“Don’t ask me if I would do it now. I don’t suppose for a moment that I would. But I did it then. Now I am famous and rich and have delightful friends like Liesl and Ramsay; charming people like yourselves come from the B.B.C. to ask me to pretend to be Robert-Houdin. But in those days I was Paul Dempster, who had been made to forget it and take a name from the side of a barn, and be the pathic of a perverted drug-taker. Do you think I have forgotten that even now? I have a lifelong reminder. I am a sufferer from a tiresome little complaint called proctalgia fugax. Do you know it? It is a cramping pain in the anus that wakes you out of a sound sleep and gives you five minutes or so of great unease. For years I thought that Willard, by this nasty use of me, had somehow injured me irreparably. It took a little courage to go to a doctor and find out that it was quite harmless, though I suppose it has some psychogenic origin. It is useless to ask Magnus Eisengrim if he would exert himself to torment a worm like Willard the Wizard; he has the magnanimity that comes so easily to the rich and powerful. But if you had put the question to Faustus LeGrand in 1929 his answer would have been the one I have just given you.
“Yes, gentlemen, it was Revenge, and it was sweet. If I am to be damned for a sin, I expect that will be the one. Shall I tell you the cream of it — or the worst of it, according to your point of view? There came a time when Willard could stand no more. Jaunting around southern France, and the Tyrol and parts of Switzerland, even when he had absorbed the minimum dose I allowed him, was a weariness that he could no longer endure. He wanted to die, and begged me for death. ‘Just gimme a little too much, kid,’ was what he said. He was never eloquent but he managed to put a really heart-breaking yearning into those words. What did I reply? ‘I couldn’t do it, Willard. Really I couldn’t. I’d have your life on my conscience. You know we’re forbidden by every moral law to take life. If I do what you ask, not only am I a murderer, but you are a suicide. Can you face the world to come with that against you?’ Then he would curse and call me every foul name he could think of. And next day it would be the same. I didn’t kill him. Instead I withheld death from him, and it was balm to my spirit to be able to do it.
“Of course it came at last. From various evidence I judge that he was between forty and forty-five, but he looked far worse than men I have seen who were ninety. You know how such people die. He had been blue before, but for a few hours before the end he was a leaden colour, and as his mouth was open it was possible to see that it was almost black inside. His teeth were in very bad condition from geeking, and he looked like one of those terrible drawings by Daumier of a pauper corpse. The pupils of his eyes were barely perceptible. His breath was very faint, but what there was of it stank horribly. Till quite near the end he was begging for a shot of his fancy. The only other person with us was a member of the St. Vite troupe, a bearded lady — you remember her, don’t you, Ramsay? — but as Willard spoke no French she didn’t know what he was saying, or if she did she gave no sign. Then a surprising thing happened; a short time before he died his pupils dilated extraordinarily, and that, with his wide-stretched mouth and his colour, gave him the look of a man dying of terror. Indeed, perhaps it was so. Was he aware of the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, where he would join the unbelieving and the abominable, the whoremongers, sorcerers, and idolaters? I had seen Abdullah go into the fire. Was it so also with Willard?
“But he was dead, and I was free. Had I not been free for years? Free since I struck the head off Abdullah? No; freedom does not come suddenly. One has to grow into it. But now that Willard was dead, I felt truly free, and I hoped that I might throw off some of the unpleasant characteristics I had taken upon myself but not, I hoped, forever taken within myself.
“I finished my season with Le grand Cirque because I did not want to attract attention by leaving as soon as Willard was out of the way. Without his luxury to pay for I was able to give up occasional pocket-picking, and save a little money. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to get to England; I knew there were vaude houses or variety shows of some kind in England, and I thought I could get a job there.
“I remember that I took stock of myself, as cold-bloodedly as I could, but not, I think, unjustly. The Deptford parson’s son, the madwoman’s son, had become a pretty widely experienced young tough; I could pick pockets, I could push dope. I could fight with a broken bottle and I had picked up the French knack of boxing with my feet. I could now speak and read French, and a little German and Italian, and I could speak a terrible patois of English, in which I sounded like the worst of Willard and Charlie combined.
“What was there on the credit side? I was an expert conjuror, and I was beginning to have some inkling of what Mrs. Constantinescu meant when she talked about real hypnotism as opposed to the sideshow kind. I was a deft mechanic, could mend anybody’s watch, and humour an old calliope. Although I had been the passive partner in countless acts of sodomy I was still, so far as my own sexual activity was concerned, a virgin, and likely to remain one, because I knew nothing about women other than Fat Ladies, Bearded Ladies, Snake Women, and mitt-camp gypsies; on the whole I liked women, but I had no wish to do to anybody I liked what Willard had done to me — and although of course I knew that the two acts differed I supposed they were pretty much the same to the recipient. I had none of Charlie’s unresting desire to ‘slip it’ to anybody. As you see, I was a muddle of toughness and innocence.
“Of course I didn’t think of myself as innocent. What young man ever does? I thought I was the toughest thing going. A verse from the Book of Psalms kept running through my head that seemed to me to describe my state perfectly. ‘I am become like a bottle in the smoke.’ It’s a verse that puzzles people who think it means a glass bottle, but my father would never have allowed me to be so ignorant as that. It means one of those old wineskins the Hebrews used; it means a goatskin that has been scraped out, and tanned, and blown up, and hung over the fire till it is as hard as a warrior’s boot. That was how I saw myself.
“I was twenty-two, so far as I could reckon, and a bottle that had been thoroughly smoked. What was life going to pour into the bottle? I didn’t know, but I was off to England to find out.
“And you are off to England in the morning gentlemen. Forgive me for holding you so long. I’ll say good night.”
And for the last time at Sorgenfrei we went through that curious little pageant of bidding our ceremonious good night to Magnus Eisengrim, who said his farewells with unusual geniality.
Of course the film-makers didn’t go back to their inn. They poured themselves another round of drinks and made themselves comfortable by the fire.
“What I can’t decide,” said Ingestree, “is how much of what we have heard we are to take as fact. It’s the inescapable problem of the autobiography: how much is left out, how much has been genuinely forgotten, how much has been touched up to throw the subject into striking relief? That stuff about Revenge, for instance. Can he have been as horrible as he makes out? He doesn’t seem a cruel man now. We must never forget that he’s a conjuror by profession; his lifelong pose has been demonic. I think he’d like us to believe he played the demon in reality, as well.”
“I take it seriously,” said Lind. “You are English, Roly, and the English have a temperamental pull toward cheerfulness; they don’t really believe in evil. If the Gulf Stream ever deserted their western coast, they’d think differently. Americans are supposed to be the great optimists, but the English are much more truly optimistic. I think he has done all he says he has done. I think he killed his enemy slowly and cruelly. And I think it happens oftener than is supposed by people who habitually avert their minds from evil.”