One day when he returned to his boarding-house for dinner, he found a summons to jury duty there. After that life was different.
He served on many juries; he liked serving. There was the two dollars a day—later raised to three—that it brought in; and two dollars would buy a lot of tobacco and of the sticky taffy he was beginning to enjoy so much despite its malignant effect upon his remaining teeth. But the money wasn’t the only consideration, nor even the most potent one. He liked the feeling of importance that came to him in the jury-box, the knowledge that all these attorneys and their clients and their witnesses were here for but one purpose: to convince him, Tim Gurley, of the justice of their cases; that he was having a hand in the world’s graver work, helping make weighty and important decisions, doing justice.
Neither his eyes nor his ears were very responsive now, and at first he found himself frequently being excused from service after the attorneys’ preliminary questions; but he soon learned what was expected of him. By straining his attention to the utmost he could catch the substance of the lawyers’ queries—sufficient to tell him whether a yes or a no was expected of him.
He would have liked to have heard more clearly the testimony of some of the witnesses, especially when he could see that the other jurymen were leaning forward in their chairs with attentive expressions upon their faces; but a man can’t have everything, and now and then a witness would take the stand and speak clearly enough for Tim Gurley to hear every word he said. But, even at the worst, Tim Gurley was never wholly at loss for knowledge of what was going on: the attorneys, while delivering their closing arguments, almost invariably stood close to the jury-box and reviewed the salient points of their cases in language that was loud and impassioned and easily audible.
II
Born into a family whose adherence to the principles of the Democratic Party dated from the 1830s, Elton Bemis, by shunning all political doctrine that did not spring from Democratic sources, had kept his heritage unsullied. His reading was confined to two Democratic newspapers—one in the morning and one in the evening—and, while professing a worldly skepticism, he really believed everything he read therein; not excepting the vague, but nonetheless stirring, stories of abductions by gaudy villains and incarcerations in unknown prisons told by young women who return to their families after protracted absences. He had, on the strength of their representative war records as advertised in the same papers, bet $10 on Carpentier to defeat Dempsey; he had denounced the acquittal of Roscoe Arbuckle as a flagrant miscarriage of justice; and he never trusted a man who parted his hair in the middle.
He had forbidden his daughter to see or communicate with the young man of her choice on the grounds that, although otherwise unexceptionable, the young man was a Roman Catholic; and had he known that his daughter had cultivated a mild appetite for Egyptian tobacco it is quite likely that he would have put her out of the house, though he himself burned black tobacco in a black pipe to the stimulation of his salivary glands.
In his youth he had resigned from a pleasure and social club upon the admittance of a Jew to its membership; and notwithstanding that economic expediency had induced him to assume a less rigorous attitude in later years, he still got a definite pleasure from the memory of that act. He firmly believed that his country could, in either one pitched battle or a campaign of any length whatsoever, defeat the other nations of the world all together; and he had nothing but contempt for all foreigners, were they Swedes, Limies, Harps, Heinies, Bohunks, or any of the dozen or more varieties of Dagoes. He admitted, with suitable reservations, the existence in the Negro of a soul.
One day Elton Bemis sat in the jury-box, in Department 4 of the Superior Court, and counsel for the plaintiff asked him:
“If you are selected to serve on this jury, Mr. Bemis, do you think that you can give both parties to this action a fair and impartial hearing? Will you be guided by the evidence submitted and the instructions of the Court, and not allow your mind to be influenced by personal feelings or prejudices?”
And Elton Bemis replied:
“Yes, sir!”
III
He was undersized and faded and with the face of an unhealthy rodent. From the corners of a thin-lipped and colorless mouth whose looseness had erased everything of expression but a pusillanimous cruelty, lines, deep but nevertheless not clearly defined, ran up to a little crafty, twitching nose. His forehead and chin were negligible: twin slantings away into soiled collar and unkempt hair. Furtive eyes of a dark and dull opacity were set as close together as the sunken bridge of his nose would permit; the eyes moved with an uneasy jerkiness and were seldom focused upon anything higher than a man’s shoulder. His dirty fingers, with their chewed nails, scratched nervously at each other, his face, his legs.
He sat slumped down in his chair, listening with manifest disgust to the arguments with which his fellow jurors had been engrossed since the bailiff had locked them in the jury-room. Presently there came a lull in the discussion.
He spat inaccurately at a distant cuspidor, and spoke with whining plaintiveness:
“What’s the use of arguing? That guy’s guilty: you can look at him and see he’s a crook!”
MAGIC
It was late on the ninth day of Straït’s fasting that Simon, his talmid, brought the jeweler Buclip into the room where the magician sat reading a tattered manuscript titled, adequately enough, The Black Pullet, or the Hen with the Golden Eggs, comprising the Science of Magic Talismans and Rings, the Art of Necromancy and of the Kabalah, for the Conjuration of Ærial and Infernal Spirits, of Sylphs, Undines and Gnomes, serviceable for the acquisition of the Secret Sciences, for the Discovery of Treasures, for obtaining power to command all beings and to unmask all Sciences and Bewitchments. Thewhole following the Doctrines of Socrates, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Son of the Grand Aromasis, and other philosophers whose works in MS escaped the conflagration of the Library of Ptolemy.Translated from the Language of the Magi and that of the Hieroglyphs by the Doctors Mizzaboula-Jabamı¯a, Danhuzerus, Judahim and Eliaeb..
