“No, Mr. Staunton, I cannot tell you that. But perhaps you will tell me how you know what was said to Mrs. Tillman, who sat in F32 on Friday night, if your party came to the theatre on Thursday?”
“Mightn’t I have heard it from friends?”
“You might, but you did not. You came back to see my exhibition on Friday night because you had missed some of it by reason of your daughter’s over-excitement. I can only assume my exhibition offered something you wanted. A great compliment. I appreciated it, I assure you. Indeed, I appreciated it so much that the Head decided not to name you and tell the audience that your appointment as Lieutenant-Governor would be announced on Monday. I am sure you understand how much renunciation there is in refusing such a scoop. It would have brought me wonderful publicity, but it would have embarrassed you, and the Head and I decided not to do that.”
“But you can’t possibly have known! I hadn’t had the letter myself more than a couple of hours before going to the theatre. I had it with me as a matter of fact.”
“Very true, and you have it now; inside right-hand breast pocket. Don’t worry, I haven’t picked your pocket. But when you lean forward, however slightly, the tip of a long envelope made of thick creamy paper can just be seen; only governments use such ostentatious envelopes, and when a man so elegantly dressed as you are bulges his jacket with one of them, it is probably—you see? There is an elementary lesson in magic for you. Work on it for twenty years and you may comprehend the Brazen Head.”
This took Boy down a peg; the good-humoured, youthful chuckle he gave was his first step to get himself on top of the conversation again. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’ve just been showing it to the Headmaster; because, of course, I’ll have to resign as Chairman of the Board of Governors. And I was just coming to talk to you about it, Dunny.”
“Come along then,” I said. “We were going to have a drink.”
I was conscious already that Boy was up to one of his special displays of charm. He had put his foot wrong with Eisengrim by asking him to reveal the secret of an illusion; it was unlike him to be so gauche, but I suppose the excitement about his new appointment blew up his ego a little beyond what he could manage. It seemed to me that I could already see the plumed, cocked hat of a Lieutenant-Governor on his head.
Eisengrim had been sharp enough with him to arouse hostility, and Boy loved to defeat hostility by turning the other cheek—which is by no means a purely Christian ploy, as Boy had shown me countless times. Eisengrim further topped him by the little bit of observation about the letter, which had made Boy look like a child who is so besotted by a new toy that it cannot let the toy out of its grasp. Boy wanted a chance to right the balance, which of course meant making him master of the situation.
It was clear to me that one of those sympathies, or antipathies, or at any rate unusual states of feeling, had arisen between these two which sometimes lead to falling in love, or to sudden warm friendships, or to lasting and rancorous enmities, but which are always extraordinary. I wanted to see what would happen, and my appetite was given the special zest of knowing who Eisengrim really was, which Boy did not, and perhaps would never learn.
It was like Boy to seek to ingratiate himself with the new friend by treating the old friend with genial contempt. When the three of us had made our way to my room at the end of the top-floor corridor—my old room, which I have always refused to leave for more comfortable quarters in the newer buildings—he kicked the door open and entered first, turning on the lights and touring the room as he said, “Still the same old rat’s nest. What are you going to do when you have to move? How will you ever find room anywhere else for all this junk? Look at those books! I’ll bet you don’t use some of them once a year.”
It was true that several of the big volumes were spread about, and I had to take some of them out of an armchair for Eisengrim, so I was a little humbled.
But Eisengrim spoke. “I like it very much,” said he. “I so seldom get to my home, and I have to live in hotel rooms for weeks and months on end. Next spring I go on a world tour; that will mean something like five years of hotels. This room speaks of peace and a mind at work. I wish it were mine.”
“I wouldn’t say old Dunny’s mind was at work,” said Boy. “I wish all I had to do was teach the same lessons every year for forty years.”
“You are forgetting his many and excellent books, are you not?” said Eisengrim.
