World of Wonders

by Robertson Davies

  “ ‘Excuse me, Milady, but I don’t know what that is.’

  “ ‘No? Well, it’s a—it’s a common expression. I’ve never really had to define it. It’s a sort of charming nothing; a dear, sweet little zero, in which one can paint any face one chooses. An invaluable possession, don’t you see? One says it of children when one’s going to teach them something perfectly splendid. They’re wide open for teaching.’

  “ ‘I want to be taught. What do you want me to learn?’

  “ ‘I knew you were quite extraordinarily intelligent. More than intelligent, really. Intelligent people are so often thoroughly horrid. You are truly sensitive. I want you to learn to be exactly like Sir John.’

  “ ‘Imitate him, you mean?’

  “ ‘Imitations are no good. There have been people on the music-halls who have imitated him. No: if the thing is to work as we all want it to work, you must quite simply be him.’

  “ ‘How, if I don’t imitate him?’

  “ ‘It’s a very deep thing. Of course you must imitate him, but be careful he doesn’t catch you at it, because he doesn’t like it. Nobody does, do they? What I mean is—oh, dear, it’s so dreadfully difficult to say what one really means—you must catch his walk, and his turn of the head, and his gestures and all of that, but the vital thing is that you must catch his rhythm.’

  “ ‘How would I start to do that?’

  “ ‘Model yourself on him. Make yourself like a marvellously sensitive telegraph wire that takes messages from him. Or perhaps like wireless, that picks up things out of the air. Do what he did with the Guvnor.’

  “ ‘I thought he was the Guvnor.’

  “ ‘He is now, of course. But when we both worked under the dear old Guvnor at the Lyceum Sir John absolutely adored him, and laid himself open to him like Danae to the shower of gold—you know about that, of course?—and became astonishingly like him in a lot of ways. Of course Sir John is not so tall as the Guvnor; but you’re not tall either, are you? It was the Guvnor’s romantic splendour he caught. Which is what you must do. So that when you dance out before the audience juggling those plates they don’t feel as if the electricity had suddenly been cut off. Another pink gin, if you please.’

  “I didn’t greatly like pink gin. In those days I couldn’t afford to drink anything, and pink gin is a bad start. But I would have drunk hot fat to prolong this conversation. So we had another one each, and Milady dealt with hers much better than I did. A pink gin later—call it ten minutes—I was thoroughly confused, except that I wanted to please her, and must find out somehow what she was talking about.

  “When she wanted to leave I rushed to call her a taxi, but Holroyd was ahead of me, and in much better condition. He must have been in the Public Bar. We both bowed her into the cab—I seem to remember having one foot in the gutter and the other on the pavement and wondering what had happened to my legs—and when she drove off he took me by the arm and steered me back into the Public Bar, where we tucked into a corner with old Frank Moore.

  “ ‘She’s been giving him advice and pink gin,’ said Holroyd.

  “ ‘Better give him a good honest pint of half-and-half to straighten him out,’ said Frank, and signalled to the barman.

  “They seemed to know what Milady had been up to, and were ready to put it in language that I could understand, which was kind of them. They made it seem very simple: I was to imitate Sir John, but I was to do it with more style than I had been showing. I was supposed to be imitating a great actor who was imitating an eighteenth-century gentleman who was imitating a Commedia dell’ Arte comedian—that’s how simple it was. And I was doing everything too bloody fast, and slick and cheap, so I was to drop that and catch Sir John’s rhythm.

  “ ‘But I don’t get it about all this rhythm,’ I said. ‘I guess I know about rhythm in juggling; it’s getting everything under control so you don’t have to worry about dropping things because the things are behaving properly. But what the hell’s all this human rhythm? You mean like dancing?’

  “ ‘Not like any dancing I suppose you know,’ said Holroyd. ‘But yes—a bit like dancing. Not like this Charleston and all that jerky stuff. More a fine kind of complicated—well, rhythm.’

