World of Wonders

  “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 mad-woman. 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 Soirée of lllusions.”

  “Lots of people used to come twice. And three and four times. It’s 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 à 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 stagy, 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 courterous, 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 Zürcher 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.”

  “Aren’t you doing a lot of fancy guessing?”

  “No. Staunton told Magnus and Magnus told me.”

  “It was one of those situations Liesl is always talking about,” said Eisengrim. “You know: a man reaches the confessional time in his life. Sometimes he writes an autobiography; sometimes he tells his story to a group of listeners, as I have been doing. Sometimes there is only one listener, and that was how it was with Staunton.

  “Surely you remember what it was like in your room that night of November 3? Staunton and I had clicked, in the way people sometimes do. He wanted to know me: I was more than commonly interested in him because he was from my past, and not at all what one would have predicted for the fattish, purse-proud kid who had shouted ‘Hoor’ at my mother. You understood that we’d clicked, and you didn’t like it at all. That was when you decided to spill the beans, and told Staunton who I was, how he had literally brought about my birth, how you knew about the rock in the snowball and had kept it all those years. You even had my mother’s ashes in a casket. And through it all Staunton was cool as a cucumber. Denied everything that he had not—quite honestly, I believe—forgotten. Chose to regard the whole affair as something only very remotely connected with himself. Considering the way you went at him, I thought he showed enviable self-possession. But he said some sharp things about you.

  “When we were in his car, driving down the long avenue from the school, he expanded on what he’d said. He cursed you very thoroughly, Dunny. Told me that for boyhood friendship he had kept an eye on your money all through the years, and made you secure and even well-off. Befriended you and brought you to the notice of really important people—people in a very big way of business—as a guest in his house. Confided in y
ou when his first marriage was going on the rocks, and was patient when you sided with his wife. Put up with your ironic attitude toward his success, because he knew it had its root in jealousy.

  “He was offended that you never mentioned Mary Dempster—he never spoke of her as my mother—and her long years in asylums; he would have been glad to help a Deptford woman who had come to grief. And he was angry and hurt that you kept that damned stone on your desk to remind you of a grudge you had against him. A stone in a snowball! The kind of thing any boy might do, just for devilment. He would never have thought the dark, judgmatical Ramsay blood in you was so bitter with hate—you, who had made money out of saints!

  “It was then I began to know him. Oh yes, I came to know him quite well during the next hour. We’d clicked, as I said, but I’ve always distrusted that kind of thing since I first clicked with Willard. It’s unchancy. There was sympathy of character, I suppose. There was a wolfishness in Boy Staunton that he kept very well under, and probably never recognized in himself. But I know that wolfishness. Liesl has told you I have a good measure of it in myself, and that was why she suggested I take the professional name of Eisengrim, the name of the wolf in the old fables; but the name really means the sinister hardness, the cruelty of iron itself. I took the name, and recognized the fact, and thereby got it up out of my depths so that at least I could be aware of it and take a look at it, now and then. I won’t say I domesticated the wolf, but I knew where his lair was, and what he might do. Not Boy Staunton. He had lived facing the sun, and he had no real comprehension of the shadow-wolf that loped after him.

  “We wolves like to possess things, and especially people. We are unappeasably hungry. There is no reason or meaning in the hunger. It just exists, and possesses you. I saw it once, in myself, and though I didn’t know what it was at the time, I knew that it was something that was at the very heart of my being. When we played Scaramouche through Canada, I had a little meeting with Sir John, every night, just before Two, two; we had to stand in front of a mirror, to make sure every detail of costume and make-up was identical, so that when I appeared as his double the illusion would be as perfect as possible. I always enjoyed that moment, because I am wolfish about perfection.

  “There we stood, the night I speak of; it was in Ottawa, in his dressing-room at the old Russell, and we had a good mirror, a full-length one. He looked, and I looked. I saw that he was good. An egoist, as only a leading actor can be, but in his face, which was old under the make-up, there was gentleness and compassion toward me, because I was young, and had so much to learn, and was so likely to make a fool of myself through my driving greed. Compassion for me, and a silvery relish for himself, too, because he knew he was old, and had the mastery of age. But in my face, which was so like his that my doubling gave the play a special excitement, there was a watchful admiration beneath which my wolfishness could be seen—my hunger not just to be like him but to be him, whatever that might cost him. I loved him and served him faithfully right up to the end, but in my inmost self I wanted to eat him, to possess him, to make him mine.

  “He saw it, too, and he gave me a little flick with his hand as though to say, ‘You might let me live out my life, m’boy. I’ve earned it, eh? But you look as if you’d devour my very soul. Not really necessary, quonk?’ Not a word was spoken, but I blushed under my make-up. And whatever I did for him afterward, I couldn’t keep the wolf quiet. If I was a little sharp with Roly, it was because I was angry that he had seen what I truly thought I had kept hidden.

  “That was how it was with Boy Staunton. Oh, not on the surface. He had a lovely glaze. But he was a devourer.

  “He set to work to devour me. He went at it with the ease of long custom, and I don’t suppose he had an instant’s real awareness of what he was doing. He laid himself out to be charming, and to get me on his side. When he had finished damning you, Dunny, he began to excuse you, in a way that was supposed to be complimentary to me: you had lived a narrow, schoolmaster’s life, and had won a certain scholarly reputation, but he and I were the glittering successes and breathed a finer air than yours.

