’s, and would cheerfully have toured Hell with him. Emilia Pauncefort wasn’t likely to get other offers, because stately old women and picturesque hags were not frequent in West End shows that season, and the Old Vic, where she had staked out quite a little claim in cursing queens, had a new director who didn’t fancy her.

“But why Gordon Barnard, who was a very good leading man, or Felicity Larcombe, who was certain to go to the top of the profession? Macgregor explained to me that Barnard hadn’t the ambition that should have gone with his talent, and Miss Larcombe, wise girl, wanted to get as much varied experience as she could before descending on the West End and making it hers forever. There was no trouble at all in recruiting a good company, and I was glad to sign my own contract, to be assisttant to Mac and play doubles without having my name on the programme. And to everybody’s astonishment, the genius was offered a job on the tour, and took it. So eighteen actors were recruited, not counting Sir John and Milady, and with Holroyd and some necessary technical staff, the final number of the company was to be twenty-eight.

“The work was unrelenting. We opened The Master of Ballantrae, and although the other critics were not warm about it Agate gave it a push and we played a successful six weeks in London. God, what audiences! People came out of the woodwork to see it, and it seemed they had all seen it before and couldn’t get enough of it. ‘It’s like peeping into the dark backward and abysm of time,’ the genius said, and even I felt that in some way the theatre had been put back thirty years when we appeared in that powerful, thrilling, but strangely antique piece.

“Every day we were called for rehearsal, in order to get the plays ready for the tour. And what plays they were! The Lyons Mail and The Corsican Brothers, in both of which I doubled for Sir John, and Rosemary, a small play with a minimum of scenery, which was needed to round out a repertoire in which all the other plays were big ones, with cartloads of scenery and dozens of costumes. I liked Rosemary especially, because I didn’t double in it but I had a showy appearance as a stilt walker. How we sweated! It was rough on the younger people, who had to learn several new parts during days when they were working a full eight hours, but Moore and Spickernell and Paskin and Miss Pauncefort seemed to have been playing these melodramas for years, and the lines rolled off their tongues like grave old music. As for Sir John and Milady, they couldn’t have been happier, and there is nothing so indestructibly demanding and tireless as a happy actor.

“Did I say we worked eight hours? Holroyd and Macgregor, with me as their slave, worked much longer than that, because the three plays we were adding to Scaramouche and The Master had to be retrieved from storage and brushed up and made smart for the tour. But it was all done at last, and we closed in London one Saturday night, with everything finished that would make it possible for us to sail for Canada the following Tuesday.

“A small matter must be mentioned. The genius’s mother turned up for one of the last performances of The Master, and it fell to me to show her to Sir John’s dressing-room. She was a nice little woman, but not what one expects of the mother of such a splendid creature, and when I showed her through the great man’s door she looked as if she might faint from the marvel of it all. I felt sorry for her; it must be frightening when one mothers such a prodigy, and she had the humble look of somebody who can’t believe her luck.”

It was here that Roland Ingestree, who had been decidedly out of sorts for the past half-hour, intervened.

“Magnus, I don’t much mind you taking the mickey out of me, if that’s how you get your fun, but I think you might leave poor old Mum out of it.”

Magnus pretended astonishment. “But my dear fellow, I don’t see how I can. I’ve done my best to afford you the decency of obscurity. I’d hoped to finish my narrative without letting the others in on our secret. I could have gone on calling you ‘the genius’, though you had other names in the company. There were some who called you ‘the Cantab’ because of your degree from Cambridge, and there were others who called you ‘One’ because you had that mock-modest trick of referring to yourself as One when in your heart you were crying, ‘Me, me, glorious ME!’ But I can’t leave you out, and I don’t see how I can leave your Mum out, because she threw so much light on you, and therefore lent a special flavour to the whole story of Sir John’s touring company.”

“All right, Magnus; I was a silly young ass, and I freely admit it. But isn’t one permitted to be an ass for a year or two, when one is young, and the whole world appears to be open to one, and waiting for one? Because you had a rotten childhood, don’t suppose that everybody else who had better luck was utterly a fool. Have you any idea what you looked like in those days?”

“No, I haven’t, really, but I see you are dying to tell me. Do please go ahead.”

“I shall. You were disliked and distrusted because everybody thought you were a sneak, as you’ve said yourself. But you haven’t told us that you were a sneak, and blabbed to Macgregor about every trivial breach of company discipline—who came into the theatre after the half-hour call, and who might happen to have a friend in the dressing-room during the show, and who watched Sir John from the wings when he had said they weren’t to, and anything else you could find out by pussy-footing and snooping. Even that might have passed as your job, if you hadn’t had such a nasty personality—always smiling like a pantomime demon—always stinking of some sort of cheap hair oil—always running like a rabbit to open doors for Milady—and vain as a peacock about your tuppenny-ha’penny juggling and wire-walking. You were a thoroughly nasty little piece of work, let me tell you.”

“I suppose I was. But you make the mistake of thinking I was pleased with myself. Not a bit of it. I was trying to learn the ropes of another mode of life—”

“Indeed you were! You were trying to be Sir John off the stage as well as on. And what a caricature you made of it! Walking like Spring-Heeled Jack because Frank Moore had tried to show you something about deportment, and parting your greasy long hair in the middle because Sir John was the last actor on God’s earth to do so, and wearing clothes that would make a cat laugh because Sir John wore eccentric duds that looked as if he’d had ’em since Mafeking Night.”

“Do you think I’d have been better off to model myself on you?”

“I was no prize as an actor. Don’t think I don’t know it. But at least I was living in 1932, and you were aping a man who was still living in 1902, and if there hadn’t been a very strong uncanny whiff about you you’d have been a total freak.”

“Ah, but there was an uncanny whiff about me. I was Mungo Fetch, don’t forget. We fetches can’t help being uncanny.”

Lind intervened. “Dear friends,” he said, being very much the courtly Swede, “let us not have a quarrel about these grievances which are so long dead. You are both different men now. Think, Roly, of your achievements as a novelist and broadcaster; One, and the Genius and the Cantab are surely buried under that? And you, my dear Eisengrim, what reason have you to be bitter toward anyone? What have you desired that life has not given you? Including what I now see is a very great achievement; you modelled yourself on a fine actor of the old school, and you have put all you learned at the service of your own art, where it has flourished wonderfully. Roly, you sought to be a literary man, and you are one; Magnus, you wanted to be Sir John, and it looks very much as if you had succeeded, in so far as anyone can succeed—”

“Just a little more than most people succeed,” said Ingestree, who was still hot; “you ate poor old Sir John. You ate him down to the core. We could see it happening, right from the beginning of that tour.”

“Did I really?” said Magnus, apparently pleased. “I didn’t know it showed so plainly. But now you are being melodramatic, Roly. I simply wanted to be like him. I told you, I apprenticed myself to an egoism, because I saw how invaluable that egoism was. Nobody can steal another man’s ego, but he can learn from it, and I learned. You didn’t have the wits to learn.”

“I’d have been ashamed to toady as you did, whatever it brought me.”

“Toady? Now that’s an unpleasant word. You didn’t learn what there was to be learned in that company, Ingestree. You were at every rehearsal and every performance of The Master of Ballantrae that I was. Don’t you remember the splendid moment when Sir John, as Mr Henry, said to his father: ‘There are double words for everything: the word that swells and the word that belittles; my brother cannot fight me with a word.’ Your word for my relationship to Sir John is toadying, but mine is emulation, and I think mine is the better word.”

“Yours is the dishonest word. Your emulation, as you call it, sucked the pith out of that poor old ham, and gobbled it up and made it part of yourself. It was a very nasty process.”

“Roly, I idolized him.”

“Yes, and to be idolized by you, as you were then, was a terrible, vampire-like feeding on his personality and his spirit—because his personality as an actor was all there was of his spirit. You were a double, right enough, and such a double as Poe and Dostoyevsky would have understood. When we first met at Sorgenfrei I thought there was something familiar about you, and the minute you began to act I sensed what it was; you were the fetch of Sir John. But I swear it wasn’t until today, as we sat at this table, that I realized you really were Mungo Fetch.”

“Extraordinary! I recognized you the minute I set eyes on you, in spite of the rather Pickwickian guise you have acquired during the past forty years.”

“And you were waiting for a chance to knife me?”

“Knife! Knife! Always these belittling words! Have you no sense of humour, my dear man?”

“Humour is a poisoned dagger in the hands of a man like you. People talk of humour as if it were all jolly, always the lump of sugar in the coffee of life. A man’s humour takes its quality from what a man is, and your humour is like the scratch of a rusty nail.”

“Oh, balls,” said Kinghovn. Ingestree turned on him, very white in the face.

“What the hell do you mean by interfering?” he said.

“I mean what I say. Balls! You people who are so clever with words never allow yourselves or anybody else a moment’s peace. What is this all about? You two knew each other when you were young and you didn’t hit it off. So now we have all this gaudy abuse about vampires and rusty nails from Roly, and Magnus is leading him on to make a fool of himself and cause a fight. I’m enjoying myself. I like this subtext and I want the rest of it. We had just got to where Roly’s Mum was paying a visit to Sir John backstage. I want to know about that. I can see it in my mind’s eye. Colour, angle of camera, quality of light—the whole thing. Get on with it and let’s forget all this subjective stuff; it has no reality except what somebody like me can provide for it, and at the moment I’m not interested in subjective rubbish. I want the story. Enter Roly’s Mum; what next?”

“Since Roly’s Mum is such a hot potato, perhaps Roly had better tell you,” said Eisengrim.

“So I will. My Mum was a very decent body, though at the time I was silly enough to underrate her; as Magnus has made clear I was a little above myself in those days. University does it, you know. It’s such a protected life for a young man, and he so easily loses his frail hold on reality.

“My people weren’t grand, at all. My father had an antique shop in Norwich, and he was happy about that because he had risen above his father, who had combined a small furniture shop with an undertaking business. Both my parents had adored Sir John, and ages before the time we are talking about—before the First Great War, in fact—they did rather a queer thing that brought them to his attention. They loved The Master of Ballantrae; it was just their meat, full of antiquery and romance; they liked selling antiques because it seemed romantic, I truly believe. They saw The Master fully ten times when they were young, and loved it so that they wrote out the whole play from memory—I don’t suppose it was very accurate, but they did—and sent it to Sir John with an adoring letter. Sort of tribute from playgoers whose life he had illumined, you know. I could hardly believe it when I was young, but I know better now; fans get up to the queerest things in order to associate themselves with their idols.

“Sir John wrote them a nice letter, and when next he was near Norwich, he came to the shop. He loved antiques, and bought them all over the place, and I honestly think his interest in them was simply romantic, like my parents’. They never tired of telling about how he came into the shop, and inquired about a couple of old chairs, and finally asked if they were the people who had sent him the manuscript. That was a glory-day for them, I can tell you. And afterward, whenever they had anything that was in his line, they wrote to him, and quite often he bought whatever it was. That was why it was so bloody-minded of him to take it out of me about the proper way to handle a chair, and to make that crack about the shop. He knew it would hurt.

“Anyhow, my mother was out of her mind with joy when she wangled me a job with his company; thought he was going to be my great patron, I suppose. My father had died, and the shop could keep her, but certainly not me, and anyhow I was set on being a writer. I admit I was pleased to be asked to do a literary job for him; it wasn’t quite as grand as I may have pretended to Audrey Sevenhowes, but who hasn’t been a fool in his time? If I’d been shrewd enough to resist a pretty girl I’d have been a sharp little piece of glass like Mungo Fetch, instead of a soft boy who had got a swelled head at Cambridge, and knew nothing about the world.

“When my Mum knew I was going to Canada with the company she came to London to say good-bye—I’m ashamed to say I had told her there was no chance of my going to Norwich, though I suppose I could have made it—and she wanted to see Sir John. She’d brought him a gift, the loveliest little wax portrait relievo of Garrick you ever saw; I don’t know where she picked it up, but it was worth eighty pounds if it was worth a ha’penny, and she gave it to him. And she asked him, in terms that made me blush, to take good care of me while I was abroad. I must say the old boy was decent, and said very kindly that he was sure I didn’t need supervision, but that he would always be glad to talk with me if anything came up that worried me.”

“Audrey Sevenhowes put it about that your Mum had asked Milady to see that you didn’t forget your bedsocks in the Arctic wildernesses of Canada,” said Eisengrim.

“You don’t surprise me. Audrey Sevenhowes was a bitch, and she made a fool of me. But I don’t care. I’d rather be a fool than a tough any day. But I assure you there was no mention of bedsocks; my Mum was not a complex woman, but she wasn’t stupid, either.”

“Ah, there you have the advantage of me,” said Magnus, with a smile of great charm. “My mother, I fear, was very much more than stupid, as I have already told you. She was mad. So perhaps we can be friends again, Roly?”

He put out his hand across the table. It was not a gesture an Englishman would have made, and I couldn’t quite make up my mind whether he was sincere or not. But Ingestree took his hand, and it was perfectly plain that he meant to make up the quarrel.

The waiters were beginning to look at us meaningly, so we adjourned upstairs to our expensive apartment, where everybody had a chance to use the loo. The film-makers were not to be shaken. They wanted the story to the end. So, after the interval—not unlike an interval at the theatre—we reassembled in our large sitting-room, and it now seemed to be understood, without anybody having said so, that Roly and Magnus were going to continue the story as a duet.

I was pleased, as I was pleased by anything that gave me a new light or a new crumb of information about my old friend, who had become Magnus Eisengrim. I was puzzled, however, by the silence of Liesl, who had sat through the narration at the lunch table without saying a word. Her silence was not of the unobtrusive kind; the less she said the more conscious one became of her presence. I knew her well enough to bide my time. Though she said nothing, she was big with feeling, and I knew that she would have something to say when she felt the right moment had come. After all, Magnus was in a very real sense her property: did he not live in her house, treat it as his own, share her bed, and accept the homage of her extraordinary courtesy, yet always understanding who was the real ruler of Sorgenfrei? What did Liesl think about Magnus undressing himself, inch by inch, in front of the film-makers? Particularly now that it was clear that there was an old, unsettled hostility between him and Roland Ingestree, what did she think?

What did I think, as I carefully wiped my newly scrubbed dentures on one of the Savoy’s plentiful linen hand-towels, before slipping them back over my gums? I thought I wanted all I could get of this vicarious life. I wanted to be off to Canada with Sir John Tresize. I knew what Canada meant to me: what had it meant to him?

(6)

When I returned to our drawing-room Roly was already aboard ship.

“One of my embarrassments—how susceptible the young are to embarrassment—was that my dear Mum had outfitted me with a vast woolly steamer-rug in a gaudy design. The company kept pestering Macgregor to know what tartan it was, and he thought it looked like Hunting Cohen, so The Hunting Cohen it was from that time forth. I didn’t need it, God knows, because the C.P.R. ship was fiercely hot inside, and it was too late in the season for anyone to sit on deck in any sort of comfort.

“My Mum was so solicitous in seeing me off that the company pretended to think I needed a lot of looking after, and made a great game of it. Not unkind (except for Charlton and Woulds, who were bullies) but very joky and hard to bear, especially when I wanted to be glorious in the eyes of Audrey Sevenhowes. But my Mum had also provided me with a Baedeker’s Canada, the edition of 1922, which had somehow found its way into the shop, and although it was certainly out of date a surprising number of people asked for a loan of it, and informed themselves that the Govemment of Canada issued a four-dollar bill, and that the coloured porters on the sleeping-cars expected a minimum tip of twenty-five cents a day, and that a guard’s van was called a caboose on Canadian railways, and similar useful facts.

“The Co. may have thought me funny, but they were a quaint sight themselves when they assembled on deck for a publicity picture before we left Liverpool. There were plenty of these company pictures taken through the whole length of the tour, and in every one of them Emilia Pauncefort’s extraordinary travelling coat (called behind her back the Coat of Many Colours) and the fearful man’s cap that Gwenda Lewis fastened to her head with a hatpin, so that she would be ready for all New World hardships, and the fur cap C. Pengelly Spickernell wore, assuring everybody that a skin cap with earflaps was absolutely de rigueur in the Canadian winter, Grover Paskin’s huge pipe, with a bowl about the size of a brandy-glass, and Eugene Fitzwarren’s saucy Homburg and coat with velvet collar, in the Edwardian manner—all these strange habiliments figured prominently. Even though the gaudy days of the Victorian mummers had long gone, these actors somehow got themselves up so that they couldn’t have been taken for anything else on God’s earth but actors.

“It was invariable, too, that when Holroyd had mustered us for one of these obligatory pictures, Sir John and Milady always appeared last, smiling in surprise, as if a picture were the one thing in the world they hadn’t expected, and as if they were joining in simply to humour the rest of us. Sir John was an old hand at travelling in Canada, and he wore an overcoat of Raglan cut and reasonable weight, but of an amplitude that spoke of the stage—and, as our friend has told us, the sleeves were always a bit short so that his hands showed to advantage. Milady wore fur, as befitted the consort of an actor-knight; what fur it was nobody knew, but it was very furry indeed, and soft, and smelled like money. She topped herself with one of those cloche hats that were fashionable then, in a hairy purple felt; not the happiest choice, because it almost obscured her eyes, and threw her long duck’s-bill nose into prominence.

“But never—never, I assure you—in any of these pictures would you find Mungo Fetch. Who can have warned him off? Whose decision was it that a youthful Sir John, in clothes that were always too tight and sharply cut, wouldn’t have done in one of these pictures which always appeared in Canadian papers with a caption that read: ‘Sir John Tresize and his London company, including Miss Annette de la Borderie (Lady Tresize), who are touring Canada after a triumphant season in the West End.’ ”

“It was a decision of common sense,” said Magnus. “It never worried me. I knew my place, which is more than you did, Roly.”

“Quite right. I fully admit it. I didn’t know my place. I was under the impression that a university man was acceptable everywhere, and inferior to no one. I hadn’t twigged that in a theatrical company—or any artistic organization, for that matter—the hierarchy is decided by talent, and that art is the most rigorously aristocratic thing in our democratic wodd. So I always pushed in as close to Audrey Sevenhowes as I could, and I even picked up the trick from Charlton of standing a bit sideways, to show my profile, which I realize now would have been better kept a mystery. I was an ass. Oh, indeed I was a very fine and ostentatious ass, and don’t think I haven’t blushed for it since.”

“Stop telling us what an ass you were,” said Kinghovn. “Even I recognize that as an English trick to pull the teeth of our contempt. ‘Oh, I say, what a jolly good chap: says he’s an ass, don’t yer know; he couldn’t possibly say that if he was really an ass.’ But I’m a tough-minded European; I think you really were an ass. If I had a time-machine, I’d whisk myself back into 1932 and give you a good boot in the arse for it. But as I can’t, tell me why you were included on the tour. Apparently you were a bad actor and an arguing nuisance as a chair-lifter. Why would anybody pay you money, and take you on a jaunt to Canada?”

“You need a drink, Harry. You are speaking from the deep surliness of the deprived boozer. Don’t fuss; it’ll be the canonical, appointed cocktail hour quite soon, and then you’ll regain your temper. I was taken as Sir John’s secretary. The idea was that I’d write letters to fans that he could sign, and do general dog’s-body work, and also get on with Jekyll-and-Hyde.

“That was where the canker gnawed, to use an appropriately melodramatic expression. I had thought, you see, that I was to write a dramatization of Stevenson’s story, and as Magnus has told you I was full of great ideas about Dostoyevsky and masks. I used to quote Stevenson at Sir John: ‘I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens,’ I would say, and entreat him to let me put the incongruous denizens on the stage, in masks. He merely shook his head and said, ‘No good, m’boy; my public wouldn’t like it.’ Then I would have at him with another quotation, in which Jekyll tells of ‘those appetites I had long secretly indulged, and had of late begun to pamper’. Once he asked me what I had in mind. I had lots of Freudian capers in mind: masochism, and sadism, and rough-stuff with girls. That rubbed his Victorianism the wrong way. ‘Unwholesome rubbish,’ was all he would say.

