“I did nothing of the kind. These sudden transformations of character belong to fiction, not to fact, and certainly not to the world of dependence and subservience that I had known for so many years. I was quite simply scared to leave Willard. What could I do without him? I found out very quickly.
“The stage manager had told the manager about the brief outburst in the wings, and the manager came to set us right as to what he would allow in his house. But with the manager came Charlie, who carried great weight because he was the brother of Jerry, who booked the Talent for that house. It was agreed that — just this once — the matter would be overlooked.
“Willard could not be overlooked a couple of hours later, when he was so far down in whatever world his drug took him to that it was impossible for him to go on the stage. There was all the excitement and loud talk you might expect, and the upshot was that I was ordered to take Willard’s place at the next show, and do his act as well as I could, without Abdullah. And that is what I did. I was in a rattle of nerves, because I had never appeared on a stage before, except when I was safely concealed in the body of the automaton. I didn’t know how to address an audience, how to time my tricks, or how to arrange an act. The hypnotism was beyond me, and Abdullah was a wreck. I suppose I must have been dreadful, but somehow I filled in the time, and when I had done all I could the spatter of applause was only a little less encouraging than it had been for Willard for several months past.
“When Willard recovered enough to know what had happened he was furious, but his fury simply persuaded him to seek relief from the pain of a rotten world with the needle. This was what precipitated the crisis that delivered me from Abdullah forever; Jerry was on the long-distance telephone, wrangling with Charlie, and the upshot of Charlie’s best persuasion was that Willard could finish his season if Charlie would keep him in condition to appear on the stage, and that if Willard didn’t appear, I was to do so, and I was able to be made to perform a proper, well-planned act. I see now that this was very decent of Jerry, who had all the problems of an agent to trouble him. He must have been fond of Charlie. But it seemed a dreadful sentence at the time. Beginners in the entertainment world are all supposed to be panting for a chance to rush before an audience and prove themselves; I was frightened of Willard, frightened of Jerry, and most frightened of all of failure.
“As is usually the case with understudies I neither failed nor succeeded greatly. In a short time I had worked out a version of The Miser’s Dream that was certainly better than Willard’s, and on Charlie’s strong advice I did it as a mute act. I had very little voice, and what I had was a thin, ugly croak; I had no vocabulary of the kind that a magician needs; my conversation was conducted in illiterate carnival slang, varied now and then with some Biblical turn of speech that had clung to me. So I simply appeared on the stage and did my stuff without sound, while the pianist played whatever he thought appropriate. My greatest difficulty was in learning how to perform slowly enough. In my development of a technique while I was concealed in Abdullah I had become so fast and so slick that my work was incomprehensible; the quickness of the hand should certainly deceive the eye, but not so fast the eye doesn’t realize that it is being deceived.
“Abdullah simply dropped out of use. We lugged him around for a few weeks, but his transport was costly, and as I would not get inside him now he was useless baggage. So one morning, on a railway siding, Charlie and I burned him, while Willard moaned and grieved that we were destroying the greatest thing in his life, and an irreplaceable source of income.
“That was the end of Abdullah, and the happiest moment of my life up to then was when I saw the flames engulf that ugliest of images.
“In their strange way Charlie and Willard were friends, and Charlie thought the moment had come for him to reform Willard. He set about it with his usual enthusiasm, conditioned by a very simple mind. Willard must break the morphine habit. He was to cut the stuff out, at a stroke, and with no thought of looking back. Of course this meant that in a very few days Willard was a raving lunatic, rolling on the floor, the sweating, shrieking victim of crawling demons. Charlie was frightened out of his wits, brought in one of his ambiguous doctors, bought Willard a syringe to replace the one he had dramatically thrown away, and loaded him up to keep him quiet. There was no more talk of abstinence. Charlie kept assuring me that ‘somehow we’ve got to see him through it’. But there was no way through
it. Willard was a gone goose.
“I speak of this lightly now, but at the time I was just as frightened and puzzled as Charlie. I was alarmed to find how dependent on Willard I had become. I had lived with him in dreadful servitude for almost half my life, and now I didn’t know what I should do without him. Furthermore, he had been jolted by his attempt at reform into one of those dramatic changes of character which are so astonishing to people who find themselves responsible for a drug addict. He who had been domineering and ugly became embarrassingly fawning and frightened. His great dread was that Charlie and I would put him in hospital. All he wanted was to be cared for, and supplied with enough morphine to keep him comfortable. A simple demand, wasn’t it? But somehow we managed it, and one consequence was that I became involved in the nuisance of finding suppliers of the drug, making approaches to them, and paying the substantial prices they demanded.
“By the time it was the season for rejoining the World of Wonders, I had taken over completely the job of filling Willard’s place in the vaude programmes, and Willard was an invalid who had to be dragged from date to date. It was a greatly changed carnival that season. Gus was gone, and the new manager was a tough little carnie who knew how to manage the show, but had none of Gus’s pride in it; he took his tone from Charlie, as the real representative of the owners. Charlie had finally wakened up to the fact that the day of such shows was passing, and that fair dates were harder to get. That was when he decided to add a blow-off to the World of Wonders, and as well to set up in a little business of his own, unknown to Jerry.
“A blow-off is an annex to a carnival show. Sometimes it is well-advertised, if it is a speciality that does not quite fit into the show proper, like Australian stock-whip performers, or a man and a girl who do tricks with lariats, in cowboy costume. But it can also be a part of the show that is very quietly introduced, and that is not necessarily seen during every performance. Charlie’s blow-off was of this latter kind, and the only attractions in it were Zitta and Willard.
“Zitta was now too fat and too ugly to hold a place in the main tent, but in the blow-off, which occupied a smaller tent entered through the World of Wonders, she could still do a dirty act with some snakes, a logical development from the stunts she had formerly done during the Last Trick. But it was Willard’s role that startled me. Charlie had decided to exhibit him as a Wild Man. Willard sat in ragged shirt and pants, his feet bare, in the dust. After he had gone for a few weeks without shaving he looked convincingly wild. His skin had by this time taken on the bluish tinge of the morphine addict, and his eyes, with their habitually contracted pupils, looked terrifying enough to the rural spectators. Charlie’s explanation was that Zitta and Willard came from the Deep South, and were sad evidence of what happened when fine old families, reduced from plantation splendour, became inbred. The suggestion was that Willard was the outcome of a variety of incestuous matings. I doubt if many of the people who came to see Willard believed it, but the appetite for marvels and monsters is insatiable, and he was a good eyeful for the curious. The Shame of the Old South, as the blow-off was called, did pretty good business.