Boy understood that he was not going to get what he wanted, which cannot have been anything more than a complicity with an interesting stranger, by running me down, so he took another tack. “You mustn’t misunderstand if I am disrespectful towards the great scholar. We’re very old friends. We come from the same little village. In fact I think we might say that all the brains of Deptford—past, present, and doubtless to come—are in this room right now.”
For the first time in Boy’s company, Eisengrim laughed. “Might I be included in such a distinguished group?” he asked.
Boy was pleased to have gained a laugh. “Sorry, birth in Deptford is an absolute requirement.”
“Oh, I have that already. It was about my achievements in the world that I had doubt.”
“I’ve looked through your Autobiography—Lorene asked me to buy a copy for her. I thought you were born somewhere in the far north of Sweden.”
“That was Magnus Eisengrim; my earlier self was born in Deptford. If the Autobiography seems to be a little high in colour you must blame Ramsay. He wrote it.”
“Dunny! You never told me that!”
“It never seemed relevant,” said I. I was amazed that Paul would tell him such a thing, but I could see that he, like Boy, was prepared to play some high cards in this game of topping each other.
“I don’t remember anybody in the least like you in Deptford. What did you say your real name was?”
“My real name is Magnus Eisengrim; that is who I am and that is how the world knows me. But before I found out who I was, I was called Paul Dempster, and I remember you very well. I always thought of you as the Rich Young Ruler.”
“And are you and Dunny old friends?”
“Yes, very old friends. He was my first teacher of magic. He also taught me a little about saints, but it was the magic that lingered. His speciality as a conjurer was eggs—the Swami of the Omelette. He was my only teacher till I ran away with a circus.”
“Did you? You know I wanted to do that. I suppose it is part of every boy’s dream.”
“Then boys are lucky that it remains a dream. I should not have said a circus; it was a very humble carnival show. I was entranced by Willard the Wizard; he was so much more skilful than Ramsay. He was quite clever with cards and a very neat pickpocket. I begged him to take me, and was such an ignorant little boy—perhaps I might even call myself innocent, though it is a word I don’t like—that I was in ecstasy when he consented. But I soon found out that Willard had two weaknesses—boys and morphia. The morphia had already made him careless or he would never have run the terrible risk of stealing a boy. But when I had well and truly found out what travelling with Willard meant, he had me in slavery; he told me that if anybody ever found out what we did together I would certainly be hanged, but he would get off because he knew all the judges everywhere. So I was chained to Willard by fear; I was his thing and his creature, and I learned conjuring as a reward. One always learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence, though my case was spectacular. But the astonishing thing is that I grew to like Willard, especially as morphia incapacitated him for his hobby and ruined him as a conjurer. It was then he became a Wild Man.”
“Then he was Le Solitaire des forets?” I asked.
“That was even later. His first decline was from conjurer to Wild Man—essentially a geek.”
“Geek?” said Boy.
“That is what carnival people call them. They are not an advertised attraction, but word that a geek is in a back tent is passed around quietly, and money is taken withou
t any sale of tickets. Otherwise the Humane Societies make themselves a nuisance. The geek is represented as somebody who simply has to have raw flesh, and especially blood. After the spieler has lectured terrifyingly on the psychology and physiology of the geek, the geek is given a live chicken; he growls and rolls his eyes, then he gnaws through its neck until the head is off, and he drinks the spouting blood. Not a nice life, and very hard on the teeth, but if it is the only way to keep yourself in morphia, you’d rather geek than have the horrors. But geeking costs money; you need a live chicken every time, and even the oldest, toughest birds cost something. Before Willard got too sick even to geek, he was geeking with worms and gartersnakes when I could catch them for him. The rubes loved it; Willard was something even the most disgusting brute could despise.
“There was trouble with the police, at last, and I thought we would do better abroad. We had been over there quite a time, Ramsay, before you you I met in the Tyrol, and by then Willard was in very poor health, and Le Solitaire des forets was all he could manage. I doubt if he even knew where he was. So that is what running away with a circus was like, Mr. Staunton.”
“Why didn’t you leave him when he was down to geeking?”