  “He was extremely good at what he was doing. It is not easy to assume an air of youth successfully, but when it is well done it has extraordinary charm, because it seems to rock Age, and probably Death, back on their heels. He had kept his voice youthful, and his vocabulary was neither stupidly up-to-the-minute nor flawed with betraying fossil slang. I had to keep reminding myself that this man must be seventy. I have to present a professional picture of physical well-being, if not actually of youth, and I know how it is done because I learned it from Sir John. But Boy Staunton—an amateur, really—could teach me things about seeming youthful without resorting to absurdities. I knew he was eager to make me his own, to enchant me, to eat me up and take me into himself. He had just discovered a defeat; he thought he had eaten you, Ramsay, but you were like those fairy-tale figures who cut their way out of the giant’s belly.

  “So, not at all unlike a man who loses one girl and bounces to another, he tried to eat me.

  “We really must talk, he said. We were driving down from your school to my hotel, and as we were rounding Queen’s Park Circle he pulled off the road into what I suppose was a private entry beside the Legislature; there was a porte-cochère and a long flight of steps. It won’t be long before this is my personal entrance to this building, he said.

  “I knew what he was talking about; the appointment that would be announced next morning; he was full of it.”

  “I’ll bet he was,” I said; “it was just his thing—top dog in a large area—women curtsying to him—all that. And certainly his wife wanted it, and engineered it.”

  “Yes, but wait: having got it, he wasn’t so sure. If you are one of the wolfish brotherhood you sometimes find that you have no sooner achieved what you wanted than you begin to despise it. Boy’s excitement was like that of a man who thinks he has walked into a trap.”

  “Well, the job isn’t all fun. What ceremonial appointment is? You drive to the Legislature in a carriage, with soldiers riding before and behind, and there is a lot of bowing, because you represent the Crown, and then you find you are reading a speech written by somebody else, announcing policies you may not like. If he didn’t want to be a State figurehead, he should have choked off Denyse when she set to work to get him the job.”

  “Reason, reason, reason! Dunny, you surely know how limited a part reason plays in some of our most important decisions. He coveted the state landau and the soldiers, and he had somehow managed to preserve the silly notion that as Lieutenant-Governor he would really do some governing. But already he knew he was mistaken. He had looked over the schedule of duties for his first month in office, and been dismayed by the places he would have to go, and the things he would have to do. Presenting flags to Boy Scouts; opening a home for old people; eating a hundredweight of ceremonial dinners to raise money to fight diseases he’d rather not hear about. And he couldn’t get out of it; his secretary made it clear that there was no choice in the matter; the office demanded these things and he was expected to deliver the goods. But that wasn’t what truly got under his skin.

  “Such appointments aren’t done in a few days, and he had known it was coming for several weeks. During that time he had some business in London and while he was there he had thought it a good idea to take care of the matter of his ceremonial uniform. That was how he put it, but as a fellow-wolf I knew how eager he must have been to explore the possibilities of state finery. So—off to Ede and Ravenscroft to have the job done in the best possible way and no expense spared. They happened to have a uniform of the right sort which he tried on, just to get the general effect. Even though it was obvious that the uniform was for a smaller man, the effect was catastrophic. ‘Suddenly I didn’t look like myself at all,’ he said; ‘I looked old. Not shaky old, or fat old, or grim old, but certainly old.’

  “He expected me to sympathize, but wolf should never turn to wolf for sympathy. ‘You
are old,’ I said to him. ‘Very handsome and well preserved, but nobody would take you for a young man.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but not old as that uniform suggested; not a figurehead. I tried putting the hat a little on one side, to see if that helped, but the man with the measuring-tape around his neck who was with me said, Oh no, sir; never like that, and put it straight again. And I understood that forever after there would always be somebody putting my hat straight, and that I would be no more than the animation of that uniform, or some version of it.’

  “As one who had spent seven years as the cunning bowels of Abdullah I didn’t see that fate quite as he did. Of course, Abdullah wasn’t on the level. He was out to trounce the Rubes. A Lieutenant-Governor can’t have any fun of that kind. He is the embodiment of everything that is correct, and on the level, and unsurprising. The Rubes have got him and he must do their will.

  “ ‘I have lost my freedom of choice,’ he said, and he seemed to expect me to respond with horror. But I didn’t. I was enjoying myself. Boy Staunton was an old story to you, Dunny, but he was new to me, and I was playing the wolf game, too, in my way. I had not forgotten Mrs Constantinescu, and I knew that he was ready to talk, and I was ready to hear. So I remembered old Zingara’s advice. Lull ’em. So I lulled him.

  “ ‘I can see that you’re in a situation you never would have chosen with your eyes open. But there’s usually some way out. Is there no way out for you?’

  “ ‘Even if I found a way, what would happen if I suddenly bowed out?’ he said.

  “ ‘I suppose you’d go on living much as you do now,’ I told him. ‘There would be criticism of you because you refused an office you had accepted, under the Crown. But I dare say that’s been done before.’

  “I swear I had nothing in particular in mind when I made that comment. But it galvanized him. He looked at me as if I had said something of extraordinary value. Then he said: ‘Of course it was different for him; he was younger.’