  “ ‘I don’t get it at all,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get Sir John’s rhythm. Sir John got his rhythm from somebody called the Guvnor. What Guvnor? Is the whole theatre full of Guvnors?’

  “ ‘Ah, now we’re getting to it,’ said old Frank. ‘Milady talked about the Guvnor, did she? The Guvnor was Irving, you muggins. You’ve heard of Irving?’

  “ ‘Never,’ I said.

  “Old Frank looked wonderingly at Holroyd. ‘Never heard of Irving. He’s quite a case, isn’t he?’

  “ ‘Not such a case as you might think, Frank,’ said Holroyd. ‘These kids today have never heard of anybody. And I suppose we’ve got to remember that Irving’s been dead for twenty-five years. You remember him. You played with him. I just remember him. But what’s he got to do with a lad like this?—Well, now just hold on a minute. Milady thinks there’s a connection. You know how she goes on. Like a loony, sometimes. But just when you can’t stand it any more she proves to be right, and righter than any of us. You remember where I found you?’ he said to me.

  “ ‘In the street. I was doing a few passes with the cards.’

  “ ‘Yes, but don’t you remember where? I do. I saw you and I came back to rehearsal and said to Sir John, I think I’ve got what we want. Found him under the Guvnor’s statue, picking up a few pennies as a conjuror. And that was when Milady pricked up her ears. Oh Jack, she said, it’s a lucky sign! Let’s see him at once. And when Sir John wanted to ask perfectly reasonable questions about whether you would do for height, and whether a resemblance could be contrived between you and him, she kept nattering on about how you must be a lucky find because I saw you, as she put it, working the streets under Irving’s protection. You know how the Guvnor stood up for all the little people of the theatre, Jack, she said. I’m sure this boy is a lucky find. Do let’s have him. And she’s stood up for you ever since, though I don’t suppose you’ll be surprised to hear that Sir John wants to get rid of you.’

  “The pint of half-and-half had found its way to the four pink gins, and I was having something like a French Revolution in my innards. I was feeling sorry for myself. ‘Why does he hate me so,’ I said, snivelling a bit. ‘I’m doing everything I know to please him.’

  “ ‘You’d better have it straight,’ said Holroyd. ‘The resemblance is a bit too good. You look too much like him.’

  “ ‘Just what I said when I first set eyes on you,’ said old Frank. ‘My God, I said, what a Double! You might have been spit out of his mouth.’

  “ ‘Well, isn’t that what they want?’ I said.

  “ ‘You have to look at it reasonable,’ said Holroyd. ‘Put it like this: you’re a famous actor, getting maybe just the tiniest bit past your prime—though still a top-notcher, mind you—and for thirty years everybody’s said how distinguished you are, and what a beautiful expressive face you have, and how Maeterlinck damn near threw up his lunch when you walked on the stage in one of his plays, and said to the papers that you had stolen his soul, you were so good—meaning spiritual, romantic, poetic, and generally gorgeous. You still get lots of fan letters from people who find some kind of ideal in you. You’ve had all the devotion—a bit cracked some of it, but mostly very real and touching—that a great actor inspires in people, most of whom have had some kind of short-change experience in life. So: you want a Double. And when the Double comes—and such a Double that you can’t deny him—he’s a seedy little carnie, with the shifty eyes of a pickpocket and the breath of somebody that eats the cheapest food, and you wouldn’t trust him with sixpenn’orth of copper, and every time you look at him you heave. He looks like everything inside yourself that you’ve choked off and shut out in order to be what you are now. And he looks at you all the time—you do this, you know—as if he knew something a
bout you you didn’t know yourself. Now: fair’s fair. Wouldn’t you want to get rid of him? Yet here’s your wife, who’s stood by you through thick and thin, and held you up when you were ready to sink under debts and bad luck, and whom you love so much everybody can see it, and thinks you’re marvellous because of it, and what does she say? She says this nasty mess of a Double is lucky, and has to be given his chance. You follow me? Try to be objective. I don’t want to say hard things about you, but truth’s truth and must be served. You’re not anybody’s first pick for a Double, but there you are. Sir John’s dead spit, as Frank here says.’

