World of Wonders

by Robertson Davies

  “ ‘It’s an old person. They’re worried about death; will it come soon and will it hurt? Have I got cancer? Did I invest my money right? Are my grandchildren going to make out? Have I had all life holds for me?

  “ ‘Sure you get smart-alecs. Sometimes they tell you most. Flatter them. Laugh at the world with them. Say they can’t be deceived. Warn them not to let their cleverness make them hard, because they’re really very fine people and will make a big mark in the world. Look to see what they are showing to the world, then tell them they are the exact opposite. That works for almost everybody.

  “ ‘Flatter everybody. Is it crooked? Most people are starved to death for a kind word. Warn everybody against something, usually something they will be let in for because they are too honest, or too good-natured. Warn against enemies; everybody’s got an enemy. Say things will take a turn for the better soon, because they will; talking to you will make things better because it takes a load off their minds.

  “ ‘But not everybody can do it. You have to know how to get people to talk. That’s the big secret. That Willard! He calls himself a hypnotist, so what does he do? He stands up a half-dozen Rubes and says, I’m going to hypnotize you! Then he bugs his eyes and waves his hands and after a while they’re hypnotized. But the real hypnotism is something very different. It’s part kindness and part making them feel they’re perfectly safe with you. That you’re their friend even though they never saw you until a minute ago. You got to lull them, like you’d lull a child. That’s the real art. You mustn’t overdo it. No saying, you’re safe with me, or anything like that. You have to give it out, and they have to take it in, without a lot of direct talk. Of course you look at them hard, but not domineering-hard like vaude hypnotists. You got to look at them as if they was all you had on your mind at the moment, and you couldn’t think of anything you’d rather do. You got to look at them as if it was a long time since you met an equal. But don’t push; don’t shove it. You got to be wide open to them, or else they won’t be wide open to you.’

  “Of course I wanted to have my fortune told by Mrs Constantinescu, but it was against the etiquette of carnival. We never dreamed of asking Sonnenfels to lift anything heavy, or treated the Fat Woman as if she was inconvenient company. But of course Zingara knew what I thought, and she teased me about it. ‘You want to know your future, but you don’t want to ask me? That’s right; don’t put your faith in sideshow gypsies. Crooks, the whole lot of them. What do they know about the modern world? They belong to the past. They got no place in North America.’ But one day, when I suppose I was looking blue, she did tell me a few things.

  “ ‘You got an easy fortune to tell, boy. You’ll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you’ll never stop climbing. You’ll rise very high and you’ll make people treat you like a king. How do I know? Because you’re dirt right now, and it grinds your gizzard to be dirt. What makes me think you’ve got the stuff to make the world admire you? Because you couldn’t have survived the life you’re leading if you hadn’t got lots of sand. You don’t eat right and you got filthy hair and I’ll bet you’ve been lousy more than once. If it hasn’t killed you, nothing will.’

  “Mrs Constantinescu was the only person who had ever talked to me about what Willard was still doing to me. The Fat Woman muttered now and then about ‘abominations’ and Sonny was sometimes very nasty to me, but nobody came right out and said anything unmistakable. But old Zingara said ‘You’re his bumboy, eh? Well, it’s not good, but it could be worse. I’ve known men who liked goats best. It gives you a notion what women got to put up with. The stories I hear! If he calls you “hoor” just think what that means. I’ve known plenty of hoors who made it a ladder to something very good. But if you don’t like it, do something about it. Get your hair cut. Keep yourself clean. Stop wiping your nose on your sleeve. If you got no money, here’s five dollars. Now you start out with a good Turkish bath. Build yourself up. If you gotta be a hoor, be a clean hoor. If you don’t want to be a hoor, don’t look like a lousy bum.’

  “At that time, which was the early twenties, a favourite film star was Jackie Coogan; he played charming waifs, often with Charlie Chaplin. But I was a real waif, and sometimes when a Coogan picture was showing in the vaude houses where Willard and I appeared, I was humiliated by how far I fell short of the Coogan ideal.

