The Mannequin Makers

by Craig Cliff

  The effects of his fond jealousies so grieving

  That he shuts up himself. Yea, of this allow,

  If ever you have spent time worse ere now;

  If never, yet that Time himself doth say

  He wishes earnestly you never may.’

  With this, the figure shuffled back to the wings and two stage hands rolled out a backdrop painted to resemble the nave of a chapel, with real velvet curtains hung across a niche. Four men and two women, one quite old, the other rather beautiful, took the stage in a jumble of togas, tunics, capes, stockings, sandals and elfin shoes. The largest of the men in the finest of the garments also wore a crown of some heavy metal to which only the last flakes of gilt still clung.

  ‘O grave and good Paulina,’ the king began, ‘the great comfort that I have had of thee!’

  He took the older woman’s hand and she spoke to him reverently as they strolled along the stage, the other actors in tow. In front of the curtained niche, the king stopped and spoke solemnly:

  ‘Your gallery have we pass’d through, not without much content in many singularities; but we saw not that which my daughter came to look upon, the statue of her mother.’

  The actress playing Paulina began to describe the statue of the queen, the way the likeness exceeded anything the ‘hand of man hath done’, before pulling back the curtain. The actors gasped as a woman completely in white, posing on a short pedestal, was revealed. The audience murmured. Perhaps they saw an echo of Sandow’s statue—the white powdered face, one hand held up to support a veil of white lace, the other down by her hip.

  The actors marvelled at the supposed statue. Kemp thought the use of a veil unwise as the light material showed every movement. He considered the possibility of constructing a new window display based on this scene. He scanned the audience for The Carpenter, who might not be able to deliver such a scene as quickly as him, but would most certainly trump his queen (and that of the poor actress on the pedestal). Yes, there he was, leaning forward in his seat, craning his neck, thinking the very same thoughts.

  The king, Leontes, scrutinised the queen’s face.

  ‘But yet, Paulina,’ he said, ‘Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing so aged as this seems.’

  ‘So much the more our carver’s excellence,’ Paulina responded, ‘which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her as she lived now.’

  Kemp watched Hermione blinking and wondered if it was possible to train the eyelids to behave.

  Leontes continued to admire the statue, oblivious to its blinking. The younger actress, clearly the king’s daughter both in life and in the play, knelt at the foot of the statue. ‘Dear queen, that ended when I but began, give me that hand of yours to kiss.’

  Kemp felt behind him for the wall and was glad of its support.

  Would a statue of Louisa be a fitting tribute or another painful failure?

  When his focus returned to the play, Leontes was saying to another man, ‘See, my lord, would you not deem it breathed? And that those veins did verily bear blood?’

  Paulina made to draw the curtain on the statue, but Leontes stopped her.

  ‘I am sorry, sir,’ Paulina said, ‘I have thus far stirr’d you: but I could afflict you farther.’

  ‘Do, Paulina,’ Leontes said, ‘for this affliction has a taste as sweet as any cordial comfort. Still, methinks, there is an air comes from her: what fine chisel could ever yet cut breath?’

  Kemp looked at The Carpenter again, squeezed into the stalls, straining to see over the heads of those in front of him. It seemed an unlikely place for a recluse. But if Begg was to be believed, he’d been on hand to secure Sandow’s statue when it arrived at the train station the day before.

  ‘If you can behold it,’ Paulina was now saying, ‘I’ll make the statue move indeed, descend and take you by the hand; but then you’ll think—which I protest against—I am assisted by wicked powers.’

  Leontes begged her to continue and Paulina, facing the audience directly, said, ‘It is required you do awake your faith.’

  Stirring music began from the orchestra pit as Paulina urged the statue to come to life. With evident relief the actress playing Hermione began to stir. She reached out for the king’s hand and stepped down from her pedestal.

  ‘O, she’s warm!’ proclaimed Leontes. ‘If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.’

  The couple embraced and after one last speech from the king the players all left the stage, returning to receive their applause and take their bow.