“In the very early days of our association I was even so daring as to ask him to scrap Jekyll-and-Hyde and let me do a version of Dorian Gray for him. That really tore it! ‘Don’t ever mention that man to me again,’ he said; ‘Oscar Wilde dragged his God-given genius in unspeakable mire, and the greatest kindness we can do is to forget his name. Besides, my public wouldn’t hear of it.’ So I was stuck with Jekyll-and-Hyde.

“Stuck even worse than I had at first supposed. Ages and ages before, at the beginning of their career together, Sir John and Milady had concocted The Master of Ballantrae themselves, with their own innocent pencils. They made the scenario, down to the last detail, then found some hack to supply dialogue. This, I discovered to my horror, was what they had done again. They had made a scheme for Jekyll-and-Hyde, and they expected me to write some words for it, and he had the gall to say they would polish. Those two mountebanks polish my stuff! I was no hack; hadn’t I got a meritorious second in Eng. Lit. at Cambridge? And it would have been a first, if I had been content to crawl and stick to the party line about everything on the syllabus from Beowulf on down! Don’t laugh, you people. I was young and I had pride.”

“But no stage experience,” said Lind.

“Perhaps not, but I wasn’t a fool. And you should have seen the scenario Sir John and Milady had cobbled up between them. Stevenson must have turned in his grave. Do you know The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? It’s tremendously a written book. Do you know what I mean? Its quality is so much in the narrative manner; extract the mere story from it and it’s just a tale of bugaboo. Chap drinking a frothy liquid that changes from clear to purple and then to green—green if you can imagine anything so corny—and he shrinks into his wicked alter ego. I set myself to work to discover a way of getting the heart of the literary quality into a stage version.

“Masks would have helped enormously. But those two had seized on what was, for them, the principal defect of the original, which was that there was no part for a woman in it. Well, imagine! What would the fans of Miss Annette de la Borderie say to that? So they had fudged up a tale in which Dr Jekyll had a secret sorrow; it was that a boyhood friend had married the girl he truly loved, who discovered after the marriage that she truly loved Jekyll. So he adored her honourably, while her husband went to the bad through drink. The big Renunciation ploy, you see, which was such a telling card in The Master.

“To keep his mind off his thwarted love, Dr Jekyll took to mucking with chemicals, and discovered the Fateful Potion. Then the husband of the True Love died of booze, and Jekyll and she were free to marry. But by that time he was addicted to the Fateful Potion. Had taken so much of it that he was likely to give a shriek and dwindle into Hyde at any inconvenient moment. So he couldn’t marry his True Love and couldn’t tell her why. Great final scene, where he is locked in his laboratory, changed into Hyde, and quite unable to change back, because he’s run out of the ingredients of the F.P.; True Love, suspecting something’s up, storms the door with the aid of a butler and footman who break it in; as the blows on the door send him into the trembles, Jekyll, with one last superhuman clutching at his Better Self, realizes that there is only one honourable way out; he takes poison, and hops the twig just as True Love bursts in; she holds the body of Hyde in her arms, weeping piteously, and the power of her love is so great that he turns slowly back into the beautiful Dr Jekyll, redeemed at the very moment of death.”

“A strong curtain,” said I. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. I should like to have seen that play. I remember Tresize well; he could have done it magnificently.”

“You must be pulling my leg,” said lngestree, looking at me in reproach.

“Not a bit of it. Good, gutsy melodrama. You’ve described it in larky terms, because you want us to laugh. But I think it would have worked. Didn’t you ever try?”

“Oh yes, I tried. I tried all through that Canadian tour. I would slave away whenever I got a chance, and then show my homework to Sir John, and he would mark it up in his own spidery handwriting. Kept saying I had no notion of how to make words effective, and wrote three sentences where one would do.

“I tried everything I knew. I remember saying to myself one night, as I lay in my berth in a stiflingly hot Canadian train, What would Aldous Huxley do, in my position? And it came to me that Aldous would have used what we call a distancing-technique—you know, he would have written it all apparently straight, but with a choice of vocabulary that gave it all an ironic edge, so that the perceptive listener would realize that the whole play was ambiguous, and could be taken as a hilarious send-up. So I tried a scene or two like that, and I don’t believe Sir John even twigged; he just sliced out all the telling adjectives, and there it was, melodrama again. I never met a man with such a deficient literary sense.”

“Did it ever occur to you that perhaps he knew his job?” said Lind. “I’ve never found that audiences liked ambiguity very much. I’ve got all my best effects by straight statement.”

“Dead right,” said Kinghovn. “When Jurgen wants ambiguity he tips me the wink and I film the scene a bit skew-whiff, or occasionally going out of focus, and that does the trick.”

“You’re telling me this now,” said Ingestree, “and I expect you’re right, in your unliterary way. But there was nobody to tell me anything then, except Sir John, and I could see him becoming more and more stagily patient with me, and letting whatever invisible audience he acted to in his offstage moments admire the way in which the well-graced actor endured the imbecilities of the dimwitted boy. But I swear there was something to be said on my side, as well. But as I say I was an ass. Am I never to be forgiven for being an ass?”

“That’s a very pretty theological point,” I said. “ ‘In the law of God there is no statute of limitations.’ ”

“My God! Do you remember that one?” said Ingestree.

“Oh yes; I’ve read Stevenson too, you know, and that chilly remark comes in Jekyll and Hyde, so you are certainly familiar with it. Are we ever forgiven for the follies even of our earliest years? That’s something that torments me often.”

“Bugger theology!” said Kinghovn. “Get on with the story.”

“High time Harry had a drink,” said Liesl. “I’ll call for some things to be sent up. And we might as well have dinner here, don’t you think? I’ll choose.”

When she had gone into the bedroom to use the telephone Magnus looked calculatingly at Ingestree, as if at some curious creature he had not observed before. “You describe the Canadian tour simply as a personal Gethsemane, but it was really quite an elaborate affair,” he said. “I suppose one of your big problems was trying to fit a part into Jekyll-and-Hyde for the chaste and lovely Sevenhowes. Couldn’t you have made her a confidential maid to the True Love, with stirring lines like, ‘Ee, madam, Dr Jekyll ’e do look sadly mazy-like these latter days, madam’? That would have been about her speed. A rotten actress. Do you know what became of her? Neither do I. What becomes of all those pretty girls with a teaspoonful of talent who seem to drift off the stage before they are thirty? But really, my dear Roly, there was a great deal going on. I was working like a galley-slave.”

“I’m sure you were,” said Ingestree; “toadying to Milady, as I said earlier. I use the word without malice. Your approach was not describable as courtier-like, nor did it quite sink to the level of fawning; therefore I think toadying is the appropriate expression.”

“Call it toadying if it suits your keen literary sense. I have said several times that I loved her, but you choose not to attach any importance to that. Loved her not in the sense of desiring her, which would have been grotesque, and never entered my head, but simply in the sense of wishing to serve her and do anything that was in my power to make her happy. Why I felt that way about a woman old enough to be my mother is for you dabblers in psychology to say, but nothing you can think of will give the real quality of my feeling; there is a pitiful want of resonance in so much psychological explanation of what lies behind things. If you had felt more, Roly, and been less remorselessly literary, you might have seen possibilities in the plan for the Jekyll and Hyde play. A man redeemed and purged of evil by a woman’s love—now there’s a really unfashionable theme for a play in our time! So unfashionable as to be utterly incredible. Yet Sir John and Milady seemed to know what such themes were all about. They were more devoted than any people I have ever known.”

“Like a couple of old love-birds,” said Ingestree.

“Well, what would you prefer? A couple of old scratching cats? Don’t forget that Sir John was a symbol to countless people of romantic love in its most chivalrous expression. You know what Agate wrote about him once—‘He touches women as if they were camellias.’ Can you name an actor on the stage today who makes love like that? But there was never a word of scandal about them, because off the stage they were inseparables.

“I think I penetrated their secret: undoubtedly they began as lovers but they had long been particularly close friends. Is that common? I haven’t seen much of it, if it is. They were sillies, of course. Sir John would never hear a word that suggested that Milady was unsuitably cast as a young woman, though I know he was aware of it. And she was a silly because she played up to him, and clung quite pitiably to some mannerisms of youth. I knew them for years, you know; you only knew them on that tour. But I remember much later, when a newspaper interviewer touched the delicate point, Sir John said with great dignity and simplicity, ‘Ah, but you see, we always felt that our audiences were ready to make allowances if the physical aspect of a character was not ideally satisfied, because they knew that so many other fine things in our performances were made possible thereby.’

“He had a good point, you know. Look at some of the leading women in the Comédie Française; crone is not too hard a word when first you see them, but in ten minutes you are delighted with the art, and forget the appearance, which is only a kind of symbol, anyhow. Milady had extraordinary art, but alas, poor dear, she did run to fat. It’s better for an actress to become a bag of bones, which can always be equated somehow with elegance. Fat’s another thing. But what a gift of comedy she had, and how wonderfully it lit up a play like Rosemary, where she insisted on playing a character part instead of the heroine. Charity, Roly, charity.”

“You’re a queer one to be talking about charity. You ate Sir John. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. You ate that poor old ham.”

“That’s one of your belittling words, like ‘toady’. I’ve said it: I apprenticed myself to an egoism, and if in the course of time, because I was younger and had a career to make, the egoism became more mine than his, what about it? Destiny, m’boy? Inevitable, quonk?”

“Oh, God, don’t do that, it’s too horribly like him.”

“Thank you. I thought so myself. And, as I tell you, I worked to achieve it!

“You had quite a jolly time on the voyage to Canada, as I recall. But don’t you remember those rehearsals we held every day, in such holes and corners of the ship as the Purser could make available to us? Macgregor and I were too busy to be seasick, which was a luxury you didn’t deny yourself. You were sick the night of the ship’s concert. Those concerts are utterly a thing of the past. The Purser’s assistant was busy almost before the ship left Liverpool, ferreting out what possible talent there might be on board—ladies who could sing ‘The Rosary’ or men who imitated Harry Lauder. A theatrical company was a godsend to the poor man. And in the upshot C. Pengelly Spickernell sang ‘Melisande in the Wood’ and ‘The Floral Dance’ (nicely contrasted material, was what he called it) and Grover Paskin told funny stories (insecurely cemented together with ‘And that reminds me of the time—’) and Sir John recited Clarence’s Dream from Richard III; Milady made the speech hitting up the audience for money for the Seaman’s Charities, and did it with so much charm and spirit that they got a record haul.

“But that’s by the way. We worked on the voyage and after we’d docked at Montreal the work was even harder. We landed on a Friday, and opened on Monday at Her Majesty’s for two weeks, one given wholly to Scaramouche and the second to The Corsican Brothers and Rosemary. We did first-rate business, and it was the beginning of what the old actors loved to call a triumphal tour. You wouldn’t believe how we were welcomed, and how the audiences ate up those romantic plays—”

“I remember some fairly cool notices,” said Roly.

“But not cool audiences. That’s what counts. Provincial critics are always cool; they have to show they’re not impressed by what comes from the big centres of culture. The audiences thought we were wonderful.”

“Magnus, the audiences thought England was wonderful. The Tresize company came from England, and if the truth is to be told it came from a special England many of the people in those audiences cherished—the England they had left when they were young, or the England they had visited when they were young, and in many cases an England they simply imagined and wished were a reality.

“Even in 1932 all that melodrama was terribly old hat, but every audience had a core of people who were happy just to be listening to English voices repeating noble sentiments. The notion that everybody wants the latest is a delusion of intellectuals; a lot of people want a warm, safe place where Time hardly moves at all, and to a lot of those Canadians that place was England. The theatre was almost the last stronghold of the old colonial Canada. You know very well it was more than twenty years since Sir John had dared to visit New York, because his sort of theatre was dead there. But it did very well in Canada because it wasn’t simply theatre there—it was England, and they were sentimental about it.

“Don’t you remember the smell of mothballs that used to sweep up onto the stage when the curtain rose, from all the bunny coats and ancient dress suits in the expensive seats? There were still people who dressed for the theatre, though I doubt if they dressed for anything else, except perhaps a regimental ball or something that also reminded them of England. Sir John was exploiting the remnants of colonialism. You liked it because you knew no better.”

“I knew Canada,” said Magnus. “At least, I knew the part of it that had responded to Wanless’s World of Wonders and Happy Hannah’s jokes. The Canada that came to see Sir John was different but not wholly different. We didn’t tour the villages; we toured the cities with theatres that could accommodate our productions, but we rushed through many a village I knew as we jaunted all those thousands of miles on the trains. As we travelled, I began to think I knew Canada pretty well. But quite another thing was that I knew what entertains people, what charms the money out of their pockets, and feeds their imagination.

“The theatre to you was a kind of crude extension of Eng. Lit. at Cambridge, but the theatre I knew was the theatre that makes people forget some things and remember others, and refreshes dry places in the spirit. We were both ignorant young men, Roly. You were the kind that is so scared of life that you only know how to despise it, for fear you might be tricked into liking something that wasn’t up to the standards of a handful of people you admired. I was the kind that knew very little that wasn’t tawdry and tough and ugly, but I hadn’t forgotten my Psalms, and I thirsted for something better as the hart pants for the water-brooks. So Sir John’s plays, and the decent manners he insisted on in his company, and the regularity and honesty of the Friday treasury, when I got my pay without having to haggle or kick back any part of it to some petty crook, did very well for me.”

“You’re idealizing your youth, Magnus. Lots of the company just thought the tour was a lark.”

“Yes, but even more of the company were honest players and did their best in the work they had at hand. You saw too much of Charlton and Woulds, who were no good and never made any mark in the profession. And you were under the thumb of Audrey Sevenhowes, who was another despiser, like yourself. Of course we had our ridiculous side. What theatrical troupe hasn’t? But the effect we produced wasn’t ridiculous. We had something people wanted, and we didn’t give them short weight. Very different from my carnival days, when short weight was the essence of everything.”

“So for you the Canadian tour was a time of spiritual growth,” said Lind.

“It was a time when I was able to admit that honesty and some decency of life were luxuries within my grasp,” said Magnus. “Can you imagine that? You people all have the flesh and finish of those who grew up feeling reasonably safe in the world. And you grew up as visible people. Don’t forget that I had spent most of my serious hours inside Abdullah.”

“Melodrama has eaten into your brain,” said Roly. “When I knew you, you were inside Sir John, inside his body and inside his manner and voice and everything about him that a clever double could imitate. Was it really different?”

“Immeasurably different.”

“I wish you two would stop clawing one another,” said Kinghovn. “If it was all so different—and I’m quite ready to believe it was—how was it different? If it’s possible to find out, of course. You two sound as if you had been on different tours.”

“Not a bit of it. It was the same tour, right enough,” said Magnus; “but I probably remember more of its details than Roly. I’m a detail man; it’s the secret of being a good illusionist. Roly has the big, broad picture, as it would have appeared to someone of his temperament and education. He saw everything it was proper for the Cantab and One to notice; I saw and tried to understand everything that passed before my eyes.

“Do you remember Morton W. Penfold, Roly? No, I didn’t think you would. But he was one of the casters on which that tour rolled. He was our Advance.

“The tour was under the management of a syndicate of rich Canadians who wanted to encourage English theatre companies to visit Canada, partly because they wanted to stem what they felt was a too heavy American influence, partly in the hope that they might make a little money, partly because they felt the attraction of the theatre in the ignorant way rich businessmen sometimes do. When we arrived in Montreal some of them met the ship and bore Sir John and Milady away, and there was a great deal of wining and dining before we opened on Monday. Morton W. Penfold was their representative, and he went ahead of us like a trumpeter all across the country. Arranged about travel and saw that tickets for everybody were forthcoming whenever we mounted a train. Saw that trains were delayed when necessary, or that an improvised special helped us to make a difficult connection. Arranged that trucks and sometimes huge sleighs were ready to lug the scenery to and from the theatres. Arranged that there were enough stagehands for our heavy shows, and a rough approximation of the number of musicians we needed to play out music, and college boys or other creatures of the right height and bulk who were needed for the supers in The Master and Scaramouche. Saw that a horse of guaranteed good character and continence was hired to pull Climene’s cart. Placed the advertisements in the local papers ahead of our appearance, and also tasty bits of publicity about Sir John and Milady; had a little anecdote ready for every paper that made it clear that the name Tresize was Cornish and that the emphasis came on the second syllable; also provided a little packet of favourable reviews from London, Montreal, and Toronto papers for the newspapers in small towns where there was no regular critic, and such material might prime the pump of a local reporter’s invention. He also saw that the information was provided for the programmes, and warned local theatre managers that Madame de Plougastel’s Salon was not a misprint for Madame de Plougastel’s Saloon, which some of them were apt to think.

“Morton W. Penfold was a living marvel, and I learned a lot from him on the occasions when he was in the same town with us for a few days. He was more theatrical than all but the most theatrical of the actors; had a big square face with a blue jaw, a hypnotist’s eyebrows, and a deceptive appearance of dignity and solemnity, because he was a fellow of infinite wry humour. He wore one of those black Homburg hats that politicians used to affect, but he never dinted the top of it, so that he had something of the air of a Mennonite about the head; wore a stiff choker collar and one of those black satin stocks that used to be called a dirty-shirt necktie, because it covered everything within the V of his waistcoat. Always wore a black suit, and had a dazzling ten-cent shoeshine every day of his life. His business office was contained in the pockets of his black overcoat; he could produce anything from them, including eight-by-ten-inch publicity pictures of the company.

“He was pre-eminently a great fixer. He seemed to know everybody, and have influence everywhere. In every town he had arranged for Sir John to address the Rotarians, or the Kiwanians, or whatever club was meeting on an appropriate day. Sir John always gave the same speech, which was about ‘cementing the bonds of the British Commonwealth’; he could have given it in his sleep, but he was too good an actor not to make it seem tailor-made for every new club.

“If we were going to be in a town that had an Anglican Cathedral over a weekend it was Morton W. Penfold who persuaded the Dean that it was a God-given opportunity to have Sir John read the Second Lesson at the eleven o’clock service. His great speciality was getting Indian tribes to invest a visiting English actor as a Chief, and he had convinced the Blackfoot that Sir John should be re-christened Soksi-Poyina many years before the tour I am talking about.

“Furthermore, he knew the idiosyncrasies of the liquor laws in every Canadian province we visited, and made sure the company did not run dry; this was particularly important as Sir John and Milady had a taste for champagne, and liked it iced but not frozen, which was not always a simple requirement in that land of plentiful ice. And in every town we visited, Morton W. Penfold had made sure that our advertising sheets, full-size, half-size, and folio, were well displayed and that our little flyers, with pictures of Sir John in some of his most popular roles, were on the reception desks of all the good hotels.

“And speaking of hotels, it was Morton W. Penfold who took particulars of everybody’s taste in accommodation on that first day in Montreal, and saw that wherever we went reservations had been made in the grand railway hotels, which were wonderful, or in the dumps where people like James Hailey and Gwenda Lewis stayed, for the sake of economy.

“Oh, those cheap hotels! I stayed in the cheapest, where one electric bulb hung from a string in the middle of the room, where the sheets were like cheesecloth, and where the mattresses—when they were revealed as they usually were after a night’s restless sleep—were like maps of strange worlds, the continents being defined by unpleasing stains, doubtless traceable to the incontinent dreams of travelling salesmen, or the rapturous deflowerings of brides from the backwoods.

“Was he well paid for his innumerable labours? I don’t know, but I hope so. He said very little that was personal, but Macgregor told me that Morton W. Penfold was born into show business, and that his wife was the granddaughter of the man whom Blondin the Magnificent had carried across Niagara Gorge on his shoulders in 1859. It was under his splendid and unfailing influence that we travelled thousands of miles across Canada and back again, and played a total of 148 performances in forty-one towns, ranging from places of about twenty thousand souls to big cities. I think I could recite the names of the theatres we played in now, though they showed no great daring in what they called themselves; there were innumerable Grands, and occasional Princesses or Victorias, but most of them were just called Somebody’s Opera House.”

“Frightful places,” said Ingestree, doing a dramatic shudder.

