“Oh, Dunny, what a coarsely melodramatic mind you have! Vengeance! If I had been as big an oddity as you are I would have embraced Boy Staunton and thanked him for what he had done for me. The means may have been a little rough, but the result is entirely to my taste. If he hadn’t hit my mother on the head with that snowball — having hidden a rock in it, which was dirty play — I might now be what my father was: a Baptist parson in a small town. I have had my ups and downs, and the downs were very far down indeed, but I am now a celebrity in a limited way, and I am a master of a craft, which is a better thing by far. I am a more complete human being than you are, you old fool. I may not have had a very happy sex-life, but I certainly have love and friendship, and much of the best of that is in bed with me at this moment. I have admiration, which everybody wants and very few people achieve. I get my living by doing what I most enjoy, and that is rare indeed. Who gave me my start? Boy Staunton! Would I murder such a man? It is to his early intervention in my life I owe what Liesl calls the Magian World View.
“Vengeance, you cry. If anybody wanted vengeance, it was you, Dunny. You lived near Staunton all your life, watched him, brooded over him, saw him destroy that silly girl you wanted — or thought you wanted — and ill-wished him a thousand times. You’re the man of vengeance. I never wanted vengeance in my life for anything.”
“Magnus! Remember how you withheld death from Willard when he begged for it! What did you do today to poor Roly Ingestree? Don’t you call that vengeance?”
“I admit I toyed with Roly. He hurt people I loved. But if he hadn’t come back into my life by chance I should never have bothered about him. I didn’t harbour evidence of his guilt for sixty years, as you harboured that stone Staunton put in the snowball.”
“Don’t twist, Magnus! When you and Staunton left my room at the College to go back to your hotel you took that stone, and when next it was seen the police had to pry it out of poor Staunton’s jaws, where it was clenched so tight they had to break his teeth to get at it!”
“I didn’t take the stone, Dunny; Staunton took it himself.”
“Did he?”
“Yes. I saw him. You were putting your box back in the bookshelves. The box that contained my mother’s ashes. Dunny, what on earth made you keep those ashes? It was ghoulish.”
“I couldn’t bear to part with them. Your mother was a very special figure in my life. To me she was a saint. Not just a good woman, but a saint, and the influence she had in my life was miraculous.”
“So you’ve often told me, but I knew her only as a madwoman. I had stood at the window of our miserable house trying not to cry while Boy Staunton and his gang shouted ‘Hoor!’ as they passed on their way to school.”
“Yes, and you let the police think you had never met him until the night he died.”
“Perfectly true. I knew who he was, when he was fifteen and I was five. He was the Rich Young Ruler in our village, as you well know. But we had never been formally introduced until you brought us together, and I presumed that was what the police were talking about.”
“A quibble.”
“An evasion, possibly. But I was answering questions, not instructing my questioners. I was working on advice given me long ago by Mrs. Constantinescu: don’t blat everything you know, especially to cops.”
“You didn’t tell them you knew that Boy had been appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the province when nobody else knew it.”
“Everybody knew it was in the air. I knew it the second night he came to the theatre, because he had the letter of appointment in the inner pocket of his handsome dinner jacket. Liesl has told you we had a member of our troupe — our company manager — who welcomed important patrons in the foyer. I suppose our man found out that the rumour had become a fact by means which I always thought it better not to investigate too closely. So I knew. And the Brazen Head could have spilled the beans that evening, from the stage, but Liesl and I thought it might be just a teeny bit indiscreet.”
“That was another thing you didn’t tell the police. Boy Staunton came twice to the Soiree of Illusions.”
“Lots of people used to come twice. And three and four times. Its a very good show. But you’re right; Staunton came to see me. He was interested in me in the way people used to be interested in Sir John. I suppose there was something about my personality, as there was about Sir John’s, that had a special attraction for some people. My personality is a valuable part of our bag of tricks, as you very well know.”
Indeed I did. And how it had come pressing off the screen in Un Hommage a Robert-Houdin! I had always thought personal attributes lost something in the cinema; it seemed reasonable that a photograph of a man should be less striking than the man himself. But not when the art of Lind and that rumpot of genius Kinghovn lay behind the photograph. I had sat in the little viewing-room at the B.B.C. entranced by what I saw of a Magnus more vivid than ever I had seen him on the stage. True, his performance was a tiny bit stagey, considered as cinematic acting, but it was a staginess of such grace, such distinction and accomplishment, that nobody could have wished it otherwise. As I watched I remembered what used to be said of stage favourites when I was a boy: they were polished. They had enviable repose. They did nothing quite the way anyone else did it, and they had an attitude toward their audiences which was, quite apart from the role they were playing, splendidly courteous, as if a great man were taking friendly notice of us. I had thought of this when Magnus told us how Sir John accepted applause when he made his first entrance in Scaramouche, and later gave those curtain-speeches all across Canada, which seemed to embrace audiences of people who yearned mutely for such attention. Magnus had this polish in the highest and most subtle degree, and I could understand how Boy Staunton, who was a lifelong hero-worshipper and had not got it out of his system even at the age of seventy, would have responded to it.
Polish! How Boy had honed and yearned after polish! What idols he had worshipped! And as a Lieutenant-Governor elect I could imagine how he coveted what Magnus displayed on the stage. A Lieutenant-Governor with that sort of distinction — that would astonish the Rubes!
We were silent for a while. But I was full of questions, mad for certainties even though I understood there were no certainties. I broke the silence.
“If you weren’t the man who granted his inmost wish, who was it? I have swallowed the pill that I was ‘the inevitable fifth, who was keeper of his conscience and keeper of the stone’ — though I accept that only as Liesl’s oracular phraseology. But who granted his wish? And what was the wish?”
This time it was Liesl who spoke. “It could very well have been his son, Ramsay. Don’t forget David Staunton, who represented continuance to his father. Have you no understanding of how some men crave for continuance? They see it as their immortality. Boy Staunton who had built up the great fortune, from a few fields of sugar-beets to a complex of business that was known all over the world. You must pardon my nationalist bias, but it is significant that when Staunton died — or killed himself, as it was supposed — his death was reported at some length in our Neue Zurcher Zeitung. That paper, like the London Times, recognizes only the most distinguished achievements of the Angel of Death. Their obituary columns are almost the Court Circular of the Kingdom of God. Well, who inherits an important man’s earthly glory? People like Staunton hope it will be a son.
“A son Staunton had, we know. But what a son! Not a disgrace. One might find the spaciousness of tragedy in a disgrace. David Staunton was a success; a notable criminal lawyer, but also a sharp critic of his father’s life. A man whose cold eye watched the glorious Boy growing older, and richer, and more powerful, and was not impressed. A man who did not admire or seek to emulate his father’s great success with women. A man who understood, by tie of blood and by a child’s intuition, the terrible, unappeasable hunger that lies at the bottom of ambition like Boy Staunton’s. I don’t know whether David ever understood that consciously; but he thwarted his father’s terrible craving to be everything, command everything, and possess everything, and he did it in the way that hurt most: he refused to produce a successor to himself. He refused to continue the Staunton line and the Staunton name and the glory that was Staunton. That was pressing the knife into the vital spot. But don’t jump to conclusions: the man who granted his inmost wish wasn’t David Staunton.”