“Yes, and you were an influence in making him what he is,” said Liesl.
“Because you taught him conjuring?” said Lind.
“No, no; Ramsay was personally responsible for the premature birth of little Paul Dempster, and responsible also for Paul’s mother’s madness, which marked him so terribly,” said Liesl.
I gaped at her in astonishment. “This is what comes of confiding in women! Not only can they not keep a secret; they retell it in an utterly false way! I must put this matter right. It is true that Paul Dempster was born prematurely because his mother was hit on the head by a snowball. It is true that the snowball was meant to hit me, and it hit her instead because I dodged it. It is true that the blow on the head and the birth of the child seemed to precipitate an instability that sometimes amounted to madness. And it is true that I felt some responsibility in the matter. But that was long ago and far away, in a country which you would scarcely recognize as modern Canada. Liesl, I blush for you.”
“What a lovely old-fashioned thing to say, dear Ramsay. Thank you very much for blushing for me, because I long ago lost the trick of blushing for myself. But I didn’t spill the beans about you just to make you jump. I wanted to make the point that you are a figure in this story, too. A very strange figure, just as odd as any in your legends. You precipitated, by a single action — and who could think you guilty just because you jumped out of the way of a snowball (who, that is, but a grim Calvinist like yourself, Ramsay) — everything that we have been hearing from Magnus during these nights past. Are you a precipitating figure in Magnus’s story, or he in yours? Who could comb it all out? But get on with your myth, dear man. I want to hear what lovely twist you will give to what Magnus has told us.”
“It is not a twist, but an explication. Magnus has made it amply clear that he was brought up in a strict, unrelenting form of puritanism. In consequence he still blames himself whenever he can, and because he knows the dramatic quality of the role, he likes to play the villain. But as for his keeping Willard as a sort of hateful pet, in order to jeer at him, I simply don’t believe it was like that at all. What is the mythical element in his story? Simply the very old tale of the man who is in search of his soul, and who must struggle with a monster to secure it. All myth and Christianity — which has never been able to avoid the mythical pull of human experience — are full of similar instances, and people all around us are living out this basic human pattern every day. In the study of hagiography –”
“I knew you’d get to saints before long,” said Liesl.
“In the study of hagiography we have legends and all those splendid pictures of saints who killed dragons, and it doesn’t take much penetration to know that the dragons represent not simply evil in the world but their personal evil, as well. Of course, being saints, they are said to have killed their dragons, but we know that dragons are not killed; at best they are tamed, and kept on the chain. In the pictures we see St. George, and my special favourite, St. Catherine, triumphing over the horrid beast, who lies with his tongue out, looking as if he thoroughly regretted his mistaken course in life. But I am strongly of the opinion that St. George and St. Catherine did not kill those dragons, for then they would have been wholly good, and inhuman, and useless and probably great sources of mischief, as one-sided people always are. No, they kept the dragons as pets. Because they were Christians, and because Christianity enjoins us to seek only the good and to have nothing whatever to do with evil, they doubtless rubbed it into the dragons that it was uncommonly broadminded and decent of them to let the dragons live at all. They may even have given the dragon occasional treats: you may breathe a little fire, they might say, or you may leer desirously at that virgin yonder, but if you make one false move you’ll wish you hadn’t. You must be a thoroughly submissive dragon, and remember who’s boss. That’s the Christian way of doing things, and that’s what Magnus did with Willard. He didn’t kill Willard. The essence of Willard lives with him today. But he got the better of Willard. Didn’t you notice how he was laughing as he said good night?”
“I certainly did,” said Ingestree. “I didn’t understand it at all. It wasn’t just the genial laughter of a man saying farewell to some guests. And certainly he didn’t seem to be laughing at us. I thought perhaps it was relief at having got something off his chest.”
“The laugh troubled me,” said Lind. “I am not good at humour, and I like to be perfectly sure what people are laughing at. Do you know what it was, Ramsay?”
“Yes,” I said, “I think I do. That was Merlin’s Laugh.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Lind.
“If Liesl will allow it, I must be mythological again. The magician Merlin had a strange laugh, and it was heard when nobody else was laughing. He laughed at the beggar who was bewailing his fate as he lay stretched on a dunghill; he laughed at the foppish young man who was making a great fuss about choosing a pair of shoes. He laughed because he knew that deep in the dunghill was a golden cup that would have made the beggar a rich man; he laughed because he knew that the pernickety young man would be stabbed in a quarrel before the soles of his new shoes were soiled. He laughed because he knew what was coming next.”
“And of course our friend knows what is coming next in his own story,” said Lind.
“Are we to take it then that there was some striking reversal of fortune awaiting him when he went to England?” said Ingestree.
“I know no more than you,” said I. “I do not hear Merlin’s Laugh very often, though I think I am more sensitive to its sound than most people. But he spoke of finding out what wine would be poured into the well-smoked bottle that he had become. I don’t know what it was.”
Ingestree was more excited than the rest. “But are we never to know? How can we find out?”
“Surely that’s up to you,” said Lind. “Aren’t you going to ask Eisengrim to come to London to see the rushes of this film we have been making? Isn’t that owing to him? Get him in London and ask him to continue.”
Ingestree looked doubtful. “Can it be squeezed out of the budget?” he said. “The corporation doesn’t like frivolous expenses. Of course I’d love to ask him, but if we run very much over budget, well, it would be as good as my place is worth, as servants used to say in the day when they knew they were servants.”
“Nonsense, you can rig it,” said Kinghovn. But Ingestree still looked like a worried, rather withered baby.
“I know what is worrying Roly,” said Liesl. “He thinks that he could squeeze Eisengrim’s expenses in London out of the B.B.C. — but he knows he can’t lug in Ramsay and me, and he’s too nice a fellow to suggest that Magnus travel without us. Isn’t that it, Roly?”
Ingestree looked at her. “Bang on the head,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Liesl. “I’ll pay my own way, and even this grinding old miser Ramsay might unchain a few pennies for himself. Just let us know when to come.”
And so, at last, they went. As we came back into the large, gloomy, nineteenth-century Gothic hall of Sorgenfrei, I said to Liesl: “It was nice of you to think of Lebbaeus, tonight. People don’t mention him very often. But you’re wrong, you know, saying that there is no record of what he did after the Crucifixion. There is a non-canonical Acts of Thaddaeus — Thaddaeus was his surname, you recall — that tells all about him. It didn’t get into the Bible, but it exists.”
“What’s it like?”
“A great tale of marvels. Real Arabian Nights stuff. Puts him dead at the centre of affairs.” “Didn’t I say so! Just like a man. I’ll bet he wrote it himself.”
— II —
Merlin’s Laugh
1
Because of Jurgen Lind’s slow methods of work, it took longer to get Un Hommage a Robert-Houdin into a final form than we had expected, and it was nearly three months later when Eisengrim, Liesl, and I journeyed to London to see what it looked like. The polite invitation suggested that criticism would be welcome. Eisengrim was the star, and Liesl had put up a good deal of the money for the venture, expecting to get it back over the next two or three years, with substantial gains, but I think we all knew that criticism of Lind would not be gratefully received. A decent pretence was to be kept up, all the same.