  “I tried a more thorough style of washing, and I got a haircut, a terrible one from a barber who wanted to make everybody look like Rudolph Valentino. I bought some pomade for my hair from him, and the whole World of Wonders laughed at me. But Mrs Constantinescu encouraged me. Later, when I was with Willard on the vaude circuit, we had three days in a town where there was a Turkish bath, and I spent a dollar and a half on one. The masseur worked on me for half an hour, and then said: ‘You know what? I never seen a dirtier guy. Jeeze, there’s still grey stuff comin’ outa ya! Look at these towels! What you do for a living, kid? Sweep chimneys?’ I developed quite a taste for Turkish baths, and stole money regularly from Willard to pay for them. I’m sure he knew I stole, but he preferred that to having me ask him for money. He was growing very careless about money, anyhow.

  “I was emboldened to steal enough, over a period of a few weeks, to buy a suit. It was a dreadful suit, God knows, but I had been wearing Willard’s cast-offs, cheaply cut down, and it was a royal robe to me. Willard raised his eyebrows when he saw it, but he said nothing. He was losing his grip on the world, and losing his grip on me, and like many people who are losing their grip, he mistook it for the coming of a new wisdom in himself. But when summer came, and Mrs Constantinescu saw me, she was pleased.

  “ ‘You’re doing fine,’ she said. ‘You got to get yourself ready to make a break. This carnival is running downhill. Gus is getting tired. Charlie is getting too big a boy for her to handle. He’s drunk on the show now, and she don’t even bawl him out. Bad luck is coming. How do I know? What else could be coming to a stale tent-show like this? Bad luck. You watch out. Their bad luck will be your good luck, if you’re smart. Keep your eyes open.’

  “I mustn’t give the impression that Mrs Constantinescu was always at my elbow uttering gypsy warnings. I didn’t understand much of what she said, and I mistrusted some of what I understood. That business about looking at people as if you were interested in nothing else, for instance; when I tried it, I suppose I looked foolish, and Happy Hannah made a loud fuss in the Pullman one day, declaring that I was trying to learn the Evil Eye, and she knew who was teaching me. Mrs Constantinescu was very high on her list of abominations. She urged me to search Deuteronomy to learn what happened to people who had the Evil Eye; plagues wonderful, and plagues of my seed, even great plagues of long continuance, and sore sickness; that was what was in store for me unless I stopped bugging my eyes at folks who had put on the whole armour of God, that they might stand against the wiles of the Devil. Like every young person, I was abashed at the apparent power of older people to see through me. I suppose I was pitifully transparent, and Happy Hannah’s inveterate malignancy gave her extraordinary penetration. Indeed, I was inclined to think at that time that Mrs Constantinescu was a nut, but she was an interesting nut, and willing to talk. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how much good sense was in what she said.

  “Of course she was right about bad luck coming to the show. It happened suddenly.

  “Em Dark was a nice woman, and she tried to fight down her growing disappointment with Joe by doing everything she could for him, which included making herself attractive. She was small, and rather plump, and dressed well, making all her clothes. Joe was very proud of her appearance, and I think poor Joe was beginning to be aware that the best thing about him was his wife. So he was completely thrown off base one day, as the Pullman was carrying us from one village to another, to see a horrible caricature of Em walk past him and down the aisle toward Heinie and Sonny, who were laughing their heads off in the door of the smoking-room. It was Rango, dressed in Em’s latest and best
, with a cloche hat on his head, and one of Em’s purses in his hairy hand. There is no doubt that Heinie and Sonny meant to get Joe’s goat, and to spatter the image of Em, because that was the kind of men they were, and that was what they thought funny. Joe looked like a man who has seen a ghost. He was working, as he so often was, on one of the throwing knives he sold as part of his act, and I think before he knew what he had done, he threw it, and got Rango right between the shoulders. Rango turned, with a look of dreadful pathos on his face, and fell in the aisle. The whole thing took less than thirty seconds.

  “You can imagine the uproar. Heinie rushed to Rango, coddled him in his arms, wept, swore, screamed, and became hysterical. But Rango was dead. Sonny stormed and accused Joe in German; he was the kind of man who jabs with his forefinger when he is angry. Gus and Professor Spencer tried to restore order, but nobody wanted order; the excitement was the most refreshing thing that had happened to the World of Wonders in years. Everybody had a good deal to say on one side or the other, but mostly against Joe. The love between Joe and Em concentrated the malignancy of those unhappy people, but this was the first time they had been given a chance to attack it directly. Happy Hannah was seized with a determination to stop the train. What good that would have done nobody knew, but she felt that a big calamity demanded the uttermost in drama.