“Shall I answer you honestly? Very well, then; it was loyalty. Yes, loyalty to Willard, though not to his geeking or his nasty ways with boys. I suppose it was loyalty to his dreadful, inescapable human need. Many people feel these irrational responsibilities and cannot crush them. Like Ramsay’s loyalty to my mother, for instance. I am sure it was an impediment to him, and certainly it must have been a heavy expense, but he did not fail her. I suppose he loved her. I might have done so if I had ever known her. But, you see, the person I knew was a woman unlike anybody else’s mother, who was called “hoor” by people like you, Mr. Staunton.”
“I really don’t remember,” said Boy. “Are you sure?”
“Quite sure. I have never been able to forget what she was or what people called her. Because, you see. it was my birth that made her like that. My father thought it his duty to tell me, so that I could do whatever was possible to make it up to her. My birth was what robbed her of her sanity; that sometimes happened, you know, and I suppose it happens still. I was too young for the kind of guilt my father wanted me to feel; he had an extraordinary belief in guilt as an educative force. I couldn’t stand it. I cannot feel guilt now. But I can call up in an instant what it felt like to be the child of a woman everybody jeered at and thought a dirty joke—including you, the Rich Young Ruler. But I am sure your accent is much more elegant now. A Lieutenant-Governor who said “hoor” would not reflect credit on the Crown, would he?”
Boy had plenty of experience in being baited by hostile people, and he did not show by a quiver how strange this was to him. He prepared to get the attack into his own hands.
“I forget what you said your name was.”
Eisengrim continued to smile, so I said, “He’s Paul Dempster.”
This time it was my turn for surprise. “Who may Paul Dempster be?” asked Boy.
“Do you mean to say you don’t remember the Dempsters in Deptford? The Reverend Amasa Dempster?”
“No. I don’t remember what is of no use to me, and I haven’t been in Deptford since my father died. That’s twenty-six years.”
“You have no recollection of Mrs. Dempster?”
“None at all. Why should I?”
I could hardly believe he spoke the truth, but as we talked on I had to accept it as a fact that he had so far edited his memory of his early days that the incident of the snowball had quite vanished from his mind. But had not Paul edited his memories so that only pain and cruelty remained? I began to wonder what I had erased from my own recollection.
We had drinks and were sitting as much at ease as men can amid so many strong currents of feeling. Boy made another attempt to turn the conversation into a realm where he could dominate.
“How did you come to choose your professional name? I know magicians like to have extraordinary names, but yours sounds a little alarming. Don’t you find that a disadvantage?”
“No. And I did not choose it. My patron gave it to me.” He turned his head towards me, and I knew that the patron was Liesl. “It comes from one of the great northern beast fables, and it means Wolf. Far from being a disadvantage, people like it. People like to be in awe of something, you know. And my magic show is not ordinary. It provokes awe, which is why it is a success. It has something of the quality of Ramsay’s saints, though my miracles have a spice of the Devil about them—again my patron’s idea. That is where you make your mistake. You have always wanted to be loved; nobody responds quite as we would wish, and people are suspicious of a public figure who wants to be loved. I have been wiser than you. I chose a Wolfs name. You have chosen forever to be a Boy. Was it because your mother used to call you Pidgy Boy-Boy, even when you were old enough to call my mother “hoor”?”
“How in God’s name did you know that? Nobody in the world now living knows that!”
“Oh yes, two people know it—myself and Ramsay. He told me, many years ago, under an oath of secrecy.”
“I never did any such thing!” I shouted, outraged. Yet, even as I shouted, a doubt assailed me.
“But you did, or how would I know? You told me that to comfort me once, when the Rich Young Ruler and some of his gang had been shouting at my mother. We all forget many of the things we do, especially when they do not fit into the character we have chosen for ourselves. You see yourself as the man of many confidences, Ramsay. It would not do for you to remember a time when you told a secret, Dunstan Ramsay—when did you cease to be Dunstable?”