  The master of ceremonies returned, rubbing his hands together greedily.

  ‘And now, fine people of Maru-maru,’ he said, pronouncing the town’s name as if it were two separate words, ‘the time has come for the pinnacle of the performance, the strength of the show. But first I must beg your patience as the stage is prepared for the many feats the Great Sandow will perform.’

  The same two stage hands who had rolled The Winter’s Tale’s background onstage came and rolled it off, though this time they were garbed in white togas and Roman sandals. Joined by four more men similarly attired—two of whom had been in the previous vignette—they began placing wooden crates on the stage in a deliberate fashion. When the boxes were all arranged, the mock Romans removed items with brief flourishes—dumbbells, barbells, chains, large bands of elastic, lengths of wood—the audience gasping with each revelation. The two strongest-looking men, possibly disciples of Sandow, each carried a large basket on stage and held them still as a third man fixed a steel rod between them. When everything had been arranged the men left and the curtain was lowered.

  Kemp took this moment, while the rest of the crowd murmured with excitement, to consider again the challenge of a Winter’s Tale window display: the spirals of artifice of having a wooden mannequin standing in for an actress pretending to be a marble statue (possibly enchanted) of the queen. How he longed for Louisa to be his sounding board, his collaborator. To sketch the scene he saw in his head so that he might see the flaws in the arrangement of the figures. But it would flounder, he realised, without the perfect Hermione. Such a mannequin was beyond his capabilities. He looked at his bandaged forefinger, which began to throb on cue.

  The curtain began to rise and the theatre fell silent. At first only the wooden crates at the foot of the stage were visible, then a revolving platform—he tried in vain to see how it might be powered—and inch by inch a man wearing only a leopard skin loincloth was revealed against a purple backdrop.

  Though Kemp had seen—had scrutinised—the plaster statue in the window of Hercus & Barling, he had still expected the real Sandow to be more imposing. What spun slowly before the people of Marumaru was a fair-headed, clean-limbed man of medium height somewhere in his mid-thirties. The orchestra began to play a swift, upbeat tune. Sandow’s clear skin glowed pink under the stage lights. The pose he held—his hands clasped behind his head, his feet at right angles with one heel lifted slightly, his torso in the contrapposto of classical sculpture—showed the development and balance of his muscles, the perfect symmetry of his form. Most striking to Kemp was the man’s back. It was as if it had been moulded by the hands of a loving god, each muscle distinct and purposeful. It was a tactile thing, begging to be touched. Beautiful in a way that was beyond man or woman, beyond art or life, even beyond the figures that emerged from The Carpenter’s gouges.

  After two or three slow revolutions of the pedestal, Sandow lowered his arms, making fists of his hands, dropped his head almost until his chin touched his chest and rearranged his pose, making new abdominal muscles prominent that had previously lain flat. It was as if serpents were pulsing beneath the man’s skin and he had managed to charm them into performing in unison. Despite the stillness of each pose, he seemed on the edge of being burst open should the charm wear off.

  Sandow began to alter his poses more quickly, working up to the pace of the orchestra’s accompaniment and giving Kemp less than half a turn to absorb each new perfection before it w
as erased by another.

  In the grief, confusion and anger of the last two days, Colton Kemp had shrunk from the world’s many stimulations, had sought and failed to drown his sadness and release his tension, had doubted the existence of happiness elsewhere and in the future, had seen himself confronted with a greyer life untouched by beauty—and yet here he was, in a theatre crowded with almost everyone he knew, excited and overstimulated by this vision of a man, spinning and spinning like a celestial body.

  The pedestal came to a stop. Sandow performed a backward somersault from standing, folded his arms and stood perfectly still, his face in profile. The crowd, who had been applauding and exclaiming for the duration of the brief exhibition, responded with a hero’s ovation.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said and stepped down from the pedestal. ‘Thank you. Please, that is quite enough applause.’ His voice was deep and guttural.