“I’ve seen worse since,” said Magnus. “You should try a tour in Central America, to balance your viewpoint. What was interesting about so many of the Canadian theatres, outside the big cities, was that they seemed to have been built with big ideas, and then abandoned before they were equipped. They had pretty good foyers and auditoriums with plush seats, and invariably eight boxes, four on each side of the stage, from which nobody could see very well. All of them had drop curtains with views of Venice or Rome on them, and a spy-hole through which so many actors had peeped that it was ringed with a black stain from their greasepaint. Quite a few had special curtains on which advertisements were printed for local merchants; Sir John didn’t like those, and Holroyd had to do what he could to suppress them.

“Every one had a sunken pen for an orchestra, with a fancy balustrade to cut it off from the stalls, and nobody ever seemed to sweep in there. At performance time a handful of assassins would creep into the pen from a low door beneath the stage, and fiddle and thump and toot the music to which they were accustomed. C. Pengelly Spickernell used to say bitterly that these musicians were all recruited from the local manager’s poor relations; it was his job to assemble as many of them as could get away from their regular work on a Monday morning and take them through the music that was to accompany our plays. Sir John was fussy about music, and always had a special overture for each of his productions, and usually an entr’acte as well.

“God knows it was not very distinguished music. When we heard it, it was a puzzle to know why ‘Overture to Scaramouche’ by Hugh Dunning did any more for the play that followed than if the orchestra had played ‘Overture to The Master of Ballantrae’ by Festyn Hughes. But there it was, and to Sir John and Milady these two lengths of mediocre music were as different as daylight and dark, and they used to sigh and raise their eyebrows at one another when they heard the miserable racket coming from the other side of the curtain, as if it were the ravishing of a masterpiece. In addition to this specially written music we carried a substantial body of stuff with such titles as ‘Minuet d’Amour’, ‘Peasant Dance’, and ‘Gaelic Memories’, which did for Rosemary; and for The Corsican Brothers Sir John insisted on an overture that had been written for Irving’s production of Robespierre by somebody called Litolff. Another great standby was ‘Suite: At the Play’, by York Bowen. But except in the big towns the orchestra couldn’t manage anything unfamiliar, so we generally ended up with ‘Three Dances from Henry VIII’, by Edward German, which I suppose is known to every bad orchestra in the world. C. Pengelly Spickernell used to grieve about it whenever anybody would listen, but I honestly think the audiences liked that bad playing, which was familiar and had associations with a good time.

“Backstage there was nothing much to work with. No light, except for a few rows of red, white, and blue bulbs that hardly disturbed the darkness when they were full on. The arrangements for hanging and setting our scenery were primitive, and only in the big towns was there more than one stagehand with anything that could be called experience. The others were jobbed in as they were needed, and during the day they worked in factories or lumber-yards. Consequently we had to carry everything we needed with us, and now and then we had to do some rapid improvising. It wasn’t as though these theatres weren’t used; most of them were busy for at least a part of each week for seven or eight months every year. It was simply that the local magnate, having put up the shell of a theatre, saw no reason to go further. It made touring adventurous, I can tell you.

“The dressing-rooms were as ill equipped as the stages. I think they were worse than those in the vaude houses I had known, because those at least were in constant use and had a frowsy life to them. In many towns there were only two wash-basins backstage for a whole company, one behind a door marked M and the other behind a door marked F. These doors, through years of use, had ceased to close firmly, which at least meant that you didn’t need to knock to find out if they were occupied. Sir John and Milady used small metal basins of their own, to which their dressers carried copper jugs of hot water—when there was any hot water.

“One thing that astonished me then, and still surprises me, is that the stage door, in nine towns out of ten, was up an unpaved alley, so that you had to pick your way through mud, or snow in the cold weather, to reach it. You knew where you were heading because the only light in the alley was one naked electric bulb, stuck laterally into a socket above the door, with a wire guard around it. It was not the placing of the stage door that surprised me, but the fact that, for me, that desolate and dirty entry was always cloaked in romance. I would rather go through one of those doors, even now, than walk up a garden path to be greeted by a queen.”

“You were stage-struck,” said Roly. “You rhapsodize. I remember those stage doors. Ghastly.”

“I suppose you’re right,” said Magnus. “But I was very, very happy. I’d never been so well placed, or had so much fun in my life. How Macgregor and I used to labour to teach those stagehands their job! Do you remember how, in the last act of The Corsican Brothers, when the Forest of Fontainebleau was supposed to be covered in snow, we used to throw down coarse salt over the stage-cloth, so that when the duel took place Sir John could kick some of it aside to get a firm footing? Can you imagine trying to explain how that salt should be placed to some boob who had laboured all day in a planing-mill, and had no flair for romance? The snow was always a problem, though you’d think that Canadians, of all people, would understand snow. At the beginning of that act the forest is supposed to be seen in that dull but magical light that goes with snowfall. Old Boissec the wood-cutter—Grover Paskin in one of his distinguished cameos—enters singing a little song; he represents the world of everyday, drudging along regardless of the high romance which is shortly to burst upon the scene. Sir John wanted a powdering of snow to be falling as the curtain rose; just a few flakes, falling slowly so that they caught a little of the winter light. Nothing so coarse as bits of paper for us! It had to be fuller’s earth, so that it would drift gently, and not be too fiercely white. Do you think we could get one of those stagehands on the road to grasp the importance of the speed at which that snow fell, and the necessity to get it exactly right? If we left it to them they threw great handfuls of snow bang on the centre of the stage, as if some damned great turkey with diarrhoea were roosting up in a tree. So it was my job to get up on the catwalk, if there was one, and on something that had been improvised and was usually dangerous if there wasn’t, and see that the snow was just as Sir John wanted it. I suppose that’s being stage-struck, but it was worth every scruple of the effort it took. As I said, I’m a detail man, and without the uttermost organization of detail there is no illusion, and consequently no romance. When I was in charge of the snow the audience was put in the right mood for the duel, and for the Ghost at the end of the play.”

“You really can’t blame me for despising it,” said Roly. “I was one of the New Men; I was committed to a theatre of ideas.”

“I don’t suppose I’ve ever had more than half a dozen ideas in my life, and even those wouldn’t have much appeal for a philosopher,” said Magnus. “Sir John’s theatre didn’t deal in ideas, but in feelings. Chivalry, and loyalty and selfless love don’t rank as ideas, but it was wonderful how they seized on our audiences; they loved such things, even if they had no intention of trying them out in their own lives. No use arguing about it, really. But people used to leave our performances smiling, which isn’t always the case with a theatre of ideas.”

“Art as soothing syrup, in fact.”

“Perhaps. But it was very good soothing syrup. We never made the mistake of thinking it was a universal panacea.”

“Soothing syrup in aid of a dying colonialism.”

“I expect you’re right. I don’t care, really. It’s true we thumped the good old English drum pretty loudly, but that was one of the things the syndicate wanted. When we visited Ottawa, Sir John and Milady were the Governor General’s guests at Rideau Hall.”

“Yes, and what a bloody nuisance that was! Actors ought never to stay in private houses or official residences. I had to scamper out there every morning with the letters, and get my orders for the day. Run the gamut of snotty aides who never seemed to know where Lady Tresize was to be found.”

“Didn’t she ever tell you any stories about that? Probably not. I don’t think she liked you much better than you liked her. Certainly she told me that it was like living in a very pretty little court, and that all sorts of interesting people came to call. Don’t you remember that the Govemor General and his suite came to Scaramouche one night when we were playing in the old Russell Theatre? ‘God Save the King’ was played after they came in, and the audience was so frozen with etiquette that nobody dared to clap until the G.G. had been seen to do so. There were people who sucked in their breath when I thumbed my nose while walking the tightrope; they thought I was Sir John, you see, and they couldn’t imagine a knight committing such an unspeakable rudery in the presence of an Earl. But Milady told me the Earl was away behind the times; he didn’t know what it meant in Canadian terms, and thought it still meant something called ‘fat bacon’, which I suppose was Victorian. He guffawed and thumbed his nose and muttered, ‘Fat bacon, what?’ at the supper party afterward, at which Mr Mackenzie King was a guest; Mr King was so taken aback he could hardly eat his lobster. Apparently he got over it though, and Milady said she had never seen a man set about a lobster with such whole-souled enthusiasm. When he surfaced from the lobster he talked to her very seriously about dogs. Funny business, when you think of it—I mean all those grandees sitting at supper at midnight, after a play. That must have been romantic too, in its way, although there were no young people present—except the aides and one or two ladies-in-waiting, of course. In fact, I thought a lot of Canada was romantic.”

“I didn’t. I thought it was the rawest, roughest, crudest place I had ever set eyes on, and in the midst of that, all those vice-regal pretensions were ridiculous.”

“I wonder if that’s what you really thought, Roly? After all, what were you comparing it with? Norwich, and Cambridge, and a brief sniff at London. And you weren’t in a condition to see anything except through the spectacles of a thwarted lover and playwright. You were being put through the mincer by the lovely Sevenhowes; you were her toy for the tour, and your agonies were the sport of her chums Charlton and Woulds. Whenever we were on one of those long train hops from city to city, we all saw it in the dining-car.

“Those dining-cars! There was romance for you! Rushing through the landscape; that fierce country north of Lake Superior, and the marvellous steppes of the prairies, in an elegant, rather too hot, curiously shaped dining-room, full of light, glittering with tablecloths and napkins so white they looked blue, shining silver (or something very close), and all those clean, courteous, friendly black waiters—if that wasn’t romance you don’t know the real thing when you see it! And the food! Nothing hotted up or melted out in those days, but splendid stuff that came on fresh at every big stop; cooked brilliantly in the galley by a real chef; fresh fish, tremendous meat, real fruit—don’t you remember what their baked apples were like? With thick cream! Where does one get thick cream now? I remember every detail. The cube sugar was wrapped in pretty white paper with Castor printed on it, and every time we put it in our coffee I suppose we enriched our dear friend Boy Staunton, so clear in the memory of Dunny and myself, because he came from our town, though I didn’t know that at the time.…” (My ears pricked up: I swear my scalp tingled. Magnus had mentioned Boy Staunton, the Canadian tycoon, and also my lifelong friend, whom I was pretty sure Magnus had murdered. Or, if not murdered, had given a good push on a path that looked like suicide. This was what I wanted for my document. Had Magnus, who withheld death cruelly from Willard, given it almost as a benefaction to Boy Staunton? Would his present headlong, confessional mood carry him to the point where he would admit to murder, or at least give a hint that I, who knew so much but not enough, would be able to interpret?. But I must miss nothing, and Magnus was still rhapsodizing about C.P.R. food as once it was.) “… And the sauces; real sauces, made by the chef—exquisite!

“There were bottled sauces, too. Commercial stuff I learned to hate because at every meal that dreary utility actor Jim Hailey asked for Garton’s; then he would wave it about saying, ‘Anybody want any of the Handkerchief?’ because, as he laboriously pointed out, if you spelled Garton’s backward it came out Snotrag; poor Hailey was that depressing creature, a man of one joke. Only his wife laughed and blushed because he was being ‘awful’, and she never failed to tell him so. But I suppose you didn’t see because you always tried to sit at the table with Sevenhowes and Charlton and Woulds; if she was cruel and asked Eric Foss to sit with them instead, you sat as near as you could and hankered and glowered as they laughed at jokes you couldn’t hear.

“Oh, the trains, the trains! I gloried in them because with Wanless’s I had done so much train travel and it was wretched. I began my train travel, you remember, in darkness and fear, hungry, with my poor little bum aching desperately. But here I was, unmistakably a first-class passenger, in the full blaze of that piercing, enveloping, cleansing Canadian light. I was quite content to sit at a table with some of the technical staff, or sometimes with old Mac and Holroyd, and now and then with that Scheherazade of the railways, Morton W. Penfold, when he was making a hop with us.

“Penfold knew all the railway staff; I think he knew all the waiters. There was one conductor we sometimes encountered on a transcontinental, who was a special delight to him, a gloomy man who carried a real railway watch—one of those gigantic nickel-plated turnips that kept very accurate time. Penfold would hail him: ‘Lester, when do you think we’ll be in Sault Ste Marie?’ Then Lester would pull up the watch out of the well of his waistcoat, and look sadly at it, and say, ‘Six fifty-two, Mort, if we’re spared.’ He was gloomy-religious, and everything was conditional on our being spared; he didn’t seem to have much confidence in either God or the C.P.R.

“Penfold knew the men on the locomotives, too, and whenever we came to a long, straight stretch of track, he would say, ‘I wonder if Fred is dipping his piles.’ This was because one of the oldest and best of the engineers was a martyr to haemorrhoids, and Penfold swore that whenever we came to an easy piece of track, Fred drew off some warm water from the boiler into a basin, and sat in it for a few minutes, to ease himself. Penfold never laughed; he was a man of deep, private humour, and his solemn, hypnotist’s face never softened, but the liquid on his lower eyelid glittered and occasionally spilled over, and his head shook; that was his laugh.

“Now and then, on long hauls, the train carried a private car for Sir John and Milady; these luxuries could not be hired—or only by the very rich—but sometimes a magnate who owned one, or a politician who had the use of one, would put it at the disposal of the Tresizes, who had armies of friends in Canada. Sir John, and Milady especially, were not mingy about their private car, and always asked a few of the company in, and now and then, on very long hauls, they asked us all in and we had a picnic meal from the dining-car. Now surely that was romance, Roly? Or didn’t you find it so? All of us perched around one of those splendid old relics, most of which had been built not later than the reign of Edward the Seventh, full of marquetry woodwork (there was usually a little plaque somewhere that told you where all the woods came from) and filigree doodads around the ceiling, and armchairs with a fringe made of velvet bobbles everywhere that fringe could be imagined. In a sort of altar-like affair at one end of the drawing-room area were magazines in thick leather folders—and what magazines! Always the Sketch and the Tatler and Punch and the Illustrated London News—it was like a club on wheels. And lashings of drink for everybody—that was Penfold’s craft at work—but it wasn’t at all the thing for anybody to guzzle and get drunk, because Sir John and Milady didn’t like that.”

“He was a great one to talk,” said Ingestree. “He could drink any amount without showing it, and it was believed everywhere that he drank a bottle of brandy a day just to keep his voice mellow.”

“Believed, but simply not true. It’s always believed that star actors drink heavily, or beat their wives, or deflower a virgin starlet every day to slake their lust. But Sir John drank pretty moderately. He had to. Gout. He never spoke about it, but he suffered a lot with it. I remember one of those parties when the train lurched and Felicity Larcombe stumbled and stepped on his gouty foot, and he turned dead white, but all he said was, ‘Don’t speak of it, my dear,’ when she apologized.”

“Yes, of course you’d have seen that. You saw everything. Obviously, or you couldn’t tell us so much about it now. But we saw you seeing everything, you know. You weren’t very good at disguising it, even if you tried. Audrey Sevenhowes and Charlton and Woulds had a name for you—the Phantom of the Opera. You were always somewhere with your back against a wall, looking intently at everything and everybody. ‘There’s the Phantom, at it again,’ Audrey used to say. It wasn’t a very nice kind of observation. It had what I can only call a wolfish quality about it, as if you were devouring everything. Especially devouring Sir John. I don’t suppose he made a move without you following him with your eyes. No wonder you knew about the gout. None of the rest of us did.”

“None of the rest of you cared, if you mean the little clique you travelled with. But the older members of the company knew, and certainly Morton W. Penfold knew, because it was one of his jobs to see that the same kind of special bottled water was always available for Sir John on every train and in every hotel. Gout’s very serious for an actor. Any suggestion that a man who is playing the Master of Ballantrae is hobbling is bad for publicity. It was clear enough that Sir John wasn’t young, but it was of the uttermost importance that on the stage he should seem young. To do that he had to be able to walk slowly; it’s not too hard to seem youthful when you’re leaping about the stage in a duel, but it’s a very different thing to walk as slowly as he had to when he appeared as his own ghost at the end of The Corsican Brothers. Detail, my dear Roly; without detail there can be no illusion. And one of the odd things about Sir John’s kind of illusion (and my own, when later on I became a master illusionist) is that the showiest things are quite simply arranged, but anything that looks like simplicity is extremely difficult.

“The gout wasn’t precisely a secret, but it wasn’t shouted from the housetops, either. Everybody knew that Sir John and Milady travelled a few fine things with them—a bronze that he particularly liked, and she always had a valuable little picture of the Virgin that she used for her private devotions, and a handsome case containing miniatures of their children—and that these things were set up in every hotel room they occupied, to give it some appearance of personal taste. But not everybody knew about the foot-bath that had to be carried for Sir John’s twice-daily treatment of the gouty foot; a bathtub wouldn’t do, because it was necessary that all of his body be at the temperature of the room, while the foot was in a very hot mineral solution.

“I’ve seen him sitting in his dressing-gown with the foot in that thing at six o’clock, and at half-past eight he was ready to step on the stage with the ease of a young man. I never thought it was the mineral bath that did the trick; I think it was more an apparatus for concentrating his will, and determination that the gout shouldn’t get the better of him. If his will ever failed, he was a goner, and he knew it.

“I’ve often had reason to marvel at the heroism and spiritual valour that people put into causes that seem absurd to many observers. After all, would it have mattered if Sir John had thrown in the towel, admitted he was old, and retired to cherish his gout? Who would have been the loser? Who would have regretted The Master of Ballantrae? It’s easy to say, No one at all, but I don’t think that’s true. You never know who is gaining strength as a result of your own bitter struggle; you never know who sees The Master of Ballantrae, and quite improbably draws something from it that changes his life, or gives him a special bias for a lifetime.

“As I watched Sir John fighting against age—watched him wolfishly, I suppose Roly would say—I learned something without knowing it. Put simply it is this: no action is ever lost—nothing we do is without result. It’s obvious, of course, but how many people ever really believe it, or act as if it were so?”

“You sound woefully like my dear old Mum,” said Ingestree. “No good action is ever wholly lost, she would say.”

“Ah, but I extend your Mum’s wisdom,” said Magnus. “No evil action is ever wholly lost, either.”

“So you pick your way through life like a hog on ice, trying to do nothing but good actions? Oh, Magnus! What balls!”

“No, no, my dear Roly, I am not quite such a fool as that. We can’t know the quality or the results of our actions except in the most limited way. All we can do is to try to be as sure as we can of what we are doing so far as it relates to ourselves. In fact, not to flail about and be the deluded victims of our passions. If you’re going to do something that looks evil, don’t smear it with icing and pretend it’s good; just bloody well do it and keep your eyes peeled. That’s all.”

“You ought to publish that. Reflections While Watching an Elderly Actor Bathing His Gouty Foot. It might start a new vogue in morality.”

“I was watching a little more than Sir John’s gouty foot, I assure you. I watched him pumping up courage for Milady, who had special need of it. He wasn’t a humorous man; I mean, life didn’t appear to him as a succession of splendid jokes, big and small, as it did to Morton W. Penfold. Sir John’s mode of perception was romantic, and romance isn’t funny except in a gentle, incidental way. But on a tour like that, Sir John had to do things that had their funny side, and one of them was to make that succession of speeches, which Penfold arranged, at service clubs in the towns where we played. It was the heyday of service clubs, and they were hungrily looking for speakers, whose job it was to say something inspirational, in not more than fifteen minutes, at their weekly luncheon meetings. Sir John always cemented the bonds of the Commonwealth for them, and while he was waiting to do it they levied fines on one another for wearing loud neckties, and recited their extraordinary creeds, and sang songs they loved but which were as barbarous to him as the tribal chants of savages. So he would come back to Milady afterward, and teach her the songs, and there they would sit, in the drawing-room of some hotel suite, singing

—and at the appropriate moments they would clap their hands to substitute for the forbidden words ‘God-damn’, which good Rotarians knew, but wouldn’t utter.