  “Very soon I was going to have to leave them. My stomach was heaving. But I was still determined to find out whatever I could to keep my job. I wanted it now more desperately than before. ‘So what do I do?’ I asked.

  “Holroyd puffed at his pipe, groping for an answer, and it was old Frank who spoke. He spoke very kindly. ‘You just keep on keeping on,’ he said. ‘Try to find the rhythm. Try to get inside Sir John.’

  “These were fatal words. I rushed out into the street, and threw up noisily and copiously in the gutter. Try to get inside Sir John! Was this to be another Abdullah?

  “It was, but in a way I could not have foreseen. Experience never repeats itself in quite the same way. I was beginning another servitude, much more dangerous and potentially ruinous, but far removed from the squalor of my experience with Willard. I had entered upon a long apprenticeship to an egoism.

  “Please notice that I say egoism, not egotism, and I am prepared to be pernickety about the distinction. An egotist is a self-absorbed creature, delighted with himself and ready to tell the world about his enthralling love affair. But an egoist, like Sir John, is a much more serious being, who makes himself, his instincts, yearnings, and tastes the touchstone of every experience. The world, truly, is his creation. Outwardly he may be courteous, modest, and charming—and certainly when you knew him Sir John was all of these—but beneath the velvet is the steel; if anything comes along that will not yield to the steel, the steel will retreat from it and ignore its existence. The egotist is all surface; underneath is a pulpy mess and a lot of self-doubt. But the egoist may be yielding and even deferential in things he doesn’t consider important; in anything that touches his core he is remorseless.

  “Many of us have some touch of egoism. We who sit at this table are no strangers to it. You, I should think, Jurgen, are a substantial egoist, and so are you, Harry. About Ingestree I can’t say. But Liesl is certainly an egoist and you, Ramsay, are a ferocious egoist battling with your demon because you would like to be a saint. But none of you begins to approach the egoism of Sir John. His egoism was fed by the devotion of his wife, and the applause he could call forth in the theatre. I have never known anyone who came near him in the truly absorbing and damning sin of egoism.”

  “Damning?” I leapt on the word.

  “We were both brought up to believe in damnation, Dunny,” said Eisengrim, and he was deeply serious. “What does it mean? Does it mean shut off from the promptings of compassion; untouched by the feelings of others except in so far as they can serve us; blind and deaf to anything that is not grist to our mill? If that is what it means, and if that is a form of damnation, I have used the word rightly.

  “Don’t misunderstand. Sir John wasn’t cruel, or dishonourable or overreaching in common ways; but he was all of these things where his own interest as an artist was concerned; within that broad realm he was without bowels. He didn’t make Adele Chesterton cry at every rehearsal because he was a brute. He hadn’t brought Holroyd—who was a tough nut in every other way—to a condition of total subjection to his will because he liked to domineer over a fellow-being. He hadn’t turned Milady into a kind of human oilcan who went about cooling wheels he had worn red-hot because he didn’t know that she was a woman of rare spirit and fine sensitivity. He did these things and a thousand others because he was wholly devoted to an ideal of theatrical art that was contained—so far as he was concerned—within himself. I think he knew perfectly well what he did, and he thought it worth the doing. It served his art, and his art demanded a remorseless egoism.

  “He was one of the last of a kind that has now vanished. He was an actor-manager. There was no Arts Council to keep him afloat when he failed, or pick up the bill for an artistic experiment or act of daring. He had to find the money for his ventures, and if the money was lost on one production he had to get it back from another, or he would soon appeal to investors in vain. Part of him was a financier. He asked people to invest in his craft and skill and sense of business.

