World of Wonders

by Robertson Davies

  “I’m doing it for Ingestree, really,” said Magnus, and I thought it an odd remark, as he and Roly had not been on the best of terms since they first met at Sorgenfrei. Inquisitive, as always, I found a time to mention this to Roly, who was puzzled and flattered. “Can’t imagine why he said that,” was his comment; “but there’s something about him that rouses more than ordinary curiosity in me. He’s terribly like someone I’ve known, but I can’t say who it is. And I’m fascinated by his crusty defence of old Tresize and his wife. I know a bit about Sir John that puts him in a very different light from the rosy glow Magnus spreads over his memories. These recollections of old actors, you know—awful old hams, most of them. It’s the most perishable of the arts. Have you ever had the experience of seeing a film you saw thirty or even forty years ago and thought wonderful? Avoid it, I urge you. Appallingly disillusioning. One remembers something that never had any reality. No, old actors should be let die.”

  “What about old conjurors?” I said; “why Hommage? Why don’t you leave Robert-Houdin in his grave?”

  “That’s precisely where he is. You don’t think this film we’re making is really anything like the old boy, do you? With every modern technique at our command, and Jurgen Lind sifting every shot through his own marvellously contemporary concept of magic—no, no, if you could be whisked back in time and see Robert-Houdin you’d see something terribly tacky in comparison with what we’re offering. He’s just a peg on which Jurgen is hanging a fine modern creation. We need all the research and reconstruction and whatnot to produce something inescapably contemporary; a paradox, but that’s how it is.”

  “Then you believe that there is no time but the present moment, and that everything in the past is diminished by the simple fact that it is irrecoverable? I suppose there’s a name for that point of view, but at present I can’t put my tongue to it.”

  “Yes, that’s pretty much what I believe. Eisengrim’s raptures about Sir John and Milady interest me as a phenomenon of the present; I’m fascinated that he should think as he does at this moment, and put so much feeling into expressing what he feels. I can’t be persuaded for an instant that those two old spooks were anything very special.”

  “You realize, of course, that you condemn yourself to the same treatment? You’ve done some work that people have admired and admire still. Are you agreed that it should be judged as you judge Magnus’s idols?”

  “Of course. Let it all go! I’ll have my whack and that’ll be the end of me. I don’t expect any yellow roses on my monument. Nor a monument, as a matter of fact. But I’m keenly interested in other monument-worshippers. Magnus loves the past simply because it feeds his present, and that’s all there is to it. It’s the piety and ancestor-worship of a chap who, as he’s told us, had a nasty family and a horrid childhood and has had to dig up a better one. Before he’s finished he’ll tell us the Tresizes were his real parents, or his parents in art, or something of that sort. Want to bet?”

  I never bet, and I wouldn’t have risked money on that, because I thought that Ingestree was probably right.

  (5)

  Our last day was a Saturday, and the three film-makers appeared in time for lunch at the Savoy. Liesl had arranged that we should have one of the good tables looking out over the Embankment, and it was a splendid autumn day. The light, as it fell on our table, could not have been improved on by Kinghovn himself. Magnus never ate very much, and today he confined himself to some cold beef and a dish of rice pudding. It gave him a perverse pleasure to order these nursery dishes in restaurants where other people gorged on luxuries, and he insisted that the Savoy served the best rice pudding in London. The others ate heartily, Ingestree with naked and rather touching relish, Kinghovn like a man who has not seen food for a week, and Lind with a curious detachment, as though he were eating to oblige somebody else, and did not mean to disappoint them. Liesl was in one of her ogress moods and ordered steak tartare, which seemed to me no better than raw meat. I had the set lunch; excellent value.

  “You spoke of Tresize’s egoism when last we dealt with the subtext,” said Lind, champing his great jaws on a lamb chop.