  “I did not at first understand the full enormity of what Joe had done. To kill Rango was certainly a serious injury to Heinie, whose livelihood he was. To buy and train another orang-outang would be months of work. It was Zovene, busily crossing himself, who put the worst of the horror in words: it is a well-known fact in the carnival and circus world that if anybody kills a monkey, three people will die. Heinie wanted Joe to be first on the list, but Gus held him back; luckily for him, because in a fight Joe could have murdered anybody on the show, not excluding Sonny.

  “What do you do with a dead monkey? First of all Rango had to be disentangled from Em Dark’s best outfit, which Em quite understandably didn’t want and threw off the back of the car with Rango’s blood on it. (What do you suppose the finder made of that?) Then the body had to be stowed somewhere, and Heinie would have it nowhere except in his berth, which Rango customarily shared with him. You can’t make a dead monkey look dignified, and Rango was not an impressive corpse. His eyes wouldn’t shut; one stared and the other eyelid drooped, and soon both eyes took on a bluish film; his yellow teeth showed. The Darks felt miserable, because of what Joe had done, and because their love had been held up to mockery in the naked passion and hatred of the hour after Rango’s death. Heinie had not scrupled to say that Rango was a lot more use on the show and a lot better person, even though not human, than a little floozie who just stood up and let a dummkopf of a husband throw knives at her; if Joe was so good at hitting Rango, how come he never hit that bitch of a wife of his? This led to more trouble, and it was Em who had to prevent Joe from battering Heinie. I must say that Heinie took the fullest advantage of the old notion that a man is not responsible for what he does in his grief. He got very drunk that night, and wailed and grieved all up and down the car.

  “Indeed, the World of Wonders got drunk. Private bottles appeared from everywhere, and were private no more. Professor Spencer accepted a large drink, and it went a very long way with him, for he was not used to it. Indeed, even Happy Hannah took a drink, and quite shortly everyone wished she hadn’t. It had been her custom for some years to drink a lot of cider vinegar; she said it kept her blood from thickening, to the great danger of her life, and she got away with so much vinegar that she always smelled of it. Her unhappy inspiration was to spike her evening slug of vinegar with a considerable shot of bootleg hooch which Gus pressed on her, and it was hardly down before it was up again. A nauseated Fat Woman is a calamity on a monumental scale, and poor Gus had a bad night of it with Happy Hannah. Only Willard kept out of the general saturnalia; he crept into his berth, injected himself with his favourite solace, and was out of that world of sorrow, over which the corpse of Rango spread an increasing influence.

  “From time to time the Talent would gather around Heinie’s berth, and toast the remains. Professor Spencer made a speech, sitting on the edge of the upper berth opposite the one which had become Rango’s bier; in this comfortable position he was able to hold his glass with a device he possessed, attached to one foot. He was drunkenly eloquent, and talked touchingly if incoherently about the link between Man and the Lesser Creation, which was nowhere so strong or so truly understood as in circuses and carnivals; had we not, through the years, come to esteem Rango as one of ourselves, a delightful Child of Nature who spoke not with the tongue of man, but through a thousand merry tricks, which now, alas, had been brought to an untimely end? (‘Rango’d of been twenty next April,’ sobbed Heinie; ‘twenty-two, more likely, but I always dated him from when I bought him.’) Professor Spencer did not want to say that Rango had been struck down by a murderer’s hand. No, that wasn’t the way he looked at it. He would speak of it more as a Cream Passional, brought on by the infinite complexity of human relationships. The Professor rambled on until he lost his audience, who took affairs into their own hands, and drank toasts to Rango as long as the booze held out, with simple cries of ‘Good luck and good-bye, Rango old pal.’

  “At last Rango’s wake was over. The Darks had lain unseen in their berth ever since it had been possible to go to bed, but it was half past three when Heinie crawled in beside Rango and wept himself to sleep with the dead monkey in his arms. By now Rango was firmly advanced in rigor mortis and his tail stuck from between the curtains of the berth like a poker. But Heinie’s devotion was much admired; Gus said it warmed the cuckolds of her heart.