“I tell you it was eerie to see those two, so English, so Victorian, so theatrical, singing those utterly uncharacteristic words in their high-bred English accents, until they were laughing like loonies. Then Sir John would say something like ‘Of course one shouldn’t laugh at them, Nan, because they’re really splendid fellows at heart, and do marvels for crippled children—or is it tuberculosis? I can never remember.’ But the important thing was that Milady had been cheered up. She never showed her failing spirits—at least she thought she didn’t—but he knew. And I knew.

“It was another of those secrets like Sir John’s gout, which Mac and Holroyd and some of the older members of the company were perfectly well aware of but never discussed. Milady had cataracts, and however courageously she disguised it, the visible world was getting away from her. Some of the clumsiness on stage was owing to that, and much of the remarkable lustre of her glance—that bluish lustre I had noticed the first time I saw her—was the slow veiling of her eyes. There were days that were better than others, but as each month passed the account was further on the debit side. I never heard them mention it. Why would I? Certainly I wasn’t the kind of person they would have confided in. But I was often present when all three of us knew what was in the air.

“I have you to thank for that, Roly. Ordinarily it would have been the secretary who would have helped Milady when something had to be read, or written, but you were never handily by, and when you were it was so clear that you were far too busy with literary things to be just a useful pair of eyes that it would have been impertinence to interrupt you. So that job fell to me, and Milady and I made a pretence about it that was invaluable to me.

“It was that she was teaching me to speak—to speak for the stage, that’s to say. I had several modes of speech; one was the tough-guy language of Willard and Charlie, and another was a half-Cockney lingo I had picked up in London; I could speak French far more correctly than English, but I had a poor voice, with a thin, nasal tone. So Milady had me read to her, and as I read she helped me to place my voice differently, breathe better, and choose words and expressions that did not immediately mark me as an underling. Like so many people of deficient education, when I wanted to speak classy—that was what Charlie called it—I always used as many big words as I could. Big words, said Milady, were a great mistake in ordinary conversation, and she made me read the Bible to her to rid me of the big-word habit. Of course the Bible was familiar ground to me, and she noticed that when I read it I spoke better than otherwise, but as she pointed out, too fervently. That was a recollection of my father’s Bible-reading voice. Milady said that with the Bible and Shakespeare it was better to be a little cool, rather than too hot; the meaning emerged more powerfully. ‘Listen to Sir John,’ she said, ‘and you’ll find that he never pushes a line as far as it will go.’ That was how I learned about never doing your damnedest; your next-to-damnedest was far better.

“Sir John was her ideal, so I learned to speak like Sir John, and it was quite a long time before I got over it, if indeed I ever did completely get over it. It was a beautiful voice, and perhaps too beautiful for everybody’s taste. He produced it in a special way, which I think he learned from Irving. His lower lip moved a lot, but his upper lip was almost motionless, and he never showed his upper teeth; completely loose lower jaw, lots of nasal resonance, and he usually spoke in his upper register, but sometimes he dropped into deep tones, with extraordinary effect. She insisted on careful phrasing, long breaths, and never accentuating possessive pronouns—she said that made almost anything sound petty.

“So I spent many an hour reading the Bible to her, and refreshing my memory of the Psalms. ‘Consider and hear me, O Lord my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death. Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved.’ We had that almost every day. That, and ‘Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.’ It was not long before I understood that Milady was praying, and I was helping her, and after the first surprise—I had been so long away from anybody who prayed, except for Happy Hannah, whose prayers were like curses—I was pleased and honoured to do it. But I didn’t intrude upon her privacy; I was content to be a pair of eyes, and to learn to be a friendly voice. May I put in here that this was another side of apprenticeship to Sir John’s egoism, and it was not something I had greedily sought. On the contrary it was something to which I seemed to be fated. If I stole something from the old man, the impulse for the theft was not wholly mine; I seemed to be pushed into it.

“One of the things that pushed me was that as Milady’s sight grew dimmer, she liked to have somebody near to whom she could speak in French. As I’ve told you, she came from the Channel Islands, and from her name I judge that French was her cradle-tongue. So, under pretence of correcting my French pronunciation, we had many a long talk, and I read the Bible to her in French, as well as in English. That was a surprise for me! Like so many English-speaking people I could not conceive of the words of Christ in any language but my own, but as we worked through Le Nouveau Testament in her chunky old Geneva Bible, there they were, coloured quite differently. Je suis le chemin, & la vérité, & la vie; nul ne vient au Père sinon par moi. Sounded curiously frivolous, but nothing to Bienheureux sont les débonnaires: car ils hériteront la terre. I thought I concealed the surprise in my voice at that one, but Milady heard it (she heard everything) and explained that I must think of débonnaire as meaning clément, or perhaps les doux. But of course we all interpret Holy Writ to suit ourselves as much as we dare; I liked les débonnaires, because I was striving as hard as I could to be debonair myself, and I had an eye on at least a good-sized chunk of la terre for my inheritance. Learning to speak English and French with an upper-class accent—or at least a stage accent, which was a little more precise than merely upper class—was part of my campaign.

“As well as reading aloud, I listened to her as she rehearsed her lines. The old plays, like The Master of Ballantrae, were impressed on her memory forever, but she liked to go over her words for Rosemary and Scaramouche before every performance, and I read her cues for her. I learned a good deal from that, too, because she had a fine sense of comedy (something Sir John had only in a lesser degree), and I studied her manner of pointing up a line so that something more than just the joke—the juice in which the joke floated—was carried to the audience. She had a charming voice, with a laugh in it, and I noticed that clever Felicity Larcombe was learning that from her, as well as I.

“Indeed, I became a friend of Milady’s, and rather less of an adorer. Except for old Zingara, who was a very different pair of shoes, she was the only woman I had ever known who seemed to like me, and think I was of any interest or value. She rubbed it into me about how lucky I was to be working with Sir John, and doing marvellous little cameos which enhanced the value of a whole production, but I had enough common sense to see that she was right, even though she exaggerated.

“One thing about me that she could not understand was that I had no knowledge of Shakespeare. None whatever. When I knew the Bible so well, how was it that I was in darkness about the other great classic of English? Had my parents never introduced me to Shakespeare? Of course Milady could have had no idea of the sort of people my parents were. I suppose my father must have heard of Shakespeare, but I am sure he rejected him as a fellow who had frittered away his time in the theatre, that Devil’s domain where lies were made attractive to frivolous people.

“I have often been amazed at how well comfortable and even rich people understand the physical deprivations of the poor, without having any notion of their intellectual squalor, which is one of the things that makes them miserable. It’s a squalor that is bred in the bone, and rarely can education do much to root it out if education is simply a matter of schooling. Milady had come of quite rich parents, who had daringly allowed her to go on the stage when she was no more than fourteen. In Sir Henry Irving’s company, of course, which wasn’t like kicking around from one stage door to another, and snatching for little jobs in pantomime. To be one of the Guvnor’s people was to be one of the theatrically well-to-do, not simply in wages but in estate. And at the Lyceum she had taken in a lot of Shakespeare at the pores, and had whole plays by heart. How could anyone like that grasp the meagreness of the household in which I had been a child, and the remoteness of intellectual grace from the Deptford life? So I was a pauper in a part of life where she had always been wrapped in plenty.

“I was on friendly terms, with proper allowance for the disparity in our ages and importance to the company, by the time we had journeyed across Canada and played Vancouver over Christmas. We were playing two weeks at the Imperial; the holiday fell on the middle Sunday of our fortnight that year, and Sir John and Milady entertained the whole company to dinner at their hotel. It was the first time I had ever eaten a Christmas dinner, though during the previous twenty-three years I suppose I must have taken some sort of nourishment on the twenty-fifth of December, and it was the first time I had ever been in a private dining-room in a first-class hotel.

“It seemed elegant and splendid to me, and the surprise of the evening was that there was a Christmas gift for everybody. They were vanity things and manicure sets and scarves and whatnot for the girls, and the men had those big boxes of cigarettes that one never sees any more and notecases and all the range of impersonal but pleasant stuff you would expect. But I had a bulky parcel, and it was a complete Shakespeare—one of those copies illustrated with photographs of actors in their best roles; this one had a coloured frontispiece of Sir John as Hamlet, looking extremely like me, and across it he had written, ‘A double blessing is a double grace—Christmas Greetings, John Tresize.’ Everybody wanted to see it, and the company was about equally divided between those who thought Sir John was a darling to have done that for a humble member of his troupe, and those who thought I must be gaining a power that was above my station; the latter group did not say anything, but their feelings could be deduced from the perfection of their silence.

“I was in doubt about what I should do, because it was the first time in my life that anybody had ever given me anything; I had earned things, and stolen things, but I had never been given anything before and I was embarrassed, suspicious, and clumsy in my new role.

“Milady was behind it, of course, and perhaps she expected me to bury myself in the book that night, and emerge, transformed by poetry and drama, a wholly translated Mungo Fetch. The truth is that I had a nibble at it, and read a few pages of the first play in the book, which was The Tempest, and couldn’t make head nor tail of it. There was a shipwreck, and then an old chap beefing to his daughter about some incomprehensible grievance in the past, and it was not my line at all, and I gave up.

“Milady was too well bred ever to question me about it, and when we were next alone I managed to say some words of gratitude, and I don’t know whether she ever knew that Shakespeare and I had not hit it off. But the gift was very far from being a dead loss: in the first place it was a gift, and the first to come my way; in the second it was a sign of something much akin to love, even if the love went no further than the benevolence of two people with a high sense of obligation to their dependants and colleagues, down to the humblest. So the book became something more than an unreadable volume; it was a talisman, and I cherished it and gave it an importance among my belongings that was quite different from what it was meant to be. If it had been a book of spells, and I a sorcerer’s apprentice who was afraid to use it, I could not have held it in greater reverence. It contained something that was of immeasurable value to the Tresizes, and I cherished it for that. I never learned anything about Shakespeare, and on the two or three occasions when I have seen Shakespearean plays in my life they have puzzled and bored me as much as The Tempest, but my superstitious veneration of that book has never failed, and I have it still.

“There’s evidence, if you need it, that I am not really a theatre person. I am an illusionist, which is a different and probably a lesser creature. I proved it that night. After the dinner and the gifts, we had an impromptu entertainment, a very mixed bag. Audrey Sevenhowes danced the Charleston, and did it very well; C. Pengelly Spickernell sang two or three songs, vaguely related to Christmas, and Home, and England. Grover Paskin sang a comic song about an old man who had a fat sow, and we all joined in making pig-noises on cue. I did a few tricks, and was the success of the evening.

“Combined with the special gift, that put me even more to the bad with the members of the company who were always looking for hidden meanings and covert grabs for power. My top trick was when I borrowed Milady’s Spanish shawl and produced from beneath it the large bouquet the company had clubbed together to give her; as I did it standing in the middle of the room, with no apparent place to conceal anything at all, not to speak of a thing the size of a rosebush, it was neatly done, but as sometimes happens with illusions, it won almost as much mistrust as applause. I know why. I had not at that time grasped the essential fact that an illusionist must never seem to be pleased with his own cleverness, and I suppose I strutted a bit. The Cantab and Sevenhowes and Charlton and Woulds sometimes spoke of me as The Outsider, and that is precisely what I was. I don’t regret it now. I’ve lived an Outsider’s life, though not in quite the way they meant; I was outside something beyond their comprehension.

“That was an ill-fated evening, as we discovered on the following day. There was champagne, and Morton W. Penfold, who was with us, gained heroic stature for finding it in what the English regarded as a desert. Everybody drank as much as they could get, and there were toasts, and these were Sir John’s downfall. The Spartan regime of a gouty man was always a burden to him, and he didn’t see why he should drink whisky when everybody else was drinking the wine he loved best. He proposed a toast to The Profession, and told stories about Irving; it called for several glasses, though not really a lot, and before morning he was very ill. A doctor came, and saw that there was more than gout wrong with him. It was an inflamed appendix, and it had to come out at once.

“Not a great calamity for most people, even though such an operation wasn’t as simple then as it is now, but it was serious for a star actor, half-way through a long tour. He would be off the stage for not less than three weeks.

“Sir John’s illness brought out the best and the worst in his company. All the old hands, and the people with a thoroughly professional attitude, rallied round at once, with all their abilities at top force. Holroyd called a rehearsal for ten o’clock Monday morning, and Gordon Barnard, who was our second lead, sailed through Scaramouche brilliantly; he was very different from Sir John, as a six-foot-two actor of the twentieth century must be different from a five-foot-two actor who is still in the nineteenth, but there was no worry whatever about him. Darton Flesher, who had to step into Barnard’s part, needed a good deal of help, solid man though he was. But then somebody had to fill in for Flesher, and that was your friend Leonard Woulds, Roly, who proved not to know the lines which, as an understudy, he should have had cold. So it was a busy day.

“Busy for Morton W. Penfold, who had to tell the papers what had happened, and get the news on the Canadian Press wire, and generally turn a misfortune into some semblance of publicity. Busy for Felicity Larscombe, who showed herself a first-rate person as well as a first-rate actress; she undertook to keep an eye on Milady, so far as anyone could, because Milady was in a state. Busy also for Gwenda Lewis, who was a dull actress and silly about her dull husband, Jim Hailey; but Gwenda had been a nurse before she went on the stage, and she helped Felicity to keep Milady in trim to act that evening. Busy for old Frank Moore and Macgregor, who both spread calm and assurance through the company—you know how easily a company can be rattled—and lent courage where it was wanted.

“The consequence was that that night we played Scaramouche very well, to a capacity audience, and did excellent business until it was time for us to leave Vancouver. The only hitch, which both the papers mentioned humorously, was that when Scaramouche walked the tightrope, it looked as if Sir John had mischievously broken out of the hospital and taken the stage. But there was nothing anybody could do about that, though I did what I could by wearing my red mask.

“It seemed as though the public were determined to help us through our troubles, because we played to full houses all week. Whenever Milady made her first entrance, there was warm applause, and this was a change indeed, because usually Morton W. Penfold had to arrange for the local theatre manager to be in the house at that time to start the obligatory round when she came on. Indeed, by the end of the week, Penfold was able to circulate a funny story to the papers that Sir John had announced from his hospital bed that it was obvious that the most profitable thing a visiting star could do was to go to bed and send his understudy on in his place. Dangerous publicity, but it worked.

“So everything appeared to be in good order, except that we had to defer polishing up The Lyons Mail, which we had intended to put into the repertory instead of The Corsican Brothers for our return journey across Canada.

“Not everything was satisfactory, however, because the Sevenhowes, Charlton, and Woulds faction were making mischief. Not very serious mischief in the theatre, because Holroyd would not have put up with that, but personal mischief in the company was much more difficult to check. They tried sucking up to Gordon Barnard, who was now the leading man, telling him how much easier it was to act with him than with Sir John. Barnard wouldn’t have any of that, because he was a decent fellow, and he knew his own shortcomings. One of these was that in The Master and Scaramouche we used a certain number of extras, and these inexperienced people tended to look wooden on the stage unless they were jollied, or harried, into more activity than they could generate by themselves; Sir John was an expert jollier and harrier—as I understand Irving also was—and he had his own ways of hissing remarks and encouragement to these inexperienced people that kept them up to the mark; Barnard couldn’t manage it, because when he hissed the extras immediately froze in their places, and looked at him in terror. Just a question of personality, but there it was; he was a good actor, but a poor inspirer. When this happened, Charlton and Woulds laughed, sometimes so that the audience could see them, and Macgregor had to speak to them about it.

“They also made life hard for poor old C. Pengelly Spickernell, in ways that only actors understand; when they were on stage with him, they would contrive to be in his way when he had to make a move, and in a few seconds the whole stage picture was a little askew, and it looked as if it were his fault; also, in Scaramouche, where he played one of the Commedia dell’ Arte figures, and wore a long, dragging cloak, one or other of them would contrive to be standing on the end of it when he had a move to make, pinning him to the spot; it was only necessary for them to do this two or three times to put him in terror lest it should happen every time, and he was a man with no ability to defend himself against such harassment.

“They were ugly to Gwenda Lewis, overrunning her very few cues, but Jim Hailey settled that by going to their dressing-room and talking it over with them in language he had learned when he had been in the Navy. Trivial things, but enough to make needless trouble, because a theatrical production is a mechanism of exquisitely calculated details. On tour it was useless to threaten them with dismissal, because they could not be replaced, and although there was a tariff of company fines for unprofessional conduct it was hard for Macgregor to catch them red-handed.

“Their great triumph had nothing to do with performance, but with the private life of the company. I fear this will embarrass you, Roly, but I think it has to be told. The great passion the Cantab felt for Audrey Sevenhowes was everybody’s business; love and a cough cannot be hid, as the proverb says. I don’t think Audrey was really an ill-disposed girl, but her temperament was that of a flirt of a special order; such girls used to be called cock-teasers; she liked to have somebody mad about her, without being obliged to do anything about it. She saw herself, I suppose, as lovely Audrey, who could not be blamed for the consequences of her fatal attraction. I am pretty sure she did not know what was going on, but Charlton and Woulds began a campaign to bring that affair to the boil; they filled the Cantab full of the notion that he must enjoy the favours of Miss Sevenhowes to the fullest—in the expression they used, he must ‘tear off a branch’ with Audrey—or lose all claim to manhood. This put the Cantab into a sad state of self-doubt, because he had never torn off a branch with anybody, and they assured him that he mustn’t try to begin with the Sevenhowes, as he might expose himself as a novice, and become an object of ridicule. Might make a Horlicks of it, in fact. They bustled the poor boob into thinking that he must have a crash course in the arts of love, as a preparation for his great conquest; they would help him in this educational venture.

“It would have been nothing more than rather nasty joking and manipulation of a simpleton if they had kept their mouths shut, but of course that was not their way. I disliked them greatly at that time, but since then I have met many people of their kind, and I know them to be much more conceited and stupid than really cruel. They both fancied themselves as lady-killers, and such people are rarely worse than fools.

“They babbled all they were up to around the company; they chattered to Eric Foss, who was about their own age, but a different sort of chap; they let Eugene Fitzwarren in on their plan, because he looked wordly and villainous, and they were too stupid to know that he was a past president of the Anglican Stage Guild and a great worker on behalf of the Actors’ Orphanage, and altogether a highly moral character. So very soon everybody in the company knew about it, and thought it a shame, but didn’t know precisely what to do to stop the nonsense.

“It was agreed that there was no use talking to the Cantab, who wasn’t inclined to take advice from anybody who could have given him advice worth having. It was also pretty widely felt that interfering with a young man’s sexual initiation was rather an Old Aunty sort of thing to do, and that they had better let nature take its course. The Cantab must tear off a branch some time; even C. Pengelly Spickernell agreed to that; and if he was fool enough to be manipulated by a couple of cads, whose job was it to protect him?

“It became clear in the end that Mungo Fetch was elected to protect him, though only in a limited sense.—No, Roly, you can’t possibly want to go to the loo again. You’d better sit down and hear this out.—The great worriers about the Cantab were Holroyd and Macgregor, and they were worrying on behalf of Sir John and Milady. Not that the Tresizes knew about the great plot to deprive the Cantab of his virginity; Sir John would have dealt with the matter summarily, but he was in hospital in Vancouver, and Milady was much bereft by his absence and telephoned to the hospital wherever we were. But Macgregor and Holroyd felt that this tasteless practical joke somehow reflected on those two, whom they admired wholeheartedly, and whose devotion to each other established a standard of sexual behaviour for the company that must be respected, if not fully maintained.

“Holroyd kept pointing out to Macgregor that the Cantab was in a special way a charge delivered over to Sir John by his Mum, and that it was therefore incumbent on the company as a whole—or the sane part of it, he said—to watch over the Cantab while Sir John and Milady were unable to do so. Macgregor agreed, and added Calvinist embroideries to the theme; he was no great friend to sex, and I think he held it against the Creator that the race could not be continued without some recourse to it; but he felt that such recourse should be infrequent, hallowed by church and law, and divorced as far as possible from pleasure. It seems odd, looking back, that nobody felt any concern about Audrey Sevenhowes; some people assumed that she was in on the joke, and the others were confident she could take care of herself.