“A girl renamed me when I had at last broken with my mother. Liesl said it made me one of the twice-born. Had you thought that we are all three of the company of the twice-born? We have all rejected our beginnings and become something our parents could not have foreseen.”
“I can’t imagine your parents foreseeing that you would become a theorizer about myth and legend,” said Eisengrim. “Hard people—I remember them clearly. Hard people—especially your mother.”
“Wrong,” said I. And I told him how my mother had worked and schemed and devised a nest to keep him alive, and exulted when he decided to live. “She said you were a fighter, and she liked that.”
Now it was his turn to be disconcerted. “Do you mind if I have one of your cigars?” he said.
I do not smoke cigars, but the box he took from a shelf on the other side of the room might easily be mistaken for a humidor—rather a fine one. But as he took it down and rather superciliously blew dust from it his face changed.
He brought it over and laid it on the low table around which our chairs were grouped. “What’s this?” he asked.
“It is what it says it is,” said I.
The engraving on the silver plaque on the lid of the box was beautiful and clear, for I had chosen the script with care:
Requiescat in pace
Mary Dempster
1888–1959
Here is the patience and faith of the saints.
We looked at it for some time. Boy was first to speak.
“Why would you keep a thing like that with you?”
“A form of piety. A sense of guilt unexpiated. Indolence. I have always been meaning to put them in some proper place, but I haven’t found it yet.”
“Guilt?” said Eisengrim.
Here it was. Either I spoke now or I kept silence forever. Dunstan Ramsay counselled against revelation, but Fifth Business would not hear.
“Yes, guilt. Staunton and I robbed your mother of her sanity.” And I told them the story of the snowball.
“Too bad,” said Boy. “But if I may say so, Dunny, I think you’ve let the thing build up into something it never was. You unmarried men are terrible fretters. I threw the snowball—at least you say so, and for argument’s sake let that go—and you dodged it. It precipitated something which was probably going to happen anyhow. The difference between
us is that you’ve brooded over it and I’ve forgotten it. We’ve both done far more important things since. I’m sorry if I was offensive to your mother, Dempster. But you know what boys are. Brutes, because they don’t know any better. But they grow up to be men.”
“Very important men. Men whom the Crown delighteth to honour,” said Eisengrim with an unpleasant laugh.
“Yes. If you expect me to be diffident about that, you’re wrong.”
“Men who retain something of the brutish boy, even,” said I.
“I don’t think I understand you.”
Fifth Business insisted on being heard again. “Would this jog your memory?” I asked, handing him my old paperweight.
“Why should it? An ordinary bit of stone. You’ve used it to hold down some of the stuff on your desk for years. I’ve seen it a hundred times. It doesn’t remind me of anything but you.”
“It is the stone you put in the snowball you threw at Mrs. Dempster,” I said. “I’ve kept it because I couldn’t part with it. I swear I never meant to tell you what it was. But, Boy, for God’s sake, get to know something about yourself. The stone-in-the-snowball has been characteristic of too much you’ve done for you to forget it forever!”
“What I’ve done! Listen, Dunny, one thing I’ve done is to make you pretty well-off for a man in your position. I’ve treated you like a brother. Given you tips nobody else got, let me tell you. And that’s where your nice little nest-egg came from. Your retirement fund you used to whine about.”
I hadn’t thought I whined, but perhaps I did. “Need we go on with this moral bookkeeping?” I said. “I”m simply trying to recover something of the totality of your life. Don’t you want to possess it as a whole—the bad with the good? I told you once you’d made a God of yourself, and the insufficiency of it forced you to become an atheist. It’s time you tried to be a human being. Then maybe something bigger than yourself will come up on your horizon.”
“You’re trying to get me. You want to humiliate me in front of this man here; you seem to have been in cahoots with him for years, though you never mentioned him or his miserable mother to me—your best friend, and your patron and protector against your own incompetence! Well, let him hear this, as we’re dealing in ugly truths: you’ve always hated me because I took Leola from you. And I did! It wasn’t because you lost a leg and were ugly. It was because she loved me better.”
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