  “Next morning, at the fairground, our first business was to bury Rango. ‘Let him lay where his life was spent for others,’ was what Heinie said. Professor Spencer, badly hung over, asked God to receive Rango. The Darks came, and brought a few flowers, which Heinie ostentatiously spurned from the grave. All Rango’s possessions—his cups and plates, the umbrella with which he coquetted on the tightrope—were buried with him.

  “Was Zingara tactless, or mischievous, when she said loudly, as we broke up to go about our work: ‘Well, how long do we wait to see who’s first?’ The calliope began the toot-up—it was ‘The Poor Butterfly Waltz’—and we got ready for the first trick which, without Rango, put extra work on all of us.

  “As the days passed we realized just how much extra work the absence of Rango did mean. There was nothing Heinie could do without him, and five minutes of performance time had somehow to be made up at each trick. Sonnenfels volunteered to add a minute to his act, and so did Duparc; Happy Hannah was always glad to extend the time during which she harassed her audience about religion, and it was simple for Willard to extend the doings of Abdullah for another minute; so it seemed easy. But an additional ten minutes every day was not so easy for Sonnenfels as for the others; as Strong Men go, he was growing old. Less than a fortnight after the death of Rango, at the three o’clock trick, he hoisted his heaviest bar-bell to his knee, then level with his shoulders, then dropped it with a crash and fell forward. There was a doctor on the fairground, and it was less than three minutes before he was with Sonny, but even at that he came too late. Sonny was dead.

  “It is much easier to dispose of a Strong Man than it is of a monkey. Sonny had no family, but he had quite a lot of money in a belt he wore at all times, and we were able to bury him in style. He had been a stupid, evil-speaking, bad-tempered man—quite the opposite of the genial giant described by Charlie in his introduction—and no one but Heinie regretted him deeply. But he left another hole in the show, and it was only because Duparc could do a few tricks on the tightrope that the gap could be filled without making the World of Wonders seem skimpy. Heinie mourned Sonny as uproariously as he had mourned Rango, but this time his grief was not so well received by the Talent.

  “Sonny’s death was proof positive that the curse of a dead monkey was a fact. Zingara was no
t slow to point out how short a time had been needed to set the bad luck to work. The Talent turned against Heinie with just as much extravagance of sentimentality as they had shown in pitying him. They were inclined to blame him for Sonny’s death. He was still hanging around the show, and he was still drawing a salary, because he had a contract which said nothing about the loss of his monkey by murder. He was on the booze. Gus and Charlie resented him because he cost money without bringing anything in. His presence was a perpetual reminder of bad luck, and soon he was suffering the cold shoulder that had been my lot when Happy Hannah first decided I was a Jonah. Heinie was a proven Jonah, and to look at him was to be reminded that somebody was next on the list of the three who must atone for Rango. Heinie had ceased to be Talent; his reason for being was buried with Rango. He was an outsider, and in the carnival world an outsider is very far outside indeed.

  “We were near the end of the autumn season, and no more deaths occurred before we broke up for winter, some of us to our vaudeville work, and others, like Happy Hannah, to a quiet time in dime museums and Grand Congresses of Strange People in the holiday grounds of the warm south. Zingara was not the only one to remark that poor Gus was looking very yellow. Happy Hannah thought Gus must be moving into The Change, but Zingara said The Change didn’t make you belch a lot, and go off your victuals, like Gus, and whispered a word of fear. When we assembled again the following May, Gus was not with us.

  “There the deaths seemed to stop, for those who were less perceptive than Zingara, and myself. But something happened during the winter season that was surely a death of a special kind.

  “It was in Dodge City. Willard was fairly reliable during our act, but sometimes during the day he was perceptibly under the influence of morphine, and at other and much worse times he was feeling the want of it. I did not know how prolonged addiction works on the imagination; I was simply glad that his sexual demands on me had dropped almost to nothing. Therefore I did not know what to make of it when he seized me one afternoon in the wings of the vaude house, and accused me violently of sexual unfaithfulness to him. I was ‘at it’, he said, with a member of a Japanese acrobatic troupe on the bill, and he wasn’t going to stand for that. I was a hoor right enough, but by God I wasn’t going to be anybody else’s hoor. He cuffed me, and ordered me to get into Abdullah, and stay there, so he would know where I was; and I wasn’t to get out of the automaton any more, ever. He hadn’t kept me all these years to be cheated by any such scum as I was.