“Charlton and Woulds laid their plan with gloating attention to detail. Charlton explained to the Cantab, and to any man who happened to be near, that women are particularly open to seduction in the week just preceding the onset of their menstrual period; during this time, he said, they simply ravened for intercourse. Furthermore, they had to be approached in the right way; nothing coarsely direct, no grabbing at the bosom or anything of that sort, but a psychologically determined application of a particular caress; this was a firm, but not rough, placing of the hand on the waist, on the right side, just below the ribs; the hand should be as warm as possible, and this could easily be achieved by keeping it in the trousers pocket for a few moments before the approach. This was supposed to impart special, irresistible warmth to the female liver; Liesl tells me it is a very old belief.”

“I think Galen mentions it,” said Liesl, “and like so much of Galen, it is just silly.”

“Charlton considered himself an expert at detecting the menstrual state of women, and he had had his eye on Miss Sevenhowes; she would be ripe and ready to fall when we were in Moose Jaw, and therefore the last place in which the Cantab could achieve full manhood would be Medicine Hat. He approached Morton W. Penfold for information about the altars to Aphrodite in Medicine Hat, and was informed that, so far as the advance agent knew, they were few and of a Spartan simplicity. Penfold advised against the whole plan; if that was the kind of thing they wanted, they had better put it on ice till they got to Toronto. Anyhow he wanted no part of it. But Charlton and Woulds had no inclination to let their great plan rest until after Sir John had rejoined the company, for though they mocked him, they feared him.

“They played on the only discernible weakness in the strong character of Morton W. Penfold. His whole reputation, Charlton pointed out, rested on his known ability to supply anything, arrange anything, and do anything that a visiting theatrical company might want in Canada; here they were, asking simply for an address, and he couldn’t supply it. They weren’t asking him to take the Cantab to a bawdy-house, wait, and escort him home again; they just wanted to know where a bawdy-house might be found. Penfold was touched in his vanity. He made some inquiries among the locomotive crew, and returned with the address of a Mrs Quiller in Medicine Hat, who was known to have obliging nieces.

“We were playing a split week, of which Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were spent in Medicine Hat. On Thursday, with Charlton and Woulds at his elbow, the Cantab telephoned Mrs Quiller. She had no idea what he was talking about, and anyways she never did business over the phone. Might he drop in on Friday night? It all depended; was he one of them actors? Yes, he was. Well, if he come on Friday night she supposed she’d be t’home but she made no promises. Was he comin’ alone? Yes, he would be alone.

“All day Friday the Cantab looked rather green, and Charlton and Woulds stuck to him like a couple of bridesmaids, giving any advice that happened to come into their heads. At half past five Holroyd sent for me in the theatre, and I found him in the tiny stage-manager’s office, with Macgregor and Morton W. Penfold. ‘I suppose you know what’s on tonight?’ said he. ‘Scaramouche, surely?’ I said. ‘Don’t be funny with me, boy,’ said Holroyd; ‘you know what I mean.’ ‘Yes, I think I do,’ said I. ‘Then I want you to watch young Ingestree after the play, and follow him, and stay as close to him as you can without being seen, and don’t leave him till he’s back in his hotel.’ ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do that—’ I began, but Holroyd wasn’t having it. ‘Yes, you do,’ he said; ‘there’s nothing green about you, and I want you to do this for the company; nothing is to happen to that boy, do you understand?’ ‘But he’s going with the full intention of having something happen to him,’ I said; ‘you don’t expect me to hold off the girls with a gun, do you?’ ‘I just want you to see that he doesn’t get robbed, or beaten up, or anything worse than what he’s going for,’ said Holroyd. ‘Oh, Nature, Nature, what an auld bitch ye are!’ said Macgregor, who was taking all this very heavily.

“I thought I had better get out before I laughed in their faces; Holroyd and Macgregor were like a couple of old maids. But Morton W. Penfold knew what was what. ‘Here’s ten dollars,’ he said; ‘I hear it’s the only visiting card Old Ma Quiller understands; tell her you’re there to keep an eye on young Ingestree, but you mustn’t be seen; in her business I suppose she gets used to queer requests and odd provisos.’ I took it, and left them, and went off for a good laugh by myself. This was my first assignment as guardian angel.

“All things considered, everything went smoothly. After the play I left Macgregor to do some of my tidy-up work himself, and followed the Cantab after he had been given a back-slapping send-off by Charlton and Woulds. He didn’t walk very fast, though it was a cold January night, and Medicine Hat is a cold town. After a while he turned in to an unremarkable-looking house, and after some inquiries at the door he vanished inside. I chatted for a few minutes with an old fellow in a tuque and mackinaw who was shovelling away an evening snowfall, then I knocked at the door myself.

“Mrs Quiller answered in person, and though she was not the first madam I had seen—now and then one of the sisterhood would appear in search of Charlie, who had a bad habit of forgetting to settle his bills—she was certainly the least remarkable. I am always amused when madams in plays and films appear as wonderful, salty characters, full of hard-won wisdom and overflowing, compassionate understanding. Damned old twisters, any I’ve ever seen. Mrs Quiller might have been any suburban housewife, with a dyed perm and bifocal specs. I asked if I could speak to her privately, and waggled the ten-spot, and followed her into her living-room. I explained what I had come for, and the necessity that I was not to be seen; I was just someone who had been sent by friends of Mr Ingestree to see that he got home safely. ‘I getcha,’ said Mrs Quiller; ‘the way that guy carries on, I think he needs a guardeen.’

“I settled down in the kitchen with Mrs Quiller, and accepted a cup of tea and some soda crackers—her nightly snack, she explained—and we talked very comfortably about the theatre. After a while we were joined by the old snow-shoveller, who said nothing, and devoted himself to a stinking cigar. She was not a theatre-goer herself, Mrs Quiller said—too busy at night for that; but she liked a good fillum. The last one she seen was Laugh, Clown, Laugh with Lon Chaney in it, and this girl Loretta Young. Now there was a sweet fillum, but it give you a terrible idea of the troubles of people in show business, and did I think it was true to life? I said I thought it was as true as anything dared to be, but the trials of people in the theatre were so many and harrowing that the public would never believe them if they were shown as they really were. That touched the spot with Mrs Quiller, and we had a fine discussion about the surprises and vicissitudes life brought to just about everybody, which lasted some time.

“Then Mrs Quiller grew restless. ‘I wonder what’s happened to that friend of yours,’ she said; ‘he’s takin’ an awful long time.’ I wondered, too, but I thought it better not to make any guesses. It was not long till another woman came into the kitchen; I would have judged her to be in her early hard-living thirties, and she had never been a beauty; she had an unbecoming Japanese kimono clutched around her, and her feet were in slippers to which remnants of Caribou still clung. She looked at me with suspicion. ‘It’s okay,’ said Mrs Quiller, ‘this fella’s the guardeen. Anything wrong, Lil?’ ‘Jeez, I never seen such a guy,’ said Lil; ‘nothin’ doing yet. He just lays there with the droops, laughin’, and talkin’. I never heard such a guy. He keeps sayin’ it’s all so ridiculous, and would I believe he’d once been a member of some Marlowe Society or something. What are they, anyway? A bunch o’ queers? But anyways I’m sick of it. He’s ruining my self-confidence. Is Pauline in yet? Maybe she could do something with him.’

“Mrs Quiller obviously had great qualities of generalship. She turned to me. ‘Unless you got any suggestions, I’m goin’ to give him the bum’s rush,’ she said. ‘When he come in I thought, his heart’s not in it. What do you say?’ I said I thought she had summed up the situation perfectly. ‘Then you go back up there, Lil, and tell him to come back when he feels better,’ said Mrs Quiller. ‘Don’t shame him none, but get rid of him. And no refund, you understand.’

“So that was how it was. Shortly afterward I crept from Mrs Quiller’s back door, and followed the desponding Cantab back to his hotel. I don’t know what he told Charlton and Woulds, but they hadn’t much to say to him from then on. The odd thing was that Audrey Sevenhowes was quite nice to him for the rest of the tour. Not in a teasing way—or with as little tease as she could manage—but just friendly. A curious story, but not uncommon, would you say, gentlemen?”

“I say it’s time we all had a drink, and dinner,” said Liesl. She took the arm of the silent Ingestree and sat him at the table beside herself, and we were all especially pleasant to him, except Magnus who, having trampled his old enemy into the dirt, seemed a happier man and, in some strange way, cleansed. It was as if he were a scorpion, which had discharged its venom, and was frisky and playful in consequence. I taxed him with it as we left the dinner table.

“How could you,” I said. “Ingestree is a harmless creature, surely? He has done some good work. Many people would call him a distinguished man, and a very nice fellow.”

Magnus patted my arm and laughed. It was a low laugh, and a queer one. Merlin’s laugh, if ever I heard it.

(7)

Eisengrim was altogether in high spirits, and showed no fatigue from his afternoon’s talking. He pretended to be solicitous about the rest of us, however, and particularly about Lind and Kinghovn. Did they really wish to continue with his narrative? Did they truly think what he had to say offered any helpful subtext to the film about Robert-Houdin? Indeed, as the film was now complete, of what possible use could a subtext be?

“Of the utmost possible use when next I make a film,” said Jurgen Lind. “These divergences between the acceptable romance of life and the clumsily fashioned, disproportioned reality are part of my stock-in-trade. Here you have it, in your tale of Sir John’s tour of Canada; he took highly burnished romance to a people whose life was lived on a different plateau, and the discomforts of his own life and the lives of his troupe were on other levels. How reconcile the three?”

“Light,” said Kinghovn. “You do it with light. The romance of the plays is theatre-light; the different romance of the company is the queer train-light Magnus has described; think what could be done, with that flashing strobe-light effect you get when a train passes another and everything seems to flicker and lose substance. And the light of the Canadians would be that hard, bright light you find in northern lands. Leave it to me to handle all three lights in such a way that they are a variation on the theme of light, instead of just three kinds of light, and I’ll do the trick for you, Jurgen.”

“I doubt if you can do it simply in terms of appearances,” said Lind.

“I didn’t say you could. But you certainly can’t do it without a careful attention to appearances, or you’ll have no romance of any kind. Remember what Magnus says: without attention to detail you will have no illusion, and illusion’s what you’re aiming at, isn’t it?”

“I had rather thought I was aiming at truth, or some tiny corner of it,” said Lind.

“Truth!” said Kinghovn. “What kind of talk is that for a sane man? What truth have we been getting all afternoon? I don’t suppose Magnus thinks he’s been telling us the truth. He’s giving us a mass of detail, and I don’t doubt that every word he says is true in itself, but to call that truth is ridiculous even for a philosopher of film like you, Jurgen. What’s he been doing to poor old Roly? He’s cast him as the clown of the show—mother’s boy, pompous Varsity ass, snob, and sexual non-starter—and I’m sure it’s all true, but what has it to do with our Roly? The man you and I work with and lean on? The thoroughly capable administrator, literary man, and smoother-of-the-way? Eh?”

“Thank you for these few kind words, Harry,” said Ingestree. “You save me the embarrassment of saying them myself. Don’t suppose I bear any malice. Indeed, if I may make a claim for my admittedly imperfect character, it is that I have never been a malicious man. I accept what Magnus says. He has described me as I no doubt appeared to him. And I haven’t scrupled to let you know that so far as I was concerned he was an obnoxious little squirt and climber. That’s how I would describe him if I were writing my autobiography, which I may do, one of these days. But what’s an autobiography? Surely it’s a romance of which one is oneself the hero. Otherwise why write the thing? Perhaps you give yourself a rather shopworn character, like Rousseau, or H.G. Wells, and it’s just another way of making yourself interesting. But Mungo Fetch and the Cantab belong to the drama of the past; it’s forty years since they trod the boards. We’re two different people now. Magnus is a great illusionist and, as I have said time after time, a great actor: I’m what you so generously described, Harry. So let’s not fuss about it.”

Magnus was not satisfied. “You don’t believe, then,” said he, “that a man is the sum and total of all his actions, from birth to death? That’s what Dunny believes, and he’s our Sorgenfrei expert on metaphysics. I think that’s what I believe, too. Squirt and climber; not a bad summing-up of whatever you were able to understand of me when first we met, Roly. I’m prepared to stand by it, and when your autobiography comes out I shall look for myself in the Index under S and C: ‘Squirts I have known, Mungo Fetch’, and ‘Climbers I have encountered, Fetch, M.’ We must all play as cast, as my contract with Sir John put it. As for truth, I suppose we have to be content with the constant revisions of history. Though there is the odd inescapable fact, and I still have one or two of those to impart, if you want me to go on.”

They wanted him to go on. The after-dinner cognac was on the table and I made it my job to see that everyone had enough. After all, I was paying my share of the costs, and I might as well cast myself as host, so far as lay in my power. God knows, that piece of casting would be undisputed when the bill was presented.

“As we made the return journey across Canada, a change took place in the spirit of the company,” said Magnus; “going West it was all adventure and new experiences, and the country embraced us; as soon as we turned round at Vancouver it was going home, and much that was Canadian was unfavourably compared with the nests in the suburbs of London toward which many of the company were yearning. The Haileys talked even more about their son, and their grave worry that if they didn’t get him into a better school he would grow up handicapped by an undesirable accent. Charlton and Woulds were hankering for restaurants better than the places, most of them run by Chinese, we found in the West. Grover Paskin and Frank Moore talked learnedly of great pubs they knew, and of the foreign fizziness of Canadian beer. Audrey Sevenhowes, having squeezed the Cantab, threw him away and devoted herself seriously to subduing Eric Foss. During our journey West we had seen the dramatic shortening of the days which has such ominous beauty in northern countries, and which I loved; now we saw the daylight lengthen, and it seemed to be part of our homeward journey; we had gone into the darkness and now we were heading back toward the light, and every night, as we went into those queer little stage doors, the naked bulb that shone above them seemed less needful.

“The foreignness of Canada seemed to abate a little at every sunset, but it was not wholly gone. When we played Regina for a week there was one memorable night when five Blackfoot Indian chiefs, asserting their right as tribal brothers of Sir John, sat as his guests in the left-hand stage box: it was rum, I can tell you, playing Scaramouche with those motionless figures, all of them in blankets, watching everything with unwinking, jetty black eyes. What did they make of it? God knows. Or perhaps Sir John had some inkling, because Morton W. Penfold arranged that he should meet them in an interval, when there was an exchange of gifts, and pictures were taken. But I doubt if the French Revolution figured largely in their scheme of things. Milady said they loved oratory, and perhaps they were proud of Soksi-Poyina as he harangued the aristocrats so eloquently.

“Sir John had rejoined us by that time, and it was a shock when he appeared in our midst, for his hair had turned almost entirely grey during his time in the hospital. Perhaps he had touched it up before then, and the dye had run its course; he never attempted to return it to its original dark brown, and although the grey became him, he looked much older, and in private life he was slower and wearier. Not so on the stage. There he was as graceful and light-footed as ever, but there was something macabre about his youthfulness, in my eyes, at least. With his return the feeling of the company changed; we had supported Gordon Barnard with all our hearts, but now we felt that the ruler had returned to his kingdom; the lamp of romance burned with a different flame—a return, perhaps, to gaslight, after some effective but comparatively charmless electricity.

“I had a feeling, too, that the critics changed their attitude toward us on the homeward journey, and it was particularly evident in Toronto. The important four were in their seats, as usual: the man who looked like Edward VII from Saturday Night; the stout little man, rumoured to be a Theosophist, from the Globe; the smiling little fellow in pince-nez from the Telegram; and the ravaged Norseman who wrote incomprehensible rhapsodies for the Star. They were friendly (except Edward VII, who was jocose about Milady), but they would persist in remembering Irving (whether they had ever actually seen him, or not), and that bothered the younger actors. Bothered Morton W. Penfold, too, who mumbled to Holroyd that perhaps the old man would be wise to think about retirement.

“The audiences came in sufficient numbers, and were warm in their applause, particularly when we played The Lyons Mail. It was another of the dual roles in which Sir John delighted, and so did I, because it gave me a new chance to double. If Roly had been looking for it, he would have found the seed of his Jekyll and Hyde play here, for it was a play in which, as the good Leserques, Sir John was all nobility and candour, and then, seconds later, lurched on the stage as the drunken murderer Dubosc, chewing a straw and playing with a knobbed cudgel. There was one moment in that play that never failed to chill me: it was when Dubosc had killed the driver of the mail coach, and leaned over the body, rifling the pockets; as he did it, Sir John whistled the ‘Marseillaise’ through his teeth, not loudly, but with such terrible high spirits that it summoned up, in a few seconds, a world of heartless, demonic criminality. But even I, enchanted as I was, could understand that this sort of thing, in this form, could not last long on the stage that Noel Coward had made his own. It was acting of a high order, but it was out of time. It still had magic here in Canada, not because the people were unsophisticated (on the whole they were as acute as English audiences in the provinces) but because, in a way I cannot explain, it was speaking to a core of loneliness and deprivation in these Canadians of which they were only faintly aware. I think it was loneliness, not just for England, because so many of these people on the prairies were not of English origin, but for some faraway and long-lost Europe. The Canadians knew themselves to be strangers in their own land, without being at home anywhere else.

“So, night by night, Canada relinquished its hold on us, and day by day we became weary, not perhaps of one another, but of our colleagues’ unvarying heavy overcoats and too familiar pieces of luggage; what had been the romance of long hops going West—striking the set, seeing the trucks loaded at the theatre and unloaded onto the train, climbing aboard dead tired at three o’clock in the morning, and finding berths in the dimmed, heavily curtained sleeping-car—grew to be tedious. Another kind of excitement, the excitement of going home, possessed us, and although we were much too professional a company to get out of hand, we played with a special gloss during our final two weeks in Montreal. Then aboard ship, a farewell telegram to Sir John and Milady from Mr Mackenzie King (who seemed to be a great friend of the theatre, though outwardly a most untheatrical man), and off to England by the first sailing after the ice was out of the harbour.

“I had changed substantially during the tour. I was learning to dress like Sir John, which was eccentric enough in a young man, but at least not vulgar in style. I was beginning to speak like him, and as is common with beginners, I was overdoing it. I was losing, ever so little, my strong sense that every man’s hand was against me, and my hand against every man. I had encountered my native land again, and was reconciled to all of it except Deptford. We passed through Deptford during the latter part of our tour, on a hop between Windsor and London: I found out from the conductor of the train that we would stop to take on water for the engine there, and that the pause would be short, but sufficient for my purpose; as we chugged past the gravel pit beside the railway line I was poised on the steps at the back of the train, and as we pulled in to the station, so small and so familiar, I swung down onto the platform and surveyed all that was to be seen of the village.

“I could look down most of the length of our main street. I recognized a few buildings and saw the spires of the five churches—Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican, and Catholic—among the leafless trees. Solemnly, I spat. Then I went behind the train to the siding where, so many years ago, Willard had imprisoned me in Abdullah, and there I spat again. Spitting is not a ceremonious action, but I crowded it with loathing, and when I climbed back on the train I felt immeasurably better. I had not settled any scores, or altered my feelings, but I had done something of importance. Nobody knew it, but Paul Dempster had visited his childhood home. I have never returned.

“Back to England, and another long period of hand-to-mouth life for me. Sir John wanted a rest, and Milady had the long trial of waiting for her eyes to be ready for an operation—they called it ‘ripening’ in cases of cataracts then—and the operation itself, which was successful in that it made it possible for her to see with thick, disfiguring lenses that were a humiliation for a woman who still thought of herself as a leading actress. Macgregor decided to retire, which was reasonable but made a gap in the organization on which Sir John depended. Holroyd was a thoroughgoing pro, and could get a good job anywhere, and I think he saw farther than either Sir John or Milady, because he went to Stratford-on-Avon and stayed at the Memorial Theatre until he too retired. Nothing came of the Jekyll and Hyde play, though I know the Tresizes tinkered with the scenario for years, as an amusement. But they were comfortably off for money—rich, by some standards—and they could settle down happily in their suburban home, which had a big garden, and amuse themselves with the antiques that gave them so much delight. I visited them there often, because they kept a kind interest in me, and helped me as much as they were able. But their influence in the theatre was not great; indeed, a recommendation from them took on a queer look in the hands of a young man, because to so many of the important employers of actors in the London theatre in the mid-thirties they belonged to a remote past.