The room was large, white-floored, its tall walls hidden behind dark velvet glitteringly embroidered with occult insignia. In a corner the boy who had not yet got back the speech lost in awe at being apprenticed to the magician, some two months ago, squatted on his heels, and with a rumpled square of silk polished the silver ring of Raum, graved with his seal that was like the deck-plan of an eccentric small boat.
Straït was a plump man who may have been forty years old, though with magicians you cannot tell. His shrewd face was transparent of skin and sagging of mouth-corner, for this was the ninth day of his fasting. When he marked his place with a clean pudgy finger and raised his face to Simon, a reversed five-pointed star in a Hebraic-legended circle on the velvet behind him made a gay nimbus for his round pink head.
For a fidgeting moment the jeweler Buclip tried to catch the magician’s gaze, then he too looked at Simon, waiting for him to speak. But when the talmid would have spoken Buclip burst into sudden babblement.
“It’s— I want— If you can—I know you can,” he tumbled his incoherence at the magician, “if you will. I want—” His words degenerated further into unintelligible low sounds directed at the limp hat his hands worried.
Above these low sounds Simon said, “He wants the love of a woman, Master.”
The jeweler Buclip shuffled his feet and cracked his knuckles and looked at nothing, but he nodded manfully. He was a large nervous man whose naked head was as grey as grey hair could have made it.
“An especial woman?” Straït’s brown eyes that were tired from abstinence turned to the jeweler for the first time. “Or any woman?”
Buclip shook his head until his collar creaked.
“An especial one!”
“Is she wife or maid?”
“Mai— She is not married.”
“And there’s no trinket in your shop to catch her with?”
“I’ve got the finest stock in the city!” The
jeweler’s mercantile glibness died with a gulp in his burly throat. “My gifts don’t seem to make her any more—don’t seem to give her any more—” Anxiety succeeded shame between the grey pads encompassing his eyes. “You’ll help me? You’ll help me again?”
Elbows on table beside the manuscript of The Black Pullet, face in hands, Straït rolled flaccid cheeks in cushioned palms and made the jeweler wait while the only sound in the room was the whisper of silk to silver in the hands of the squatting boy.
“You shall have her,” the magician said when the jeweler’s twisting fingers had spotted his hat with damp prints. “You will tell Simon what we need to know.”
Buclip stepped jubilantly forward.
“You will—?”
Simon caught his arm, sh-h-hed in his ear, led him out.
“Always,” said Straït, leaning back in his chair, when the talmid had returned to put a handful of gold coins and a written paper beside his master. “Always,” Straït the magician complained when he had swept them over the edge into an open drawer, “it is love and wealth they want, no matter which variety of those things may be popular for a while. Twice perhaps in twenty years I have been asked for wisdom, twice it may be for happiness, once I can remember for beauty. For the rest, come fad, go fashion, there is love and there is wealth. Train your mountebankery on those targets, my Simon, and you need never want clients.”
“Mountebankery?”
“Charlatanism.”
The talmid chewed his red mouth and fear harassed his eyebrows crookedly.
“I will not get beyond that?”
When Straït had shaken his head, muscles writhed dismally in the talmid’s white young face, and the working of his mouth was out of all proportion to the volume of sound that came out, but he held his master’s gaze, however forlornly.
“I am too stupid, then,” he achieved, “to really learn the Art?”
Straït puffed his cheeks out, blew them empty, and reproached his pupil.
“Tch! Tch! What I meant was I have nothing else to teach.”
“Master! The things you do!”
“Yes,” Straït confessed with an indifferent shrug. “I grant you the queer monsters riding wolves I bring out of nowhere or Hell, as the case may be, and the wolves riding queerer monsters, and the bulls with men’s heads, and the men with snakes’ heads. I grant you all those, if they mean anything. What with all the nonsense I go through, what with fasting and poring over weird rituals and smelling unlikely odors, what with confusing my eyes with intricate symbols and chanting complicated conjurations, wouldn’t it be funny, Simon, if I didn’t see the things, however monstrous, I point my bewildered mind at?”
Simon was respectful, but Simon was triumphant.
“But I have seen those things too, Master, and the boy!”
“You have?” The magician’s tired brown eyes taunted the talmid with his youth. “And why shouldn’t you? Because I am a mountebank must I be an altogether incompetent one? Is it so great a trick to make you see and hear and smell phantasmata? Must I be less adept than politicians and recruiting sergeants and the greenest of girls?”
Simon, thus taken in conceit, flushed and looked down. Nevertheless he shook his head confidently.
“But the things you have done! The Wengel girl, the General, Madame Reer! And all the others, and all the things you have done for them!”
Straït snorted at the idea that the authenticity of his work was to be measured by its consequences.