  ‘I wish to briefly talk to you about how I have attained my strength, the system I am sure many of you are familiar with, before I perform some demonstrations.’ He gestured to the props on the stage. ‘I was not a healthy child. My parents were not endowed with extraordinary strength. All the strength I possess I owe to my system.’

  The boy, Jesse, who had been Father Time, returned to the stage stripped to the waist like Sandow, though he wore a thick leather belt and white tights rather than the master’s Herculean loincloth. With Jesse as his model, Sandow—part preacher of the gospel of physical culture, part salesman for his own wares—proceeded to demonstrate how to perform exercises with his Spring-Grip Dumbbell and his elastic ‘developer’. A lot of attention was paid to the development of the lungs and chest—though he pronounced it schest, in perhaps the clearest signal of his origins—and at one point demonstrated how he could expand his chest from an already impressive forty-seven inches to a full sixty-one.

  He repeated often the fact that a person of any age or gender could undertake these exercises and obtain benefit from them. ‘As I travel about the colonies,’ Sandow said, resting a hand on Jesse’s shoulder, ‘I like to hold special talks with physicians and other interested parties of a town. These talks are discussions in the true sense and I much prefer this back and forth to a mere address. Unfortunately, as I will be leaving town early in the morning, I will not have the opportunity to hold such a congress here. However, I will take questions from the floor this evening.’ He held up his hand quickly. ‘But first, let me conclude the traditional portion of the show with a few feats of strength!’

  With one hand he seized Jesse by the belt and lifted him over his head.

  The theatre erupted in a pandemonium of applause.

  The assistants in togas returned to the stage and the orchestra resumed. Sandow began by lifting a weight he stated was one hundred and thirty pounds, though it looked like a toy as he raised it above his head with one hand. He brought it down and handed it carefully to an assistant, who struggled to return it to its wooden rack. Sandow then lifted a barbell from the floor to an arm’s length above his head in a single jerk. ‘Two hundred and forty-two pounds,’ he said, while still supporting the weight. He then lifted a larger barbell to his shoulder, announced, ‘Three hundred pounds,’ and proceeded to fully extend his arm above his head.

  The strongman began to stalk around the stage, lifting barrels and bursting chains, quickly and quietly. Even as the acts became more and more ludicrous, he maintained an air of grace.

  He lay on his side and lifted one of his assistants by the ankle into the air.

  Assistants brought forward two trestles. Sandow rested his neck on one, his heels on the other, and began lifting barbells with each hand while four of his assistants stood on his torso.

  He lifted the makeshift barbell constructed from the two large baskets and the metal rod, then asked two assistants to stand inside the baskets and lifted the rig with similar ease.

  He tore a pack of playing cards in half with his fingers. Then he tore two packs at once, then four, one on top of the other, ripping them as cleanly as if they had been cut with a knife. An assistant fastened the torn packets with ribbons and threw them into all parts of the theatre to be examined and retained as mementoes.

  ‘And now for a feat often referred to as “The Roman Column”,’ Sandow announced with no sign he was short of breath. He suspended himself upside down, his knees hooked over a horizontal bar protruding from an imitation marble column, then raised himself up in a sort of hanging sit-up. He repeated the feat with a barbell in each hand and again with assistants swinging on the end of the barbells.

  Sandow righted himself and the column was removed from the stage. He announced, a little brusquely, ‘And now for “The Tomb of Hercules”,’ and reclined back until his hands were on the ground, his body arched upward, pelvis pointing at the vaulted ceiling. The six assistants carried out a large wooden platform and placed it on top of the strongman. It was so large that one end remained on the ground, forming a sort of ramp, though Sandow’s arms and legs did not appear fazed by the weight.

  Jesse then led out the two ponies by their jewelled bridles and walked them carefully up the ramp of the platform until it lifted from the ground and the platform was horizontal. The six assistants then retrieved all the weights that had been used during the show and handed them to Jesse, who arranged them carefully, maintaining the equilibrium of the platform. Then, one by one, he clasped the hands of the men in togas and lifted them onto the platform.