  “I did, and I may have misled you. Shortly after I had my talk with Milady, we stopped rehearsing at the Crown and Two Chairmen, and moved into the theatre where Scaramouche was to appear. It was the Globe. We needed a theatre with plenty of backstage room because it was a pretty elaborate show. Sir John still held to the custom of opening in London with a new piece; no out-of-town tour to get things shaken down. It was an eye-opener to me to walk into a theatre that was better than the decrepit vaudeville houses where I had appeared with Willard; there was a discipline and a formality I had never met with. I was hired as an assistant stage manager (with a proviso that I should act ‘as cast’ if required) and I had everything to learn about the job. Luckily old Macgregor was a patient and thorough teacher. I had lots to do. That was before the time when the stagehands’ union was strict about people who were not members moving and arranging things, and some of my work was heavy. I was on good terms with the stage crew at once, and I quickly found out that this put a barrier between me and the actors, although I had to become a member of Actors’ Equity. But I was ‘crew’, and although everybody was friendly I was not quite on the level of ‘company’. What was I? I was necessary, and even important, to the play, but I found out that my name was to appear on the programme simply as Macgregor’s assistant. I had no place in the list of the cast.

  “Yet I was rehearsed carefully, and it seemed to me that I was doing well. I was trying to capture Sir John’s rhythm, and now, to my surprise, he was helping me. We spent quite a lot of time on Two, two. I did my juggling with my back to the audience, but as I was to wear a costume identical with Sir John’s, the audience would assume that was who I was, if I could bring off another sort of resemblance.

  “That was an eye-opener. I was vaudeville trained, and my one idea of stage deportment was to be fast and gaudy. That wasn’t Sir John’s way at all. ‘Deliberately: deliberately,’ he would say, over and over again. ‘Let them see what you’re doing. Don’t be flashy and confusing. Do it like this.’ And then he would caper across the stage, making motions like a man juggling plates, but at a pace I thought impossibly slow. ‘It’s not keeping the plates in the air that’s important,’ he would say. ‘Of course you can do that. It’s being Scaramouche that’s important. It’s the character you must get across. Eh? You understand the character, don’t you? Eh? Have you looked at the Callots?’

  “No, I hadn’t looked at the Callots, and didn’t know what they were. ‘Here m’boy; look here,’ he said, showing me some funny little pictures of people dressed as Scaramouche, and Polichinelle and other Commedia characters. ‘Get it like that! Make that real! You must be a Callot in motion!’

  “It was new and hard work for me to catch the idea of making myself like a picture, but I was falling under Sir John’s spell and was ready to give it a try. So I capered and pointed my toes, and struck exaggerated postures like the little pictures, and did my best.

  “ ‘Hands! Hands!’ he would shout, warningly, when I had my work cut out to make the plates dance. ‘Not like hooks, m’boy, like this! See! Keep ’em like this!’ And then he would demonstrate what he wanted, which was a queer trick for a juggler, because he wanted me to hold my hands with the little finger and the forefinger extended, and the two middle fingers held together. It looked fine as he did it, but it wasn’t my style at all. And all the time he kept me dancing with my toes stuck out and my heels lifted, and he wanted me to get into positions which even I could see were picturesque, but couldn’t copy.

  “ ‘Sorry, Sir John,’ I said one day. ‘It’s just that it feels a bit loony.’

  “ ‘Aha, you’re getting it at last!’ he shouted, and for the first time he smiled at me. ‘That’s what I want! I want it a bit loony. Like Scaramouche, you see. Like a charlatan in a travelling show.’

  “I could have told him a few things abo
ut charlatans in travelling shows, and the way their looniness takes them, but it wouldn’t have done. I see now that it was Romance he was after, not realism, but it was all a mystery to me then. I don’t think I was a slow learner, and in our second rehearsal in the theatre, where we had the plates, and the cloaks, and the tightrope to walk, I got my first real inkling of what it was all about, and where I was wrong and Sir John—in terms of Romance—was right.

  “I told you I had to caper across the tightrope, as Scaramouche escaping from the angry aristocrats. I was high above their heads, and as I had only about thirty feet to go, at the farthest, I had to take quite a while over it while pretending to be quick. Sir John wanted the rope—it was a wire, really—to be slackish, so that it rocked and swayed. Apparently that was the Callot style. For balance I carried a long stick that I was supposed to have snatched from Polichinelle. I was doing it circus-fashion, making it look as hard as possible, but that wouldn’t do: I was to rock on the wire, and be very much at ease, and when I was halfway across the stage I was to thumb my nose at the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr, my chief enemy. I could thumb my nose. Not the least trouble. But the way I did it didn’t please Sir John. ‘Like this,’ he would say, and put an elegant thumb to his long, elegant nose, and twiddle the fingers. I did it several times, and he shook his head. Then an idea seemed to strike him.

