How quickly he learns, I thought. And how well he knows the power of pretending something is secret which he has every intention of revealing. I turned up my mental, wholly psychological historian’s hearing-aid, determined to miss nothing, and to get at least the skeleton of it on paper before I went to sleep.
“Begin with going to hell,” said Ingestree. “You’ve given us a date: August 30, 1918. You told us you knew Ramsay when you were a boy, so I suppose you must be a Canadian. If I were going to hell, I don’t think I’d start from Canada. What happened?”
“I went to the village fair. Our village, which was called Deptford, had a proud local reputation for its fair. Schoolchildren were admitted free. That helped to swell the attendance, and the Fair Board liked to run up the biggest possible annual figure. You wouldn’t imagine there was anything wrong in what I did, but judged by the lights of my home it was sin. We were an unusually religious household, and my father mistrusted the fair. He had promised me that he might, if I could repeat the whole of Psalm 79 without an error, at suppertime, take me to the fair in the evening, to see the animals. This task of memorizing was part of a great undertaking that he had set his heart on: I was to get the whole of the Book of Psalms by heart. He assured me that it would be a bulwark and a stay to me through the whole of my life. He wasn’t rushing the job; I was supposed to learn ten verses each day, but as I was working for a treat, he thought I might run to the thirteen verses of Psalm 79 to get to the fair. But the treat was conditional; if I stumbled, the promise about the fair was off.”
“It sounds very much like rural Sweden, when I was a boy,” said Kinghovn. “How do the children of such people grow up?”
“Ah, but you mustn’t misunderstand. My father wasn’t a tyrant; he truly wanted to protect me against evil.”
“A fatal desire in a parent,” said Lind, who was known throughout the world — to film-goers at least — as an expert on evil.
“There was a special reason. My mother was an unusual person. If you want to know the best about her, you must apply to Ramsay. I don’t suppose I can tell you my own story without giving you something of the other side of her nature. She was supposed to have some very bad instincts, and our family suffered for it. She had to be kept under confinement. My father, with what I suppose must be described as compassion, wanted to make sure I wouldn’t follow in her ways. So, from the age of eight, I was set to work to acquire the bulwark and the stay of the Psalms, and in a year and a half — something like that — I had gnawed my way through them up to Psalm 79.”
“How old were you?” said Ingestree.
“Getting on for ten. I wanted fiercely to go to the fair, so I set to work on the Psalm. Do you know the Psalms? I have never been able to make head or tail of a lot of them, but others strike with a terrible truth on your heart, if you meet them at the right time. I plugged on till I came to We are become a reproach to
our neighbours, a scorn and derision to them that are round about us. Yes! Yes there we were The Dempsters, a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and derision to the whole village of Deptford. And particularly to the children of Deptford, with whom I had to go to school. School was to begin on the day after Labour Day, less than a week from the day when I sat puzzling over Psalm 79. Tell me, Lind, you know so much about evil, and have explored it in your films, Liesl tells me, like a man with an ordnance map in his hand; have you ever explored the evil of children?”
“Even I have never dared to do that,” said Lind, with the tragic grin which was the nearest he ever came to a laugh.
“If you ever decide to do so, call me in as a special adviser. It’s a primal evil, a pure malignance. They really enjoy giving pain. This is described by sentimentalists as innocence. I was tormented by the children of our village from the earliest days I can remember. My mother had done something I never found out what it was — that made most of the village hate her, and the children knew that, so it was all right to hate me and torture me. They said my mother was a hoor — that was the local pronunciation of whore — and they tormented me with a virtuosity they never showed in anything else they did. When I cried, somebody might say, ‘Aw, let the kid alone; he can’t help it his mother’s a hoor.’ I suppose the philosopher-kings who struggled up to that level have since become the rulers of the place. But I soon determined not to cry.
“Not that I became hard. I simply accepted the wretchedness of my station. Not that I hated them — not then; I learned to hate them later in life. At that time I simply assumed that children must be as they were. I was a misfit in the world, and didn’t know why.
“Onward I went with Psalm 79. O remember not against us former iniquities: let thy tender mercies speedily prevent us: for we are brought very low. But as soon as I put my nose into the schoolyard they would remember former iniquities against me. God’s tender mercies had never reached the Deptford school-yard. And I was unquestionably brought very low, for all that desolation would begin again next Tuesday.
“Having got that far with me, Satan had me well on the path to hell. I knew where some money was kept; it was small change for the baker and the milkman when they called; under my mother’s very nose — she was sitting in a chair, staring into space, tied by a rope to a ringbolt my father had set in the wall I pinched fifteen cents; I held it up so that she could see it, so that she would think I was going to pay one of the delivery-men. Then I ran off to the fair, and my heart was full of terrible joy. I was wicked, but O what a delirious release it was.
“I pieced out the enjoyment of the fair like a gourmet savouring a feast. Begin at the bottom, with what was least amusing. That would be the Women’s Institute display of bottled pickles, embalmed fruit, doilies, home-cooking, and “fancy-work”. Then the animals, the huge draught-horses, the cows with enormous
udders, the prize bull (though I did not go very near to him, for some of my schoolmates were lingering there, to snigger and work themselves up into a horny stew, gaping at his enormous testicles), the pigs so unwontedly clean, and the foolish poultry, White Wyandottes, Buff Orpingtons, and Mrs. Forrester’s gorgeous Cochin Chinas, and in a corner a man from the Department of Agriculture giving an educational display of egg-candling.
“Pleasure now began to be really intense. I looked with awe and some fear at the display from the nearby Indian Reservation. Men with wrinkled, tobacco-coloured faces sat behind a stand, not really offering slim walking-canes, with ornate whittled handles into which patterns of colour had been worked; their women, as silent and unmoving as they, displayed all sorts of fancy boxes made of sweet-grass, ornamented with beads and dyed porcupine quill. But these goods, which had some merit as craftwork, were not so gorgeous in my eyes as the trash offered by a booth which was not of local origin, in which a man sold whirligigs of gaudy celluloid, kewpie dolls with tinsel skirts riding high over their gross stomachs, alarm-clocks with two bells for determined sleepers, and beautiful red or blue pony-whips. I yearned toward those whips, but they cost a whole quarter apiece, and were thus out of my reach.
“But I was not cut off from all the carnal pleasures of the fair. After a great deal of deliberation I spent five of my ill-gotten cents on a large paper comet of pink candy floss, a delicacy I had never seen before. It had little substance, and made my mouth sticky and dry, but it was a luxury, and my life had known nothing of luxuries.
“Then, after a full ten minutes of deliberation, I laid out another five cents on a ride on the merry-go-round. I chose my mount with care, a splendid dapple-grey with flaring nostrils, ramping wonderfully up and down on his brass pole; he seemed to me like the horse in Job that saith among the trumpets. Ha, ha; for a hundred and eighty seconds I rode him in ecstasy, and dismounted only when I was chased away by the man who took care of such things and was on the lookout for enchanted riders like myself.