  Kemp almost forgot that beneath the seven men, two ponies, more than a thousand pounds of weights and the heavy platform itself, was Sandow, hands and feet planted on the stage as if embedded in the firmest of foundations.

  As the people of Marumaru cheered, the assistants dismounted with care, removing the weights and lowering the platform so that the ponies could walk down. Once the men in togas had removed the platform, Sandow pushed himself upright with what strength remained in his arms and dusted himself off. He gave a cursory bow and left the stage.

  Two minutes later he returned, dressed in a three-piece suit that Kemp would wager had come from Savile Row. He looked almost unremarkable and the audience greeted him with a trickle of polite applause.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Sandow said. ‘We have a few minutes remaining if you wish to ask me any questions about my system, or the benefits of physical culture more generally.’

  A scatter of hands rose into the hair. ‘Yes, madam?’ He pointed at Mrs Harry Wisdom in the second row.

  ‘Mr Sandow, what is your view on prohibition?’

  ‘It is my belief, madam, that if a healthy love of physical culture was spread among the young there would be no need of prohibition. Men who study physical culture take care of their bodies and when they have a drink or two have the willpower to say, “No, old man, I have had enough. This stuff does not do me any good if I take more.”’

  Big Jim Raymond stood without invitation and asked in his booming, mayoral voice, ‘What about lunatics? Do you think they would benefit by physical training?’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Sandow replied. ‘They have adopted my system at Coney Island and no fewer than eighty persons have been sent out of the asylum thoroughly cured. It is the body that feeds the brain, the latter consuming twenty-five per cent of the blood in the system. Among businessmen and politicians very often it consumes as much as sixty per cent. It stands to reason, therefore, that if you do not keep the machinery for manufacturing food for the brain in good order something must burst. Many diseases can be cured by physical training of the body, for a healthy state of the mind will not allow the bacillus to live in the body.’

  The crowd mumbled in agreement.

  ‘And you, sir, standing toward the back?’

  Jolly Bannerman straightened the lapels of his ill-fitting suit. ‘Have you received many challenges during your tour, Mr Sandow?’ he asked, grinning.

  ‘Oh, a great many,’ Sandow said, ‘and always from men who have nothing to lose and everything to gain from the advertisem
ent they would get in a public competition with myself. But to accept challenges from every man I meet is not my object in life.’ Jolly’s face sank. ‘I am endeavouring to make other men stronger than I am myself. That is my gospel and I think I have preached it well enough to you this evening. You, sir,’ Sandow indicated to a man seated four rows from the front. Kemp recognised him as Mr Fricker, the pharmacist, as he stood to ask his question.

  ‘Have you devoted any time to developing some of the minor organs, such as moving the ears?’

  The town chuckled as one.

  ‘I must admit that I have not attained this accomplishment,’ Sandow replied. ‘Indeed, I do not see its value, unless one wishes to become a professional listener.’ This retort was met with widespread laughter, applause and a few ringing bravos.

  ‘But surely,’ Kemp shouted, pushing to the front of the men standing in the wings, ‘the actress in your company who plays a statue could benefit from learning not to blink?’

  Sandow fingered his moustache, grinning as he searched for where the voice had come from. ‘Far be it from me to comment on other performers,’ he said, looking vaguely in Kemp’s direction, ‘particularly those more artful than me, a simple strongman.’

  ‘But could the eyelids be trained?’ Kemp persisted.

  ‘I do not see why not,’ Sandow said, finally eyeing Kemp, who felt as if an icicle had been planted in his chest.

  Sandow clapped his hands together. ‘What an interesting array of questions. I thank you for your kindness and hospitality and wish you all the best for the New Year.’

  The strongman made his way off the stage. The curtains dropped and the townsfolk collected their purses and canes from the floor but Colton Kemp was already out the door and running.

  The grey warbler with the long-tailed cuckoo.

  Part two

  26 DECEMBER 1918 – 10 JANUARY 1919

  A Mannequin’s Tale

  ‘. . . all man’s misery stems from a single cause, his inability to remain quietly in one room.’