“I thought I had better get out before I laughed in their faces; Holroyd and Macgregor were like a couple of old maids. But Morton W. Penfold knew what was what. ‘Here’s ten dollars,’ he said; ‘I hear it’s the only visiting card Old Ma Quiller understands; tell her you’re there to keep an eye on young Ingestree, but you mustn’t be seen; in her business I suppose she gets used to queer requests and odd provisos.’ I took it, and left them, and went off for a good laugh by myself. This was my first assignment as guardian angel.
“All things considered, everything went smoothly. After the play I left Macgregor to do some of my tidy-up work himself, and followed the Cantab after he had been given a back-slapping send-off by Charlton and Woulds. He didn’t walk very fast, though it was a cold January night, and Medicine Hat is a cold town. After a while he turned in to an unremarkable-looking house, and after some inquiries at the door he vanished inside. I chatted for a few minutes with an old fellow in a tuque and mackinaw who was shovelling away an evening snowfall, then I knocked at the door myself.
“Mrs. Quiller answered in person, and though she was not the first madam I had seen — now and then one of the sisterhood would appear in search of Charlie, who had a bad habit of forgetting to settle his bills — she was certainly the least remarkable. I am always amused when madams in plays and films appear as wonderful, salty characters, full of hard-won wisdom and overflowing, compassionate understanding. Damned old twisters, any I’ve ever seen. Mrs. Quiller might have been any suburban housewife, with a dyed perm and bifocal specs. I asked if I could speak to her privately, and waggled the ten-spot, and followed her into her living-room. I explained what I had come for, and the necessity that I was not to be seen; I was just someone who had been sent by friends of Mr. Ingestree to see that he got home safely. ‘I getcha,’ said Mrs. Quiller; ‘the way that guy carries on, I think he needs a guardeen.’
“I settled down in the kitchen with Mrs. Quiller, and accepted a cup of tea and some soda crackers — her nightly snack, she explained — and we talked very comfortably about the theatre. After a while we were joined by the old snow-shoveller, who said nothing, and devoted himself to a stinking cigar. She was not a theatre-goer herself, Mrs. Quiller said — too busy at night for that; but she liked a good fillum. The last one she seen was Laugh, Clown, Laugh with Lon Chaney in it, and this girl Loretta Young. Now there was a sweet fillum, but it give you a terrible idea of the troubles of people in show business, and did I think it was true to life? I said I thought it was as true as anything dared to be, but the trials of people in the theatre were so many and harrowing that the public would never believe them if they were shown as they really were. That touched the spot with Mrs. Quiller, and we had a fine discussion about the surprises and vicissitudes life brought to just about everybody, which lasted some time.
“Then Mrs. Quiller grew restless. ‘I wonder what’s happened to that friend of yours,’ she said; ‘he’s takin’ an awful long time.’ I wondered, too, but I thought it better not to make any guesses. It was not long till another woman came into the kitchen; I would have judged her to be in her early hard-living thirties, and she had never been a beauty; she had an unbecoming Japanese kimono clutched around her, and her feet were in slippers to which remnants of maribou still clung. She looked at me with suspicion. ‘It’s okay,’ said Mrs. Quiller, ‘this fella’s the guardeen. Anything wrong, Lil?’ ‘Jeez, I never seen such a guy,’ said Lil; ‘nothin’ doing yet. He just lays there with the droops, laughin’, and talkin’. I never heard such a guy. He keeps sayin’ it’s all so ridiculous, and would I believe he’d once been a member of some Marlowe Society or something. What are they, anyway? A bunch o’ queers? But anyways I’m sick of it. He’s ruining my self-confidence. Is Pauline in yet? Maybe she could do something with him.’
“Mrs. Quiller obviously had great qualities of generalship. She turned to me. ‘Unless you got any suggestions, I’m goin’ to give him the bum’s rush,’ she said. ‘When he come in I thought, his heart’s not in it. What do you say?’ I said I thought she had summed up the situation perfectly. ‘Then you go back up there, Lil, and tell him to come back when he feels better,’ said Mrs. Quiller. ‘Don’t shame him none, but get rid of him. And no refund, you understand.’
“So that was how it was. Shortly afterward I crept from Mrs. Quiller’s back door, and followed the desponding Cantab back to his hotel. I don’t know what he told Charlton and Woulds, but they hadn’t much to say to him from then on. The odd thing was that Audrey Sevenhowes was quite nice to him for the rest of the tour. Not in a teasing way — or with as little tease as she could manage — but just friendly. A curious story, but not uncommon, would you say, gentlemen?”
“I say it’s time we all had a drink, and dinner,” said Liesl. She took the arm of the silent Ingestree and sat him at the table beside herself, and we were all especially pleasant to him, except Magnus who, having trampled his old enemy into the dirt, seemed a happier man and, in some strange way, cleansed. It was as if he were a scorpion, which had discharged its venom, and was frisky and playful in consequence. I taxed him with it as we left the dinner table. “How could you,” I said. “Ingestree is a harmless creature, surely? He has done some good work. Many people would call him a distinguished man, and a very nice fellow.”
Magnus patted my arm and laughed. It was a low laugh, and a queer one. Merlin’s laugh, if ever I heard it
7
Eisengrim was altogether in high spirits, and showed no fatigue from his afternoon’s talking. He pretended to be solicitous about the rest of us, however, and particularly about Lind and Kinghovn. Did they really wish to continue with his narrative? Did they truly think what he had to say offered any helpful subtext to the film about Robert-Houdin? Indeed, as the film was now complete, of what possible use could a subtext be?
“Of the utmost possible use when next I make a film,” said Jurgen Lind. “These divergences between the acceptable romance of life and the clumsily fashioned, disproportioned reality are part of my stock-in-trade. Here you have it, in your tale of Sir John’s tour of Canada; he took highly burnished romance to a people whose life was lived on a different plateau, and the discomforts of his own life and the lives of his troupe were on other levels. How reconcile the three?”
“Light,” said Kinghovn. “You do it with light. The romance of the plays is theatre-light; the different romance of the company is the queer train-light Magnus has described; think what could be done, with that flashing strobe-light effect you get when a train passes another and everything seems to flicker and lose substance. And the light of the Canadians would be that hard, bright light you find in northern lands. Leave it to me to handle all three lights in such a way that they are a variation on the theme of light, instead of just three kinds of light, and I’ll do the trick for you, Jurgen.”
“I doubt if you can do it simply in terms of appearances,” said Lind.
“I didn’t say you could. But you certainly can’t do it without a careful attention to appearances, or you’ll have no romance of any kind. Remember what Magnus says: without attention to detail you will have no illusion, and illusion’s what you’re aiming at, isn’t it?”
“I had rather thought I was aiming at truth, or some tiny corner of it,” said Lind.
“Truth!” said Kinghovn. “What kind of talk is that for a sane man? What truth have we been getting all afternoon? I don’t suppose Magnus thinks he’s been telling us the truth. He’s giving us a mass of detail, and I don’t doubt that every word he says is true in itself, but to call that truth is ridiculous even for a philosopher of film like you, Jurgen. What’s he been doing to poor old Roly? He’s cast him as the clown of the show — mother’s boy, pompous Varsity ass, snob, and sexual non-starter — and I’m sure it’s all true, but what has it to do with our Roly? The man you and I work with and lean on? The thoroughly capable administrator, literary man, and smoother-of-the-way? Eh?”