“Indeed, they never appeared at the head of a company again. Sir John had one splendid appearance in a play by a writer who had been a great figure in the theatre before and just after the First World War, but his time, too, had passed; his play suffered greatly from his own illness and some justifiable but prolonged caprice on the part of the star players. Sir John was very special in that play, and he was given fine notices by the press, but nothing could conceal the fact that he was not the undoubted star, but ‘distinguished support in a role which could not have been realized with the same certainty of touch and golden splendour of personality by any other actor of our time’—so James Agate said, and everybody agreed.

“There was one very bad day toward the end of his life which, I know, opened the way for his death. In the autumn of 1937, when people were thinking of more immediately pressing things, some theatre people were thinking that the centenary of the birth of Henry Irving should not pass unnoticed. They arranged an all-star matinee, in which tribute to the great actor should be paid, and as many as possible of the great theatre folk of the day should appear in scenes selected from the famous plays of his repertoire. It should be given at his old theatre, the Lyceum, as near as possible to his birthday, which was February 6 in the following year.

“Have you ever had anything to do with such an affair? The idea is so splendid, the sentiment so admirable, that it is disillusioning to discover what a weight of tedious and seemingly unnecessary diplomacy must go into its arrangement. Getting the stars to say with certainty that they will appear is only the beginning of it; marshalling the necessary stage-settings, arranging rehearsals, and publicizing the performance, without ruinously disproportionate expense, is the bulk of the work, and I understand that an excellent committee did it with exemplary patience. But inevitably there were muddles, and in the first enthusiasm many more people were asked to appear than could possibly have been crowded on any stage, even if the matinee had been allowed to go on for six or seven hours.

“Quite reasonably, one of the first people to be asked for his services was Sir John, because he was the last actor of first-rate importance still living who had been trained under Irving. He agreed that he would be present, but then, prompted by God knows what evil spirit of vanity, he began to make conditions: he would appear, and he would speak a tribute to Irving if the Poet Laureate would write one. The committee demurred, and the Poet Laureate was not approached. So Sir John, with the bit between his teeth, approached the Poet Laureate himself, and the Poet Laureate said he would have to think about it. He thought for six weeks, and then, in response to another letter from Sir John, said he didn’t see his way clear to doing it.

“Sir John communicated this news to the committee, who had meanwhile gone on with other plans, and they did not reply because, I suppose, they were up to their eyes in complicated arrangements which they had to carry through in the spare time of their busy lives. Sir John, meanwhile, urged an ancient poet of his acquaintance, who had been a very minor figure in the literary world before the First World War, to write the poetic tribute. The ancient poet, whose name was Urban Frawley, thought a villanelle would do nicely. Sir John thought something more stately was called for; his passion for playing the literary Meddlesome Mattie was aroused, and he and the ancient poet had many a happy hour, wrangling about the form the tribute should take. There was also the great question about what Sir John should wear, when delivering it. He finally decided on some robes he had worn not less than twenty-five years earlier, in a play by Maeterlinck; like everything else in his wardrobe it had been carefully stored, and when Holroyd had been summoned from Stratford to find it, it was in good condition, and needed only pressing and some loving care to make it very handsome. This valet work became my job, and in all I made three journeys to Richmond, where the Tresizes lived, to attend to it. Everything seemed to be going splendidly, and only I worried about the fact that nothing had been heard from the committee for a long time.

“There was less than a week to go before the matinee when at last I persuaded Sir John that something must be done to make sure that he had been included in the programme. This was tactless, and he gave me a polite dressing-down for supposing that when Irving was being honoured, his colleagues would be so remiss as to forget Irving’s unquestioned successor. I was not so confident, because since the tour I had mingled a little with theatre people, and had learned that there were other pretenders to Irving’s crown, and that Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Sir Frank Benson had been spoken of in this regard, and Benson was still living. I took my scolding meekly, and went right on urging him not to leave things to chance. So, rather in the spirit of the Master of Ballantrae giving orders to the pirates, he telephoned the secretary of the committee, and talked, not to him, but to his anonymous assistant.

“Sir John told him he was calling simply to say that he would be on hand for the matinee, as he had been invited to do some months before; that he would declaim the tribute to Irving which had been specially written by that favoured child of the Muses, Urban Frawley; that he would not arrive at the theatre until half past four, and he would arrive in costume, as he knew the backstage resources of the theatre would be crowded, and nothing was further from his mind than to create any difficulty by requiring the star dressing-room. All of this was delivered in the jocular but imperative mode that was his rehearsal speciality, with much ‘eh’ and ‘quonk’ to make it sound friendly. The secretary’s secretary apparently gave satisfactory replies, because when Sir John had finished his call he looked at me slyly, as if I were a silly lad who didn’t understand how such things were done.

“It was agreed that I should drive him to the theatre, because he might want assistance in arranging his robes, and although he had an old and trusted chauffeur, the man had no skill as a dresser. So, with lots of time to spare, I helped him into the back seat in his heavy outfit of velvet and fur, climbed into the driver’s place, and off we went. It was one of those extremely class-conscious old limousines; Sir John, in the back, sat on fine whipcord, and I, in front, sat on leather that was as cold as death; we were separated by a heavy glass partition, but from time to time he spoke to me through the speaking tube, and his mood was triumphal.

“Dear old man! He was going to pay tribute to Irving, and there was nobody else in the world who could do it with a better right, or more reverent affection. It was a glory-day for him, and I was anxious that nothing should go wrong.

“As it did, of course. We pulled up at the stage door of the Lyceum, and I went in and told the attendant that Sir John had arrived. He wasn’t one of your proper old stage doormen, but a young fellow who took himself very seriously, and had a sheaf of papers naming the people he was authorized to admit. No Sir John Tresize was on the list. He showed it to me, in support of his downright refusal. I protested. He stuck his head out of the door and looked at our limousine, and made off through the passage that led to the stage, and I stuck close to him. He approached an elegant figure whom I knew to be one of the most eminent of the younger actor-knights and hissed ‘There’s an old geezer outside dressed as Nero who says he’s to appear; will you speak to him, sir?’ I intervened; ‘It’s Sir John Tresize,’ I said, ‘and it was arranged that he was to speak an Epilogue—a tribute to Irving.’ The eminent actor-knight went rather pale under his make-up (he was rigged out as Hamlet) and asked for details, which I supplied. The eminent actor-knight cursed with brilliant invention for a few seconds, and beckoned me to the corridor. I went, but not before I was able to identify the sounds that were coming from the stage as a passage from The Lyons Mail; the rhythm, the tune of what I heard was all wrong, too colloquial, too matter-of-fact.

“We made our way back to the stage door, and the eminent actor-knight darted across the pavement, leapt into the limousine beside Sir John, and began to talk to him urgently. I would have given a great deal to hear what was said, but I could only catch scraps of it from where I sat in the driver’s seat. ‘Dreadful state of confusion … can’t imagine what the organization of such an affair entails … would not for the world have slighted so great a man of the theatre and the most eminent successor of Irving … but when the proposal to the Poet Laureate fell through all communication had seemed to stop … nothing further had been heard … no, there had been no message during the past week or something would certainly have been done to alter the program … but as things stand … greatest reluctance … beg indulgence … express deepest personal regret but as you know I do not stand alone and cannot act on personal authority so late in the afternoon.…’

“A great deal of this; the eminent actor-knight was sweating and I could see in the rear-vision mirror that his distress was real, and his determination to stick to his guns was equally real. They were a notable study. You could do wonders with them, Harry: the young actor so vivid, the old one so silvery in the splendour of his distinction; both giving the quality of art to a common human blunder. Sir John’s face was grave, but at last he reached out and patted the knee in the Hamlet tights and said, ‘I won’t say I understand, because I don’t; still, nothing to be done now, eh? Damned embarrassing for us both, quonk? But I think I may say a little more than just embarrassing for me.’ Then Hamlet, delighted to have been let off the hook, smiled the smile of spiritual radiance for which he was famous, and did an inspired thing: he took the hand Sir John extended to him and raised it to his lips. It seemed under the circumstances precisely the right thing to do.

“Then I drove Sir John back to Richmond, and it was a slow journey, I can tell you. I hardly dared to look in the mirror, but I did twice, and both times tears were running down the old man’s face. When we arrived I helped him inside and he leaned very heavily on my arm. I couldn’t bear to hang around and hear what he said to Milady. Nor would they have wanted me.

“So that was how you knifed him, Roly. Don’t protest. When the stage doorman showed me that list of people who were included in the performance, it was signed by you, on behalf of the eminent actor-knight. You simply didn’t let that telephone message go any farther. It’s a pity you couldn’t have been on hand to see the scene in the limousine.”

Magnus said no more, and nobody else seemed anxious to break the silence. Ingestree appeared to be thinking, and at last it was he who spoke.

“I don’t see any reason now for denying what you’ve said. I think you have coloured it absurdly, but your facts are right. It’s true I devilled for the committee about that Irving matinee; I was just getting myself established in the theatre in a serious way and it was a great opportunity for me. All the stars who formed the committee heaped work on me, and that was as it should be. I don’t complain. But if you think Sir John Tresize was the only swollen ego I had to deal with, you’d better think again; I had months of tiresome negotiating to do, and because no money was changing hands I had to treat over a hundred people as if they were all stars.

“Yes, I got the call from Tresize, and it came just at the time when I was hardest pressed. Yes, I did drop it, because by that time I had been given a programme for that awful afternoon that we had to stick to or else disturb I can’t think how many careful arrangements. You saw one man disappointed; I saw at least twenty. All my life I’ve had to arrange things, because I’m that uncommon creature, an artist with a good head for administration. One of the lessons I’ve learned is to give no ground to compassion, because the minute you do that a dozen people descend upon you who treat compassion as weakness, and drive you off your course without the slightest regard for what happens to you. You’ve told us that you apprenticed yourself to an egoism, Magnus, and so you did, and you’ve learned the egoismgame splendidly; but in my life I’ve had to learn how to deal with people like you without becoming your slave, and that’s what I’ve done. I’m sorry if old Tresize felt badly, but on the basis of what you’ve told us I think everybody else here will admit that it was nobody’s fault but his own.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to admit that,” said Lind. “There is a hole in your excellent story: you didn’t tell your superior about the telephone call. Surely he was the man to make final decisions?”

“There were innumerable decisions to be made. If you’ve ever had any experience of an all-star matinee you can guess how many. During the last week everybody was happy if a decision could be made that would stick. I don’t remember the details very clearly. I acted for what seemed the best.”

“Without any recollection of being told how to carry a chair, or that unfortunate reference to your father’s shop, or the disappointment about Jekyll-and-Hyde in masks and meem?” said Magnus.

“What do you suppose I am? You can’t really imagine I would take revenge for petty things of that sort.”

“Oh yes; I can imagine it without the least difficulty.”

“You’re ungenerous.”

“Life has made me aware of how far mean minds rely on generosity in others.”

“You’ve always disliked me.”

“You didn’t like the old man.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Well, in my judgement at least, you killed him.”

“Did I? Something had to kill him, I suppose. Something kills everybody. And when you say something you often mean somebody. Eventually something or somebody will kill us all. You’re not going to back me into a corner that way.”

“No, I don’t think you can quite attribute Sir John’s death to Roly,” said Lind. “But a not very widely understood or recognized element in life—I mean the jealousy youth feels for age—played a part in it. Have you been harbouring ill-will toward Roly all these years because of this incident? Because I really think that what Sir John was played a large part in the way he died, as is usually the case.”

“Very well,” said Magnus; “I’ll reconsider the matter. After all, it doesn’t really signify whether I think Roly killed him, or not. But Sir John and Milady were the first two people in my life I really loved, and the list isn’t a long one. After the matinee Sir John wasn’t himself; in a few weeks he had flu, which turned to pneumonia, and he didn’t last long. I went to Richmond every day, and there was one dreadful afternoon toward the end when I went into the room where Milady was sitting; when she heard my footstep she said, ‘Is that you, Jack?’ and I knew she wasn’t going to live long, either.

“She was wandering, of course, and as I have told you I had learned so much from Sir John that I even walked like him; it was eerie and desolating to be mistaken for him by the person who knew him best. Roly says I ate him. Rubbish! But I had done something that I don’t pretend to explain, and when Milady thought he was well again, and walking as he had not walked for a year, I couldn’t speak to her, or say who I was, so I crept away and came back later, making it very clear that it was Mungo Fetch who had come, and would come as long as he was wanted.

“He died, and at that time everybody was deeply concerned about the war that was so near at hand, and there were very few people at the funeral. Not Milady; she wasn’t well enough to go. But Agate was there, the only time I ever saw him. And a handful of relatives were there, and I noticed them looking at me with unfriendly, sidelong glances. Then it broke on me that they thought I must be some sort of ghost from the past, and very probably an illegitimate son. I didn’t approach them, because I was sure that nothing would ever make it clear to them that I was indeed a ghost, and an illegitimate son, but in a sense they would never understand.

“Milady died a few weeks later, and there were even fewer at her funeral; Macgregor and Holroyd were there, and as I stood with them nobody bothered to look twice at me. Odd: it was not until they died that I learned they were both much older than I had supposed.

“The day after we buried Milady I left England; I had wanted to do so for some time, but I didn’t want to go so long as there was a chance that I could do anything for her. There was a war coming, and I had no stomach for war; the circumstances of my life had not inclined me toward patriotism. There was nothing for me to do in England. I had never gained a foothold on the stage because my abilities as an actor were not of the fashionable kind, and I had not been able to do any better with magic. I kept bread in my mouth by taking odd jobs as a magician; at Christmas I gave shows for children in the toy department of one of the big shops, but the work was hateful to me. Children are a miserable audience for magic; everybody thinks they are fond of marvels, but they are generally literal-minded little toughs who want to know how everything is done; they have not yet attained to the sophistication that takes pleasure in being deceived. The very small ones aren’t so bad, but they are in a state of life where a rabbit might just as well appear out of a hat as from anywhere else; what really interests them is the rabbit. For a man of my capacities, working for children was degrading; you might just as well confront them with Menuhin playing ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. But I drew streams of half-crowns from tiny noses, and wrapped up turtles that changed into boxes of sweets in order to collect my weekly wage. Now and then I took a private engagement, but the people who employed me weren’t serious about magic. It sounds odd, but I can’t put it any other way; I was wasted on them and my new egoism was galled by the humiliation of the work.

“I had to live, and I understood clocks. Here again I was at a disadvantage because I had no certificate of qualification, and anyhow ordinary cleaning and regulating of wrist-watches and mediocre mantel clocks bored me. But I hung around the clock exhibition in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and worked my way into the private room of the curator of that gallery in order to ask questions, and it was not long before I had a rather irregular job there. It is never easy to find people who can be trusted with fine old pieces, because it calls for a kind of sympathy that isn’t directly hitched to mechanical knowledge.

“With those old clocks you need to know not only how they work, but why they are built as they are. Every piece is individual, and something of the temperament of the maker is built into them, so the real task is to discern whatever you can of the maker’s temperament and work within it, if you hope to humour his clock and persuade it to come to life again.

“In the States and Canada they talk about ‘fixing’ clocks; it’s a bad word, because you can’t just fix a clock if you hope to bring it to life. I was a reanimator of clocks, and I was particularly good at the sonnerie—you know, the bells and striking apparatus—which is especially hard to humour into renewed life. You’ve all heard old clocks that strike as if they were being managed by very old, arthritic gnomes; the notes tumble along irregularly, without any of the certainty and dignity you want from a true chime. It’s a tricky thing to restore dignity to a clock that has been neglected or misused or that simply has grown old. I could do that, because I understood time.

“I mean my own time, as well as the clock’s. So many workmen think in terms of their own time, on which they put a value. They will tell you it’s no good monkeying with an old timepiece because the cost of the labour would run too close to the value of the clock, even when it was restored. I never cared how long a job took, and I didn’t charge for my work by the hour; not because I put no value on my time but because I found that such an attitude led to hurried work, which is fatal to humouring clocks. I don’t suppose I was paid as much as I could have demanded if I had charged by the hour, but I made myself invaluable, and in the end that has its price. I had a knack for the work, part of which was the understanding I acquired of old metal (which mustn’t be treated as if it were modern metal), and part of which was the boundless patience and the contempt for time I had gained sitting inside Abdullah, when time had no significance.

“I suppose the greatest advantage I have had over other people who have wanted to do what I can do is that I really had no education at all, and am free of the illusions and commonplace values that education brings. I don’t speak against education; for most people it is a necessity; but if you’re going to be a genius you should try either to avoid education entirely, or else work hard to get rid of any you’ve been given. Education is for commonplace people and it fortifies their commonplaceness. Makes them useful, of course, in an ordinary sort of way.

“So I became an expert on old clocks, and I know a great many of the finest chamber clocks, and lantern clocks, and astronomical and equation clocks in the finest collections in the world, because I have rebuilt them, and tinkered them, and put infinitesimal new pieces into them (but always fashioned in old metal, or it would be cheating), and brought their chimes back to their original pride, and while I was doing that work I was as anonymous as I had been when I was inside Abdullah. I was a back-room expert who worked on clocks which the Museum undertook, as a special favour, to examine and put in order if it could be done. And when I had become invaluable I had no trouble in getting a very good letter of recommendation, to anybody whom it might concern, from the curator, who was a well-known man in his field.

“With that I set off for Switzerland, because I knew that there ought to be a job for a good clock-man there, and I was certain that when the war came Switzerland would be neutral, though probably not comfortable. I was right; there were shortages, endless problems about spies who wouldn’t play their game according to the rules, bombings that were explained as accidental and perhaps were, and the uneasiness rising toward hysteria of being in the middle of a continent at war when other nations use your neutrality on the one hand, and hate you for it on the other. We were lucky to have Henri Guisan to keep us in order.

“I say ‘we’, though I did not become a Swiss and have never done so; theirs is not an easy club to join. I was Jules LeGrand, and a Canadian, and although that was sometimes complicated I managed to make it work.

“I presented my letter at the biggest watch and clock factories, and although I was pleasantly received I could not get a job, because I was not a Swiss, and at that time there were many foreigners who wanted jobs in important industries, and it was probable that some of them were spies. If I were going to place a spy, I would get a man who could pass for a native, and equip him with unexceptionable papers to show that he was a native; but when people are afraid of spies they do not think rationally. Still, after some patient application I wrangled an interview at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva, and after waiting a while Jules LeGrand found himself once more in the back room of a museum. It was there that one of the great strokes of luck in my life occurred, and most uncharacteristically it came through an act of kindness I had undertaken. There must be a soft side to my nature, and perhaps I should have trusted it more than I have done.

“I was living in a pension, the proprietor of which had a small daughter. The daughter had got herself into deep trouble because she had broken her father’s walking stick, and as the stick had been a possession of her grandfather it had something of the character of an heirloom. It was no ordinary walking-stick, but one of those joke sticks that fashionable young men used to carry—a fine Malacca cane, but with a knob on the top that did a trick. The knob of this particular specimen was of ivory, carved prettily like the head of a monkey; but when you pressed a button in its neck the monkey opened its mouth, stuck out a red tongue, and rolled its blue eyes up to heaven. The child had been warned not to play with grandfather’s stick, and had predictably done so, and jammed it so that the monkey was frozen in an expression of idiocy, its tongue half out and its eyes half raised.

“The family made a great to-do, and little Rosalie was lectured and hectored and deprived of her allowance for an indefinite period, and the tragedy of the stick was brought up at every meal; everybody at the pension had ideas either about child-rearing or the mending of the stick and I became thoroughly sick of hearing about it, though not as sick as poor Rosalie, who was a nice kid, and felt like a criminal. So I offered to take it to my workroom at the Musée and do what I could. Mending old toys could not be very different from mending old clocks, and Rosalie was growing pale, so clearly something must be done. The family had tried a few watch-repair people, but none of them wanted to be bothered with what looked like a troublesome job; it is astonishing that in a place like Geneva, which numbers watch mechanics in the thousands, there should be so few who are prepared to tackle anything old. Something new delights them, but what is old seems to clog their works. I suppose it is a matter of sympathetic approach, which was my chief stock-in-trade as a reanimator of old timepieces.