  “ ‘M’boy, what does that gesture mean to you?’ he asked, fixing me with a lustrous brown eye.

  “ ‘Kiss my arse, Sir John,’ said I, bashfully: I wasn’t sure he would know such a rude word. He looked grave, and shook his head slowly from side to side three or four times.

  “ ‘You have the essence of it, but only in the sense that the snail on the garden wall is the essence of Escargots à la Niçoise. What you convey by that gesture is all too plainly the grossly derisive invitation expressed by your phrase, Kiss my arse; it doesn’t even get as far as Baisez mon cul. What I want is a Rabelaisian splendour of contempt linked with a Callotesque elegance of grotesquerie. What it boils down to is that you’re not thinking it right. You’re thinking Kiss my arse with a strong American accent, when what you ought to be thinking is—’ and suddenly, though he was standing on the stage, he swayed perilously and confidently as though he were on the wire, and raised one eyebrow and opened his mouth in a grin like a leering wolf, and allowed no more than the tip of a very sharp red tongue to loll out on his lips and there it was! Kiss my arse with class, and God knows how many years of actor’s technique and a vivid memory of Henry Irving all backing it up.

  “ ‘I think I get it,’ I said, and had a try. He was pleased. Again. Better pleased. ‘You’re getting close,’ he said; ‘now, tell me what you’re thinking when you do that? Mph? Kiss my arse, quonk? But what kind of Kiss my arse? Quonk? Quonk?’

  “I didn’t know what to tell him, but I couldn’t be silent. ‘Not Kiss my arse at all,’ I said.

  “ ‘What then? What are you thinking? Eh? You must be thinking something, because you’re getting what I want. Tell me what it is?’

  “Better be truthful, I thought. He sees right into me and he’ll spot a lie at once. I took my courage in my hand. ‘I was thinking that I must be born again,’ I said. ‘Quite right, m’boy; born again and born different, as Mrs Poyser very wisely said,’ was Sir John’s comment. (Who was Mrs Poyser? I suppose it’s the kind of thing Ramsay knows.)

  “Born again! I’d always thought of it, when I thought about it at all, as a spiritual thing; you went through a conversion, or you found Christ, or whatever it was, and from that time you were different and never looked back. But to get inside Sir John I had to be born again physically, and if the spiritual trick is harder than that, Heaven must be thinly populated. I spent hours capering about in quiet places offstage, whenever Macgregor didn’t need me, trying to be like Sir John, trying to get style even into Kiss my arse. What was the result? Next time we rehearsed Two, two, I was awful. I nearly dropped a plate, and for a juggler that’s a shattering experience. (Don’t laugh! I don’t mean it as a joke.) But worse was to come. At the right moment I stepped out on the swaying wire, capered toward middle stage, thumbed my nose at Gordon Barnard, who was playing the Marquis, lost my balance, and fell off; Duparc’s training stood by me, and I caught the wire with my hands, swung in mid-air for a couple of seconds, and then heaved myself back up and got my footing, and scampered to the opposite side. The actors who were rehearsing that day applauded, but I was destroyed with shame, and Sir John was grinning exactly like Scaramouche, with an inch of red tongue between his lips.

  “ ‘Don’t think they’ll quite accept you as me if you do that, m’boy,’ said he. ‘Eh, Holroyd? Eh, Barnard? Quonk? Try it again.’

  “I tried it again, and didn’t fall, but I knew was I hopeless; I hadn’t found Sir John’s style and I was losing my own. After another bad try Sir John moved on to another scene, but Milady beckoned me away into a box, from which she was watching the rehearsal. I was full of apologies.

  “ ‘Of course you fell,’ she said. ‘But it was a good fall. Laudable pus, I call it. You’re learning.’

  “Laudable pus! What in God’s name did she mean! I thought I would never get used to Milady’s lingo. But she saw the bewilderment in my face, and explained.

  “ ‘It’s a medical expression. Out of fashion now, I expect. But my grandfather was rather a distinguished physician and he used it often. In those days, you know, when someone had a wound, they couldn’t heal it as quickly as they do now; they dressed it and probed it every few days to see how it was getting on. If it was healing well, from the bottom, there was a lot of nasty stuff near the surface, and that was evidence of proper healing. They called it laudable pus. I know you’re trying your very best to please Sir John, and it means a sharp wound to your own personality. As the wound heals, you will be nearer what we all want. But meanwhile there’s laudable pus, and it shows itself in clumsiness and falls. When you get your new style, you’ll understand what I mean.’

