World of Wonders tdt-3

by Robertson Davies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “ ‘Honest to God, Gus, nothing would ever have happened, if the kid hadn.t shown some talent.’ This was a lucky string to touch. Gus was sure she knew everything there was to know about Talent—a word she always pronounced with the air of one giving it a capital letter. And so it came out that when Willard had given me a quarter, out of pure open-heartedness, I had immediately done a trick with it. As neat a palm-and-pass as Willard had ever seen. Good enough for the Palace Theater in New York.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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