  Beyond that, he asked people to invest in his personality and charm, and the formidable technique he had acquired to make personality and charm vivid to hundreds of thousands of people who bought theatre seats. In justice it must be said that he had a particular sort of taste and flair that lifted him above the top level of actors to the very small group of stars with an assured following. He wasn’t personally greedy, though he liked to live well. He did what he did for art. His egoism lay in his belief that art, as he embodied it, was worth any sacrifice on his part and on the part of people who worked with him.

  “When I became part of his company the fight against time had begun. Not simply the fight against the approach of age, because he was not deluded about that. It was the fight against the change in the times, the fight to maintain a nineteenth-century idea of theatre in the twentieth century. He believed devoutly in what he did; he believed in Romance, and he couldn’t understand that the concept of Romance was changing.

  “Romance changes all the time. His plays, in which a well-graced hero moved through a succession of splendid adventures and came out on top—even when that meant dying for some noble cause—were becoming old hat. Romance at that time meant Private Lives, which was brand-new. It didn’t look to its audiences like Romance, but that was what it was. Our notion of Romance, which is so often exploration of squalor and degradation, will become old hat, too. Romance is a mode of feeling that puts enormous emphasis—but not quite a tragic emphasis—on individual experience. Tragedy puts something above humanity; so does Comedy; Romance puts humanity first. The people who liked Sir John’s kind of Romance were middle-aged, or old. Oh, lots of young people came to see him, but they weren’t the most interesting kind of young people. Perhaps they weren’t really young. The interesting young people were going to see a different sort of play. They were flocking to Private Lives. You couldn’t expect Sir John to understand. His ideal of Romance was far from that, and he had shaped a formidable egoism to serve his ideal.”

  “It’s the peril of the actor,” said Ingestree. “Do you remember what Aldous Huxley said? ‘Acting inflames the ego in a way which few other professions do. For the sake of enjoying regular emotional self-abuse, our societies condemn a considerable class of men and women to a perpetual inability to achieve non-attachment. It seems a high price to pay for our amusements.’ A profound comment. I used to be deeply influenced by Huxley.”

  “I gather you got over it,” said Eisengrim, “or you wouldn’t be talking about non-attachment over the ruins of a tremendous meal and a huge cigar you have been sucking like a child at its mother’s breast.”

  “I thought you had forgiven me,” said Ingestree, being as winsome as his age and appearance allowed. “I don’t pretend to have set aside the delights of this world; I tried that and it was no good. But I have my intellectual fopperies, and they pop out now and then. Do go on about Sir John and his egoism.”

  “So I shall,” said Magnus, “but at another time. The waiters are hovering and I perceive the delicate fluttering of paper in the hands of the chief bandit yonder.”

  I watched with envy as Ingestree signed the bill without batting an eyelash. I suppose it was company money he was spending. We went out into the London rain and called for cabs.

  (4)

  In the days that followed, Magnus was busy filming the last scraps of Hommage in a studio near London; these were c
lose-ups, chiefly of his hands, as he did intricate things with cards and coins, but he insisted on wearing full costume and make-up. There was also a time-taking quarrel with a fashionable photographer who was to provide publicity pictures, and who kept assuring Magnus that he wanted to catch “the real you”. But Magnus didn’t want candid pictures of himself, and he was rather personal in his insistence that the photographer, a bearded fanatic who wore sandals, was not likely to capture with his camera something he had taken pains to conceal for more than thirty years. So we went to a very famous photographer who was celebrated for his pictures of royalty, and he and Magnus plotted some portraits, taken in a splendid old theatre, that satisfied both of them. All of this took time, until there was no longer any reason for us to stay in London. But Lind and Ingestree, and to a lesser degree Kinghovn, were determined to hear the remainder of Magnus’s story, and after a good deal of teasing and protesting that there was really nothing to it, and that he was tired of talking about himself, it was agreed that they should spend our last day in London with us, and have their way.