  “Had I time to get a new style before the play opened? I was worried sick, and I suppose it showed, because when he had a chance old Frank Moore had a word with me.

  “ ‘You’re trying to catch the Guvnor’s manner and you aren’t making a bad fist of it, but there are one or two things you haven’t noticed. You’re an acrobat, good enough to walk the slackwire, but you’re tight as a drum. Look at the Guvnor: he hasn’t a taut muscle in his body, nor a slack one, either. He’s in easy control all the time. Have you noticed him standing still? When he listens to another actor, have you seen how still he is? Look at you now, listening to me; you bob about and twist and turn and nod your head with enough energy to turn a windmill. But it’s all waste, y’see. If we were in a scene, you’d be killing half the value of what I say with all that movement. Just try to sit still. Yes, there you go; you’re not still at all, you’re frozen. Stillness isn’t looking as if you were full of coiled springs. It’s repose. Intelligent repose. That’s what the Guvnor has. What I have, too, as a matter of fact. What Barnard has. What Milady has. I suppose you think repose means asleep, or dead.

  “ ‘Now look, my lad, and try to see how it’s done. It’s mostly your back. Got to have a good strong back, and let it do ninety per cent of the work. Forget legs. Look at the Guvnor hopping around when he’s being Scaramouche. He’s nippier on his pins than you are. Look at me. I’m real old, but I bet I can dance a hornpipe better than you can. Look at this! Can you do a double shuffle like that? That’s legs, to look at, but it’s back in reality. Strong back. Don’t pound down into the floor at every step. Forget legs.

  “ ‘How do you get a strong back? Well, it’s hard to describe it, but once you get the feel of it you’ll see what I’m talking about. The main thing is to trust your back and forget you have a front; don’t stick out your chest or your belly; let ’em look after themselves. Trust your back and lead from your back. And just let your head float on top of your neck. You’re all made of whipcord and wire. Loosen it up
and take it easy. But not slump, mind! Easy.’

  “Suddenly the old man grabbed me by the neck and seemed about to throttle me. I jerked away, and he laughed. ‘Just as I said, you’re all wire. When I touch your neck you tighten up like a spring. Now you try to strangle me.’ I seized him by the neck, and I thought his poor old head would come off in my hands; he sank to the floor, moaning, ‘Nay, spare m’ life!’ Then he laughed like an old loony, because I suppose I looked horrified. ‘D’you see? I just let myself go and trusted to my back. You work on that for a while and bob’s your uncle; you’ll be fit to act with the Guvnor.’

  “ ‘How long do you think it will take?’ I said. ‘Oh, ten or fifteen years should see you right,’ said old Frank, and walked away, still chuckling at the trick he had played on me.

  “I had no ten or fifteen years. I had a week, and much of that was spent slaving for Macgregor, who kept me busy with lesser jobs while he and Holroyd fussed about the scenery and trappings for Scaramouche. I had never seen such scenery as the stage crew began to rig from the theatre grid; the vaudeville junk I was used to didn’t belong in the same world with it. The production had all been painted by the Harker Brothers, from designs by a painter who knew exactly what Sir John wanted. It was a revelation to me then, but now I understand that it owed much to prints and paintings of France during the Revolutionary period, and a quality of late-eighteenth-century detail had been used in it, apparently in a careless and half-hidden spirit, but adding up to pictures that supported and explained the play just as did the handsome costumes. People are supposed not to like scenery now, but it could be heart-stirring stuff when it was done with love by real theatre artists.

  “The first act setting was in the yard of an inn, and when it was all in place I swear you could smell the horses, and the sweet air from the fields. Nowadays they fuss a lot about light in the theatre, and even stick a lot of lamps in plain sight of the audience, so you won’t miss how artistic they are being; but Sir John didn’t trouble about light in that way—the subtle effects of light were painted on the scenery, so you knew at once what time of day it was by the way the shadows fell, and what the electricians did was to illuminate the actors, and Sir John in particular.