“The monkey was not really difficult, but he took time. Releasing the silver collar that kept the head in position without destroying it; removing the ivory knob without damage; penetrating the innards of the knob in such a way as to discover its secrets without wrecking them: these were troublesome tasks, but what someone has made, someone else can dismantle and make again. It proved to be a matter of an escapement device that needed replacing, and that meant making a tiny part on one of my tiny lathes from metal that would work well, but not too aggressively, with the old metal in the monkey’s works. Simple, when you know how and are prepared to take several hours to do it; not simple if you are in a hurry to finish. So I did it, and restored the stick to its owner with a flowery speech in which I begged forgiveness for Rosalie, and Rosalie thought I was a marvellous man (in which she was quite correct) and a very nice man (in which I fear she was mistaken).

“The significant detail is that one evening after the museum’s working day was done I was busy with the walking-stick when the curator of my department walked through the passage outside the small workshop, saw my light, and came in, like a good Swiss, to turn it off. He asked what I was doing, and when I explained he showed some interest. It was a year later that he sent for me and asked if I knew much about mechanical toys; I said I didn’t, but that it would be odd if a toy were more complex than a clock. Then he said, ‘Have you ever heard of Jeremias Naegeli?’ and I hadn’t. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘Jeremias Naegeli is very old, very rich, and very much accustomed to having his own way. He has retired, except for retaining the chairmanship of the board of So-and-So’—and he mentioned the name of one of the biggest clock, watch, and optical equipment manufacturers in Switzerland—‘and he has collected a great number of mechanical toys, all of them old and some of them unique. He wants a man to put them in order. Would you be interested in a job like that?’

“I said, ‘If Jeremias Naegeli commands several thousand expert technicians, why would he want me?’ ‘Because his people are expected to keep on the job during wartime,’ said my boss; ‘it would not look well if he took a first-rate man for what might appear to be a frivolous job. He is old and he doesn’t want to wait until the war is over. But if he borrows you from the museum, and you are a foreigner not engaged in war production, it’s a different thing, do you understand?’ I understood, and in a couple of weeks I was on my way to St Gallen to be looked over by the imperious Jeremias Naegeli.

“It proved that he lived at some distance from St Gallen on his estate in the mountains, and a driver was sent to take me there. That was my first sight of Sorgenfrei. As you gentlemen know, it is an impressive sight, but try to imagine how impressive it was to me, who had never been in a rich house before, to say nothing of such a gingerbread castle as that. I was frightened out of my wits. As soon as I arrived I was taken by a secretary to the great man’s private room, which was called his study, but was really a huge library, dark, hot, stuffy, and smelling of leather furniture, expensive cigars, and rich man’s farts. It was this expensive stench that destroyed the last of my confidence, because it was as if I had entered the den of some fearsome old animal, which was precisely what Jeremias Naegeli was. It had been many years—in Willard’s time—since I had been afraid of anyone, but I was afraid of him.

“He played the role of great industrialist, contemptuous of ceremony and without an instant to spare on inferior people. ‘Have you brought your tools?’ was the first thing he said to me; although it was a silly question—why wouldn’t I have brought my tools?—he made it sound as if I were just the sort of fellow who would have travelled across the whole of Switzerland without them. He questioned me carefully about clockwork, and that was easy because I knew more about that subject than he did; he understood principles but I don’t suppose he could have made a safety-pin. Then he heaved himself out of his chair and gestured to me with his cigar to follow; he was old and very fat, and progress was slow, but we crawled back into the entrance hall, where he showed me the big clock there, which you have all seen; it has dials for everything you can think of—time at Sorgenfrei and at Greenwich, seconds, the day of the week, the date of the month, the seasons, and the signs of the zodiac, the phases of the moon, and a complex sonnerie. ‘What’s that?’ he said. So I told him what it was, and how it was integrated and what metals were probably used to balance one another off with enough compensation to keep the thing from needing continual readjustment. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he was pleased. ‘That clock was made for my grandfather, who designed it,’ he said. ‘He must have been a very great technician,’ I said, and that pleased him as well, as I meant it to do. Most men are much more partial to their grandfathers than to their fathers, just as they admire their grandsons but rarely their sons. Then he beckoned me to follow again, and this time we went on quite a long journey, down a flight of steps, through a long corridor, and up steps again into what I judged was another building; we had been through a tunnel.

“In a tall, sunny room in this building there was the most extraordinary collection of mechanical toys that anyone has ever seen; there can be no doubt about that, because it is now in one of the museums in Zürich, and its reputation is precisely what I have said—the most extensive and extraordinary in the world. But when I first saw it, the room looked as if all the little princes and princesses and serene highnesses in the world had been having a thoroughly destructive afternoon. Legs and arms lay about the floor, springs burst from little animals like metal guts, paint had been gashed with sharp points. It was a breathtaking scene of destruction, and as I wandered here and there looking at the little marvels and the terrible damage, I was filled with awe, because some of those things were of indisputable beauty and they had been despoiled in a fit of crazy fury.

“It was here that the old man showed the first touch of humanity I had seen in him. There were tears in his eyes. ‘Can you mend this?’ he asked, waving his heavy stick to encompass the room. It was not a time for hesitation. ‘I don’t know that I can mend it all,’ I said, ‘but if anybody can do it, I can. But I mustn’t be pressed for time.’ That fetched him. He positively smiled, and it wasn’t a bad smile either. ‘Then you must begin at once,’ he said, ‘and nobody shall ever ask you how you are getting on. But you will tell me sometimes, won’t you?’ And he smiled the charming smile again.

“That was how I began life at Sorgenfrei. It was odd, and I never became fully accustomed to the routine of the house. There were a good many servants, most of whom were well up in years, as otherwise they would have been called away for war work. There were also two secretaries, both invalidish young men, and the old Direktor—which was what everybody called him—kept them busy, because he either had, or invented, a lot of business to attend to. There was another curious functionary, also unfit for military service, whose job it was to play the organ at breakfast, and play the piano at night if the old man wanted music after dinner. He was a fine musician, but he can’t have been driven by ambition, or perhaps he was too ill to care. Every morning of his life, while the Direktor consumed a large breakfast, this fellow sat in the organ loft and worked his way methodically through Bach’s chorales. The old man called them his prayers and he heard three a day; he consumed spiced ham and cheese and extraordinary quantities of rolls and hot breads while he was listening to Bach, and when he had finished he hauled himself up and lumbered off to his study. From that time until evening the musician sat in the secretaries’ room and read, or looked out of the window and coughed softly, until it was time for him to put on his dress clothes and eat dinner with the Direktor, who would then decide if he wanted any Chopin that evening.

“We all dined with the Direktor, and with a severe lady who was the manager of his household, but we took our midday meal in another room. It was the housekeeper who told me that I must get a dinner suit, and sent me to St Gallen to buy one. There were shortages in Switzerland, and they were reflected in the Direktor’s meals, but we ate extraordinarily well, all the same.

“The Direktor was as good as his word; he never harried me about time. We had occasional conferences about things I needed, because I required seasoned metal—not new stuff—that his influence could command from the large factories in the complex of which he was the nominal ruler and undoubted financial head; I also had to have some rather odd materials to repair finishes, and as I wanted to use egg tempera I needed a certain number of eggs, which were not the easiest things to get in wartime, even in Switzerland.

“I had never dealt with an industrialist before, and I was bothered by his demand for accurate figures; when he asked me how much spring-metal of a certain width and weight I wanted I was apt to say, ‘Oh, a fair-sized coil,’ which tried his temper dreadfully. But after he had seen me working with it, and understood that I really knew what I was doing, he regained his calm, and may even have recognized that in the sort of job he had given me accuracy of estimate was not to be achieved in the terms he understood.

“The job was literally a mess. I set to work methodically on the first day to canvass the room, picking up everything and putting the component parts of every toy in a separate box, so far as I could identify them. It took ten days, and when I had done I estimated that of the hundred and fifty toys that had originally been on the shelves, all but twenty-one could be identified and put into some sort of renewed life. What remained looked like what is found after an aircraft disaster; legs, heads, arms, bits of mechanism and unidentifiable rubbish lay there in a jumble that made no sense, sort it how I would.

“It was a queer way to spend the worst years of the war. So far as work and the nurture of my imagination went, I was in the nineteenth century. None of the toys was earlier than 1790, and most of them belonged to the 1830s and ’40s, and reflected the outlook on life of that time, and its quality of imagination—the outlook and imagination, that’s to say, of the kind of people—French, Russian, Polish, German—who liked mechanical toys and could afford to buy them for themselves or their children. Essentially it was a stuffy, limited imagination.

“If I have been successful in penetrating the character of Robert-Houdin and the sort of performance he gave, it is because my work with those toys gave me the clue to it and his audience. They were people who liked imagination to be circumscribed: you were a wealthy bourgeois papa, and you wanted to give your little Clothilde a surprise on her birthday, so you went to the very best toymaker and spent a lot of money on an effigy of a little bootblack who whistled as he shined the boot he held in his hands. See Clothilde, see! How he nods his head and taps with his foot as he brushes away! How merrily he whistles ‘Ach, du lieber Augustin’! Open the back of his case—carefully, my darling, better let papa do it for you—and there is the spring, which pumps the little bellows and works the little barrel-and-pin device that releases the air into the pipes that make the whistle. And these little rods and eccentric wheels make the boy polish the boot and wag his head and tap his toe. Are you not grateful to papa for this lovely surprise? Of course you are, my darling. And now we shall put the little boy on a high shelf, and perhaps on Saturday evenings papa will make it work for you. Because we mustn’t risk breaking it, must we? Not after papa spent so much money to buy it. No, we must preserve it with care, so that a century from now Herr Direktor Jeremias Naegeli will include it in his collection.

“But somebody had gone through Herr Direktor Naegeli’s collection and smashed it to hell. Who could it be?

“Who could be so disrespectful of all the careful preservation, painstaking assembly, and huge amounts of money the collection represented? Who can have lost patience with the bourgeois charm of all these little people—the ballerinas who danced so delightfully to the music of the music-boxes, the little bands of Orientals who banged their cymbals and beat their drums and jingled their little hoops of bells, the little trumpeters (ten of them) who could play three different trumpet tunes, the canary that sang so prettily in its decorative cage, the mermaid who swam in what looked like real water, but was really revolving spindles of twisted glass, the little tightrope walkers, and the big cockatoo that could ruffle its feathers and give a lifelike squawk—who can have missed their charm and seen instead their awful rigidity and slavery to mechanical pattern?

“I found out who this monster was quite early in my long task. After I had sorted the debris of the collection, and set to work, I spent from six to eight hours a day sitting in that large room, with a jeweller’s glass stuck in my eye, reassembling mechanisms, humouring them till they worked as they ought, and then touching up the paintwork and bits of velvet, silk, spangles, and feathers that had been damaged on the birds, the fishes, monkeys, and tiny people who gave charm to the ingenious clockwork which was the important part of them.

“I am a concentrated worker, and not easily interrupted, but I began to have a feeling that I was not alone, and that I was being watched by no friendly eye. I could not see anything in the room that would conceal a snooper, but one day I felt a watcher so close to me that I turned suddenly and saw that I was being watched through one of the big windows, and that the watcher was a very odd creature indeed—a sort of monkey, I thought, so I waved to it and grinned, as one does at monkeys. In reply the monkey jabbed a fist through the window and cursed fiercely at me in some Swiss patois that was beyond my understanding. Then it unfastened the window by reaching through the hole it had made in the glass, threw up the sash, and leapt inside.

“Its attitude was threatening, and although I saw that it was human, I continued to behave as if it were a monkey. I had known Rango pretty well in my carnival days, and I knew that with monkeys the first rule is never to show surprise or alarm; but neither can you win monkeys by kindness. The only thing to do is to keep still and quiet and be ready for anything. I spoke to it in conventional German—”

“You spoke in a vulgar Austrian lingo,” said Liesl. “And you took the patronizing tone of an animal-trainer. Have you any idea what it is like to be spoken to in the way people speak to animals? A fascinating experience. Gives you quite a new feeling about animals. They don’t know words, but they understand tones. The tone people usually use to animals is affectionate, but it has an undertone of ‘What a fool you are!’ I suppose an animal has to make up its mind whether it will put up with that nonsense for the food and shelter that goes with it, or show the speaker who’s boss. That’s what I did. Really Magnus, if you could have seen yourself at that moment! A pretty, self-assured little manikin, watching to see which way I’d jump. And I did jump. Right on top of you, and rolled you on the floor. I didn’t mean to do you any harm, but I couldn’t resist rumpling you up a bit.”

“You bit me,” said Magnus.

“A nip.”

“How was I to know it was only meant to be a nip?”

“You weren’t. But did you have to hit me on the head with the handle of a screwdriver?”

“Yes, I did. Not that it had much effect.”

“You couldn’t know that the most ineffective thing you could do to me was to hit me on the head.”

“Liesl, you would have frightened St George and his dragon. If you wanted gallantry you shouldn’t have hit me and squeezed me and banged my head on the floor as you did. So far as I knew I was fighting for my life. And don’t pretend now that you meant it just as a romp. You were out to kill. I could smell it on your breath.”

“I could certainly have killed you. Who knew or cared that you were at Sorgenfrei, mending those ridiculous toys? In wartime who would have troubled to trace one insignificant little mechanic, travelling on a crooked passport, who happened to vanish? My grandfather would have been angry, but he would have had to hush the thing up somehow. He couldn’t hand his granddaughter over to the police. The old man loved me, you know. If he hadn’t, he would probably have killed me or banished me after I smashed up his collection of toys.”

“And why did you smash them?” said Lind.

“Pure bloody-mindedness. For which I had good cause. You have heard what Magnus says: ‘I looked like an ape. I still look like an ape, but I have made my apishness serve me and now it doesn’t really matter. But it mattered then, more than anything else in the world, to me. It mattered more than the European War, more than anybody’s happiness. I was so full of spleen I could have killed Magnus, and enjoyed it, and then told my grandfather to cope with the situation, and enjoyed that. And he would have done it.

“You’d better let me tell you about it, before Magnus rushes on and puts the whole thing in his own particular light. My life was pretty much that of any lucky rich child until I was fourteen. The only thing that was in the least unusual was that my parents—my father was Jeremias Naegeli’s only son—were killed in a motor accident when I was eleven. My grandfather took me on, and was as kind to me as he knew how to be. He was like the bourgeois papa that Magnus described giving the mechanical toy to little Clothilde; my grandfather belonged to an era when the attitude toward children was that they were all right as long as they were loved and happy, and their happiness was obviously the same as that of their guardians. It works pretty well when nothing disturbs the pattem, but when I was fourteen something very disturbing happened in my pattern.

“It was the beginning of puberty, and I knew all about that because my grandfather was enlightened and I was given good, if rather Calvinist, instruction by a woman doctor. So when I began to grow rather fast I didn’t pay much attention until it seemed that the growth was too much for me and I began to have fainting fits. The woman doctor appeared again and was alarmed. Then began a wretched period of hospitals and tests and consultations and head-shakings and discussions in which I was not included, and after all that a horrible time when I was taken to Zürich three times a week for treatment with a large ray-machine. The treatments were nauseating and depressing, and I was wretched because I supposed I had cancer, and asked the woman doctor about it. No, not cancer. What, then? Some difficulty with the growing process, which the ray treatment was designed to arrest.

“I won’t bore you with it all. The disease was a rare one, but not so rare they didn’t have some ideas about it, and Grandfather made sure that everything was done that anyone could do. The doctors were delighted. They did indeed control my growth, which made them as happy as could be, because it proved something. They explained to me, as if it were the most wonderful Christmas gift any girl ever had, that if they had not been able to do wonders with their rays and drugs I would have been a giant. Think of it, they said; you might have been eight feet tall, but we have been able to halt you at five foot eleven inches, which is not impossibly tall for a woman. You are a very lucky young lady. Unless, of course, there is a recurrence of the trouble, for which we shall keep the most vigilant watch. You may regard yourself as cured.

“There were, of course, a few side effects. One cannot hope to escape such an experience wholly unscathed. The side effects were that I had huge feet and hands, a disfiguring thickening of the skull and jaw, and surely one of the ugliest faces anyone has ever seen. But wasn’t I lucky not to be a giant, as well?

“I was so perverse as not to be grateful for my luck. Not to be a giant, at the cost of looking like an ape, didn’t seem to me to be the greatest good luck. Surely Fortune had something in her basket a little better than that? I raved and I raged, and I made everybody as miserable as I could. My grandfather didn’t know what to do. Zürich was full of psychiatrists but my grandfather belonged to a pre-psychiatric age. He sent for a bishop, a good Lutheran bishop, who was a very nice man but I demolished him quickly; all his talk about resignation, recognition of the worse fate of scores of poor creatures in the Zürich hospitals, the necessity to humble oneself before the inscrutable mystery of God’s will, sounded to me like mockery. There sat the bishop, with his snowy hair smelling of expensive cologne and his lovely white hands moulding invisible loaves of bread in the air before him, and there sat I, hideous and destroyed in mind, listening to him prate about resignation. He suggested that we pray, and knelt with his face in the seat of his chair. I gave him such a kick in the arse that he limped for a week, and rushed off to my own quarters.

“There was worse to come. With the thickening of the bones of my head there had been trouble with my organs of speech, and there seemed to be nothing that could be done about that. My voice became hoarse, and as my tongue thickened I found speech more and more difficult, until I could only utter in a gruff tone that sounded to me like the bark of a dog. That was the worst. To be hideous was humiliating and ruinous to my spirit, but to sound as I did threatened my reason. What was I to do? I was young and very strong, and I could rage and destroy. So that is what I did.

“It had all taken a long time, and when Magnus first saw me at the window of his workroom I was seventeen. I had gone on the rampage one day, and wrecked Grandfather’s collection of toys. It was usually kept locked up but I knew how to get to it. Why did I do it? To hurt the old man. Why did I want to hurt the old man? Because he was at hand, and the pity I saw in his eyes when he came to see me—I kept away from the life in the house—made me hate him. Who was he, so old, so near death, so capable of living the life he liked, to pity me? If Fate had a blow, why didn’t Fate strike him? He would not have had to endure it long. But I might easily live to be as old as he, trapped in my ugliness for sixty years. So I smashed his toys. Do you know, he never said a word of reproach? In the kind of world the bishop inhabited his forbearance would have melted my heart and brought me to a better frame of mind. But misfortune had scorched all the easy Christianity out of me, and I despised him all the more for his compassion, and wondered where I could attack him next.

“I knew Grandfather had brought someone to Sorgenfrei to mend the toys, and I wanted to see who it was. There was not much fun to be got out of the secretaries, and I had exhausted the possibilities of tormenting Hofstätter, the musician; he was poor game, and wept easily, the feeble schlemiel. I had spied on Magnus for quite a time before he discovered me; looking in the windows of his workroom meant climbing along a narrow ledge some distance above ground and as I looked like an ape I thought I might as well behave like one. So I used to creep along the ledge, and watch the terribly neat, debonair little fellow bent over his workbench, tinkering endlessly with bits of spring and tiny wires, and filing patiently at the cogs of little wheels. He always had his jeweller’s glass stuck in one eye, and a beautifully fresh long white coat, and he never sat down without tugging his trousers gently upward to preserve their crease. He was handsome, too, in a romantic, nineteenth-century way that went beautifully with the little automata he was repairing.

“Before my trouble I had loved to go to the opera, and Contes d’Hoffmann was one of my favourites; the scene in Magnus’s workroom always reminded me of the mechanical doll, Olympia, in Hoffmann, though he was not a bit like the grotesque old men who quarrelled over Olympia. So there it was, Hoffmann inside the window and outside, what? The only person in opera I resembled at all was Kundry the monstrous woman in Parsifal, and Kundry always seemed to be striving to do good and be redeemed. I didn’t want to do good and had no interest in being redeemed.

