World of Wonders

by Robertson Davies

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And we won’t be over

  Till it’s over

  Over there!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  God be with you till we meet again!

  Keep love’s banner floating o’er you,

  Smite death’s threatening wave before you:

  God be with you till we meet again!

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

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

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

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