“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 Theater, 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?”
“No,” said I; “I don’t, and it doesn’t trouble me much. I rather enjoy Magnus’s lordly airs. He can come off his perch when he thinks proper. Perhaps we do it because we know he doesn’t take it seriously; it’s part of a game. If he insisted, we’d rebel.”
“And when you rebelled, you would see a very different side of his nature,” said Liesl.
“You play the game with him, I observe,” said Ingestree. “You stand up when His Supreme Self-Assurance leaves the company. Yet you are mistress here, and we are your guests. Now why is that?”
“Because I am not quite sure who he is,” said Liesl.
“You don’t believe this story he’s telling us?”
“Yes. I think that he has come to the time of his life when he feels the urge to tell. Many people feel it. It is the impulse behind a hundred bad autobiographies every year. I think he is being as honest as he can. I hope that when he finishes his story — if he does finish it — I shall know rather more. But I may not have my answer then.”
“I don’t follow; you hope to hear his story out, but you don’t think it certain that you will know who he is even then, although you think he is being honest. What is this mystery?”
“Who is anybody? For me, he is whatever he is to me. Biographical facts may be of help, but they don’t explain that. Are you married, Mr. Ingestree?”
“Well, no, actually, I’m not.”
“The way you phrase your reply speaks volumes. But suppose you were married; do you think that your wife would be to you precisely what she was to her women friends, her men friends, her doctor, lawyer, and hairdresser? Of course not. To you she would be something special, and to you that would be the reality of her. I have not yet found out what Magnus is to me, although we have been business associates and friendly intimates for a long time. If I had been the sort of person who is somebody’s mistress, I would have been his mistress, but I’ve never cared for the mistress role. I am too rich for it. Mistresses have incomes, and valuable possessions, but not fortunes. Nor can I say we have been lovers, because that is a messy expression people use when they are having sexual intercourse on fairly regular terms, without getting married. But I have had many a jolly night with Magnus, and many an exciting day with him. I still have to decide what he is to me. If humouring his foible for royal treatment helps me to come to a conclusion, I have no objection.”
“Well, what about you, Ramsay? He keeps referring to you as his first teacher of magic. You knew him from childhood, then? You could surely say who he was?”
“I was almost present at his birth. But does that mean anything? An infant is a seed. Is it an oak seed or a cabbage seed? Who knows? All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages. I would be the last man to pretend that knowing somebody as a child gave any real clue to who he is as a man. I can tell you this: he jokes about the lessons I gave him when he was a child, but he didn’t think them funny then; he had a great gift for something I couldn’t do at all, or could do with absurd effort. He was deadly serious during our lessons, and for a good reason. I could read the books and he couldn’t. I think that may throw some light on what we have been hearing about the World of Wonders, which he presents as a kind of joke. I am perfectly certain it wasn’t a joke at the time.”