“I read a good deal and my favourite book at that time was Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes—I was not a stupid girl, you understand—and from it I had drawn a mishmash of notions which tended to support whatever I felt like doing, especially when I wanted to be destructive. Most adolescents are destructive, I suppose, but the worst are certainly those who justify what they do with a half-baked understanding of somebody’s philosophy. It was under the banner of Spengler, then, that I decided to surprise Magnus and rough him up a bit. He looked easy. A man who worried so much in private about the crease of his trousers was sure to be a poor fighter.

“The surprise was mine. I was bigger and stronger but I hadn’t had his experience in carnival fights and flophouses. He soon found out that hitting me on the head was no good, and hit me a most terrible blow in the diaphragm that knocked out all my breath. Then he bent one of my legs backward and sat on me. That was when we had our first conversation.

“It was long, and I soon discovered that he spoke my language. I don’t mean German; I had to teach him proper German later. I mean that he asked intelligent questions and expected sensible answers. He was also extremely rude. I told you I had a hoarse, thick voice, and he had trouble understanding me in French and English. ‘Can’t you speak better than that?’ he demanded, and when I said I couldn’t he simply said, ‘You’re not trying; you’re making the worst of it in order to seem horrible. You’re not horrible, you’re just stupid. So cut it out.’

“Nobody had ever talked to me like that. I was the Naegeli heiress, and I was extremely unfortunate; I was used to deference, and people putting up with whatever I chose to give them. Here was little Herr Trousers-Crease, who spoke elegant English and nice clean French and barnyard German, cheeking me about the way I spoke. And laying down the law and making conditions! ‘If you want to come here and watch me work you must behave yourself. You should be ashamed, smashing up all these pretty things! Have you no respect for the past? Look at this: a monkey orchestra of twenty pieces and a conductor, and you’ve reduced it to a boxful of scraps. I’ve got to mend it, and it won’t take less than four to six months of patient, extremely skilled work before the monkeys can play their six little tunes again. And all because of you! Your grandfather ought to tie you to the weathervane and leave you on the roof to die!’

“Well, it was a change from the bishop and my grandfather’s tears. Of course I knew it was bluff. He may have hoped to shame me, but I think he was cleverer than that. All he was doing was serving notice on me that he would not put up with any nonsense; he knew I was beyond shame. But it was a change. And I began, just a little, to like him. Little Herr Trousers-Crease had quality, and an egoism that was a match for my own.

“Now—am I to go on? If there is to be any more of this I think I should be the one to speak. But is this confessional evening to know no bounds?”

“I think you’d better go ahead, Liesl,” said I. “You’ve always been a great one to urge other people to tell their most intimate secrets. It’s hardly fair if you refuse to do so.”

“Ah, yes, but dear Ramsay, what follows isn’t a tale of scandal, and it isn’t really a love-story. Will it be of any interest? We must not forget that this is supposed to provide a subtext for Magnus’s film about Robert-Houdin. What is the real story of the making of a great conjuror as opposed to Robert-Houdin’s memoirs, which we are pretty much agreed are a bourgeois fake? I don’t in the least mind telling my side of the story, if it’s of any interest to the film-makers. What’s the decision?”

“The decision is that you go on,” said Kinghovn. “You have paused simply to make yourself interesting, as women do. No—that’s unjust. Eisengrim has been doing the same thing all day. But go on.”

“Very well, Harry, I shall go on. But there won’t be much for you in what I have to tell, because this part of the story could not be realized in visual terms, even by you. What happened was that I came more and more to the workroom where little Herr Trousers-Crease was mending Grandfather’s automata, and I fell under the enchantment of what he was able to do. He has told you that he humoured those little creatures back into life, but you would have to see him at work to get any kind of understanding of what it meant, because only part of it was mechanical. I suppose one of Grandfather’s master technicians—one of the men who make those marvellous chronometers that are given to millionaires by their wives, and which never vary from strict time by more than a second every year—could have mended all those little figures so that they worked, but only Magnus could have read, in a cardboard box full of parts, the secret of the tiny performance that the completed figure was meant to give. When he had finished one of his repair jobs, the little bootblack did not simply brisk away at his little boot with his miniature brush, and whistle and tap his foot: he seemed to live, to have a true quality of being as though when you had turned your back he would leap up from his box and dance a jig, or run off for a pot of beer. You know what those automata are like: there is something distasteful about their rattling merriment; but Magnus made them act—they gave a little performance. I had seen them before I broke them, and I swear that when Magnus had remade them they were better than they had ever been.

“Was little Herr Trousers-Crease a very great watchmaker’s mechanic, then? No, something far beyond that. There must have been in him some special quality that made it worth his while to invest these creatures of metal with so much vitality and charm of action. Roly has talked about his wolfishness; that was part of it, because with that wolfishness went an intensity of imagination and vision. The wolfishness meant only that he never questioned the overmastering importance of what he—whoever and whatever he was—might be doing. But the artistry was of a rare kind, and little by little I began to understand what it was. I found it in Spengler.

“You have read Spengler? No: it is not so fashionable as it once was. But Spengler talks a great deal about what he calls the Magian World View, which he says we have lost, but which was part of the Weltanschauung—you know, the world outlook—of the Middle Ages. It was a sense of the unfathomable wonder of the invisible world that existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty and day-to-day demands of the tangible world. It was a readiness to see demons where nowadays we see neuroses, and to see the hand of a guardian angel in what we are apt to shrug off ungratefully as a stroke of luck. It was religion, but a religion with a thousand gods, none of them all-powerful and most of them ambiguous in their attitude toward man. It was poetry and wonder which might reveal themselves in the dunghill, and it was an understanding of the dunghill that lurks in poetry and wonder. It was a sense of living in what Spengler called a quivering cavern-light which is always in danger of being swallowed up in the surrounding, impenetrable darkness.

“This was what Herr Trousers-Crease seemed to have, and what made him ready to spend his time on work that would have maddened a man of modern education and modern sensibility. We have paid a terrible price for our education, such as it is. The Magian World View, in so far as it exists, has taken flight into science, and only the great scientists have it or understand where it leads; the lesser ones are merely clockmakers of a larger growth, just as so many of our humanist scholars are just cud-chewers or system-grinders. We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and the fear and dread and splendour and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn’t incorporate it into a modern state, because it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshipped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory, and pitiless.

“Yet here it was, in this most unexpected place, and when I had found it I apprenticed myself to it. Literally, for I begged Herr Trousers-Crease to teach me what he knew, and even with my huge hands I gained skill, because I had a great master. And that means very often an exacting, hot-tempered, and impatient master, because whatever my great countrymen Pestalozzi and Froebel may have said about the education of commonplace people, great things are not taught by blancmange methods. What great thing was I learning? The management of clockwork? No; any great craft tends at last toward the condition of a philosophy, and I was moving through clockwork to the Magian World View.

“Of course it took time. My grandfather was delighted, for what he saw was that his intractable, hideous granddaughter was quietly engaged in helping to repair what she had destroyed. He also saw that I improved physically, because my agony over my sickness had been terribly destructive; physically I had become slouching and simian, and as Magnus saw at once, I made my speech trouble far worse than it was, to spite myself and the world. Magnus helped me with that. Re-taught me, indeed, because he would not tolerate my uncouth mutterings, and gave me some sharp and demanding instruction in the manner of speech he had learned from Lady Tresize. And I learned. It was a case of learn to speak properly or get out of the workroom, and I wanted to stay.

“We were an odd pair, certainly. I knew about the Magian World View, and recognized it in my teacher. He knew nothing of it, because he knew nothing else: it was so much in the grain of the life he had lived, so much a part of him, that he didn’t understand that everybody else didn’t think—no, not think, feel—as he did. I would not for the world have attempted to explain it to him, because that would have endangered it. His kind was not the kind of mind that is happy with explanations and theories. In the common sense of the expression, he had no brains at all, and hasn’t to this day. What does it matter? I have brains for him.

“As his pupil, is it strange that I should fall in love with him? I was young and healthy, and hideous though I was, I had my yearnings—perhaps exaggerated by the unlikelihood that they could find satisfaction. How was I to make him love me? Well, I began, as all the beginners in love do, with the crazy notion that if I loved him enough he must necessarily respond. How could he ignore the devotion I offered? Pooh! He didn’t notice at all. I worked like a slave, but that was no more than he expected. I made little gestures, gave him little gifts, tried to make myself fascinating—and that was uphill work, let me assure you. Not that he showed distaste for me. After all, he was a carnival man, and had grown used to grotesques. He simply didn’t think of me as a woman.

“At least, that is how I explained it to myself, and I made myself thoroughly miserable about it. At last, one day, when he spoke to me impatiently and harshly, I wept. I suppose I looked dreadful, and he became even more rough. So I seized him, and demanded that he treat me as a human creature and not simply as a handy assistant, and blubbered out that I loved him. I did all the youthful things: I told him that I knew it was impossible that he should love me, because I was so ugly, but that I wanted some sort of human feeling from him.

“To my delight he took me quite seriously. We sat down at the workbench, and settled to a tedious task that needed some attention, but not too much, and he told me about Willard, and his childhood, and said that he did not think that love in the usual sense was for him, because he had experienced it as a form of suffering and humiliation—a parody of sex—and he could not persuade himself to do to anyone else what had been done to him in a perverse and terrifying mode.

“This was going too fast for me. Of course I wanted sexual experience, but first of all I wanted tenderness. Under my terrible appearance—I read a lot of old legends and I thought of myself as the Loathly Maiden in the Arthurian stories—I was still an upper-class Swiss girl of gentle breeding, and I thought of sexual intercourse as a splendid goal to be achieved, after a lot of pleasant things along the way. And being a sensible girl, under all the outward trouble and psychological muddle, I said so. That led to an even greater surprise.

“He told me that he had once been in love with a woman, who had died, and that he could not feel for anyone else as he had felt for her. Romance! I rose to it like a trout to a fly. But I wanted to know more, and the more I heard the better it was. Titled lady of extraordinary charm, understanding, and gentleness. All this was to the good. But then the story began to slide sidewise into farce, as it seemed to me. The lady was not young; indeed, as I probed, it came out that she had been over sixty when he first met her. There had been no tender passages between them, because he respected her too much, but he had been privileged to read the Bible to her. It was at this point I laughed.

“Magnus was furious. The more he stormed the more I laughed, and I am sorry to say that the more I laughed the more I jeered at him. I was young, and the young can be horribly coarse about love that is not of their kind. From buggery to selfless, knightly adoration at one splendid leap! I made a lot of it, and hooted with mirth.

“I deserved to be slapped, and I was slapped. I hit back, and we fought, and rolled on the floor and slugged each other. But of course everyone knows that you should never fight with women if you want to punish them; the physical contact leads to other matters, and it did. I was not ready for sexual intercourse so soon, and Magnus did not want it, but it happened all the same. It was the first time for both of us, and it is a wonder we managed at all. It is like painting in water-colours, you know; it looks easy but it isn’t. Real command only comes with experience. We were both astonished and cross. I thought I had been raped; Magnus thought he had been unfaithful to his real love. It looked like a deadlock.

“It wasn’t, however. We did it lots of times after that—I mean, in the weeks that followed—and the habit is addictive, as you all know, and very agreeable, if not really the be-all and end-all and cure-all that stupid people pretend. It was good for me. I became quite smart, in so far as my appearance allowed, and paid attention to my hair, which as you see is very good. My grandfather was transported, because I began to eat at the family table again, and when he had guests I could be so charming that they almost forgot how I looked. The Herr Direktor’s granddaughter Fräulein Orang-Outang, so charming and witty, though it is doubtful if even the old man’s money will find her a husband.

“I am sure Grandfather knew I was sleeping with Magnus, and it must have given him severe Calvinist twinges, but he did not become a great industrialist by being a fool; he weighed the circumstances and was pleased by the obvious balance on the credit side. I think he would have consented to marriage if Magnus had mentioned it. But of course he didn’t.

“Nor would I have urged it. The more intimate we became, the more I knew that we were destined to be very great friends, and probably frequent bed-mates, but certainly not a happy bourgeois married couple. For a time I called Magnus Tiresias, because like that wonderful old creature he had been for seven years a woman, and had gained strange wisdom and insight thereby. I thought of him sometimes as Galahad, because of his knightly obsession with the woman we now know as Milady, but I never called him that to his face, because I had done with mocking at his chivalry. I have never understood chivalry, but I have learned to keep my mouth shut about it.”

“It’s a man’s thing,” said I; “and I think we have seen the last of it for a while on this earth. It can’t live in a world of liberated women, and perhaps the liberation of women is worth the price it is certain to cost. But chivalry won’t die easily or unnoticed; banish chivalry from the world and you snap the mainspring of many lives.”

“Good, grey old Ramsay,” said Liesl, reaching over to pat my hand; “always gravely regretting, always looking wistfully backward.”

“You’re both wrong,” said Magnus. “I don’t think chivalry belongs to the past; it’s part of that World View Liesl talks so much about, and that she thinks I possess but don’t understand. What captured my faith and loyalty about Milady had just as much to do with Sir John. He was that rare creature, the Man of One Woman. He loved Milady young and he loved her old and much of her greatness was the creation of his love. To hear people talk and to look at the stuff they read and see in the theatre and the films, you’d think the true man was the man of many women, and the more women, the more masculine the man. Don Juan is the ideal. An unattainable ideal for most men, because of the leisure and money it takes to devote yourself to a life of womanizing—not to speak of the relentless energy, the unappeasable lust, and the sheer woodpecker-like vitality of the sexual organ that such a life demands. Unattainable, yes, but thousands of men have a dab at it, and in their old age they count their handful of successes like rosary beads. But the Man of One Woman is very rare. He needs resources of spirit and psychological virtuosity beyond the common, and he needs luck, too, because the Man of One Woman must find a woman of extraordinary quality. The Man of One Woman was the character Sir John played on the stage, and it was the character he played in life, too.

“I envied him, and I cherished the splendour those two had created. If, by any inconceivable chance, Milady had shown any sexual affection for me, I should have been shocked, and I would have rebuked her. But she didn’t, of course, and I simply warmed myself at their fire, and by God I needed warmth. I once had a hope that I might have found something of the sort for myself, with you, Liesl, but my luck was not to run in that direction. I would have been very happy to be a Man of One Woman, but that wasn’t your way, nor was it mine. I couldn’t forget Milady.”

“No, no; we went our ways,” said Liesl. “And you know you were never much of a lover, Magnus. What does that matter? You were a great magician, and has any great magician ever been a great lover? Look at Merlin: his only false step was when he fell in love and ended up imprisoned in a tree for his pains. Look at poor old Klingsor: he could create gardens full of desirable women, but he had been castrated with a magic spear. You’ve been happy with your magic. And when I gained enough confidence to go out into the world again, I was happy in a casual, physical way with quite a few people, and some of the best of them were of my own sex.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Magnus. “Who snatched the Beautiful Faustina from under my very nose?”

“Oh, Faustina, Faustina, you always bring her up when you feel a grievance. You must understand, gentlemen, that when my grandfather died, and I was heir to a large fortune, Magnus and I realized a great ambition we had in common; we set up a magic show, which developed and gained sophistication and gloss until it became the famous Soirée of Illusions. It takes money to get one of those things on its feet, as you well know, but when it is established it can be very profitable.

“You can’t have a magic show without a few beautiful girls to be sawn in two, or beheaded, or whisked about in space. Sex has its place in magic, even if it is not the foremost place. As ours was the best show in existence, or sought to become the best, we had to have some girls better than the pretty numskulls who are content to take simple jobs in which they are no more than living stage properties.

“I found one in Peru, a great beauty indeed but not far evolved in the European sense; a lovely animal. I bought her, to be frank. You can still buy people, you know, if you understand how to go about it. You don’t go to a peasant father and say, ‘Sell me your daughter’; you say, ‘I can open up a splendid future for your daughter, that will make her a rich lady with many pairs of shoes, and as I realize you need her to work at home, I hope you won’t be offended if I offer you five hundred American dollars to recompense you for your loss.’ He isn’t offended; not in the least. And you make sure he puts his mark on an official-looking piece of paper that apprentices the girl to you, to learn a trade—in this case the trade of sempstress, because actress has a bad sound if there is any trouble. And there you are. You wash the girl, teach her to stand still on stage and do what she is told, and you clout her over the ear if she is troublesome. Quite soon she thinks she is a great deal more important than she really is, but that can be endured.

“Faustina was a thrill on the stage, because she really was stunningly beautiful, and for a while it seemed to be good business to let curious people think she was Magnus’s mistress; only a few rather perceptive people know that great magicians, as opposed to ham conjurors, don’t have mistresses. In reality, Faustina was my mistress, but we kept that quiet, in case some clamorous moralist should make a fuss about it. In Latin America, in particular, the clergy are pernickety about such things. You remember Faustina, Ramsay? I recall you had a wintry yearning toward her yourself.”

“Don’t be disagreeable, Liesl,” I said. “You know who destroyed that.”

“Destroyed it, certainly, and greatly enriched you in the process,” said Liesl, and touched me gently with one of her enormous hands.

“So there you have it, gentlemen,” she continued. “Now you know everything, it seems to me.”

“Not everything,” said Ingestree. “The name, Magnus Eisengrim—whose inspiration was that?”

“Mine,” said Liesl. “Did I tell you I took my degree at the University of Zürich? Yes, in the faculty of philosophy where I leaned toward what used to be called philology—quite a Teutonic specialty. So of course I was acquainted with the great beast-legends of Europe, and in Reynard the Fox, you know, there is the great wolf Eisengrim, whom everyone fears, but who is not such a bad fellow, really. Just the name for a magician, don’t you think?”

“And your name,” said Lind. “Liselotte Vitzlipützli? You were always named on the programmes as Theatre Autocrat—Liselotte Vitzlipützli.”

“Ah, yes. Somebody has to be an autocrat in an affair of that kind, and it sounds better and is more frank than simply Manager. Anyhow, I wasn’t quite a manager: I was the boss. It was my money, you see. But I knew my place. Manager I might be, but without Magnus Eisengrim I was nothing. Consequently—Vitzlipützli. You understand?”

“No, gnädiges Fraulein, I do not understand,” said Lind, “and you know I do not understand. What I am beginning to understand is that you are capable of giving your colleagues Eisengrim and Ramsay a thoroughly difficult time when it is your whim. So again—Vitzlipützli?”

“Dear, dear, how ignorant people are in this supposedly brilliant modern world,” said Liesl. “You surely know Faust? Not Goethe’s Faust, of course; every Teuton has that by heart—both parts of it—but the old German play on which he based his poem. Look among the characters there, and you will find that the least of the demons attending on the great magician is Vitzlipützli. So that was the name I chose. A delicate compliment to Magnus. It takes a little of the sting out of the word Autocrat.

“But an autocrat is what I must be now. Gentlemen, we have talked for a long time, and I hope we have given you your subtext. You have seen what a gulf lies between the reality of a magician with the Magian World View and such a pack of lies as Robert-Houdin’s bland, bourgeois memoirs. You have seen, too, what a distance there is between the pack of lies Ramsay wrote so artfully as a commercial life of our dear Eisengrim, and the sad little boy from Deptford. And now, we must travel tomorrow, and I must pack my two old gentlemen off to their beds, or they will not be happy for the plane. So it is time to say good night.”

Profuse thanks for hospitality, for the conversation, for the pleasure of working together on the film Un Hommage à Robert-Houdin, from Lind. A rather curious exchange of friendly words and handshakes between Eisengrim and Roland Ingestree. The business of waking Kinghovn from a drunken stupor, of getting him to understand that he must not have another brandy before going home. And then, at last, we three were by ourselves.

“Strange to spend so many hours answering questions,” said Liesl.

“Strange, and disagreeable,” said Eisengrim.

“Strange what questions went unasked and unanswered,” said I.

“Such as—?” said Liesl.

“Such as ‘Who killed Boy Staunton?’ ” said I.