“Equal results, far greater results,” he pointed out, “have been achieved by wizards whose methods were the nadir of idiocy. Indubitable marvels have been worked at one time or another by means of almost anything you can name, so long as it was a thing offensive or ridiculous enough of itself. Guts of a sort or another have more than held their own in the long run, of course, but there are few things in our world that have not had their goetical properties soon or late.”
He leaned forward to tap with derisive finger the tattered manuscript of The Black Pullet.
“This childish hocus pocus, whose fraudulent absurdities are known even to men who write books—haven’t magicians used it successfully? Haven’t such asinine formulas as the Grimoire of Honorius, the Verus Jesuitarum Libellus, and the Praxis Magica Fausti been effectively applied to the disarrangements of natural things’ balance? Haven’t simpler sorcerers perpetrated like wonders without any tools at all?”
“Yes, Master,” Simon said, tight-lipped, his back to the wall of his faith, “but you have shown me things that could not be unless a true magic was behind them.”
Straït put his face in his hands and fell to rolling his cheeks in his palms again. A wistfulness was behind the tired shrewdness of his pink face, perhaps because he could not now contradict his talmid.
“There is that thing in back of these things, Simon, in back of our toying, behind even the explorations of the elder cabalists. That thing, almost corporate, perhaps, in the knowledge and experience of the Magi’s sanctuaries in the distant years, is a wisdom, a mystic science of knowledge behind and beyond and above known knowledge. It hasn’t, it can’t have anything to do with our trickeries, our juggling. All this”—he flicked a hand from his cheek to indicate the room and its appointments and everything that had happened or could happen in the room, and in the world because of the room—“is a twisted false shadow of that thing’s possible shadow. And because that thing is almost certainly back there, this theurgic sleight-of-hand of ours would be all the more shabby for being valid.
“On a day, Simon, perhaps you will go through this playing to a perception of that thing in back. But it is not likely. What is likely is you’ll try and fail and fall back into this legerdemain in which you daily gain facility. Maybe you’ll try again, but it is not likely anything will come of it. In this nonsense you’ve learned you’ll find the satisfaction a man has in doing what—however silly—he can do skillfully. There will be days when you’ll find a pleasure in the thought of things you have done for your clients, though that will come only on optimistic days. You’ll have the flavor of your power over our thin Procels and Hagentis, and of your romantic, even important, place in your world. Intelligent people will have small use for you, true enough, knowing your work is as futile when it succeeds as when it fails. But that won’t worry you greatly: the intelligent won’t be, really, citizens of your world.
“You’ll have your skill, and your craftsman’s pride in that skill, and the money it brings you, and presently you will be middle-aged and old. Some nights the thought of the True Magic you mock with your trickery will be a torment in your bed, but, in the end, your brain addled by fasting, by immersion in symbolism and formula, and by the rest of the business, you will become—as I hope—a simple-minded sorcerer with childish pride and faith in your utility.”
“Yes, Master.” A pleasantly indifferent smile colored the talmid’s face. “Just the same, I’ll be perfectly satisfied if I can ever do half the things you do.”
Straït looked at his talmid with eyes wherein pity and amused contempt and a certain pleasure in the compliment were curiously blended. He grunted away the matter so unsatisfactorily discussed and turned to the immediate.
“I can’t use Raum for this Buclip business, though he would have served nicely for the other,” he said. “But, since I can raise one demon to handle both, there’s no need of fasting another nine days. What we need, then, is one who is a reader of minds and a reconciler for the one, and a kindler of love for the other. There is Vaul, the camel, agreeable enough if it were not for his persistence in talking Egyptian, a devilishly confusing language for me. Dantalian would be best, I think, especially as the morning should be fair.” He spoke to the boy who still rubbed Raum’s ring. “Put up that ring, my son, and look to Dantalian’s. You will find it near the top of the cabinet, a copper ring with a sprawling seal of crosses and small circles.”
The morning’s dawning, fair as the magician had foretold, was barely accompli
shed when, white and large in linen cap and robe, belted with the broad skin girdle that was marked with the Names, Straït came into the room where his assistants were in their proper garments. When he gave them good-morning they answered with nods only: they might not speak until the business was done. From the open west windows the velvet hangings had already been gathered back, and the four candles—the red, the white, the green, and the greenish black—stood on the table beside the silken roll in which the tools of the Art were bundled.
When he had seen that these things were ready, Straït drew on the white floor, still damp from the lustral water, a wide circle, and, within it, another, less wide. Into the space between the circles he copied, to the rhythm of an inarticulate mumbled chant, and writing always toward the west, the Names that were on his girdle, spacing them with the astrological signs of sun, moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. In the inner circle’s center he drew a square whose angles terminated in crosses. Between that square and the circle he drew four five-pointed stars. In the center of each he put the Tau, and, in the proper places, the proper letters. Outside the circle, close to its curve, he repeated the astrological signs, and, in the prescribed places, the four five-pointed stars with their centered Taus, but in each point of these stars he wrote a syllable of the Name Tetragrammaton. Last of all, he drew a triangle that lay partly outside the circle and partly over its western rim.
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