by Paul Gallico
For while any genuine conjurer could live in the city, only the greatest were admitted to the exclusive Master’s Guild. These were the elite of the town and only three each year were accepted, winnowed down from more than a hundred candidates. Naturally, any entertainer who could advertise that he was a Member of the Guild was more in demand than a lesser performer and this was why this annual event brought Mageia to a state of great excitement and anticipation.
The shops in the Square dealt only in magical apparatus of one kind or another; costumes, properties, cabinets and books with directions for producing tricks of every variety.
But it was the inhabitants by whom Adam and Mopsy now found themselves surrounded who gave life, color and dash to this fascinating place. The majority of them were handsomely dressed in black tail coats, white ties and silk top hats, while from their shoulders hung opera capes lined with red or cream satin. Many of them sported little black pointed beards that gave them a slightly sinister air, as one would expect of a magician, or had spiky mustaches waxed to a point, or both. Some had imposing ebony walking sticks with gold heads; others carried ivory-tipped wands in their white-gloved hands.
But there were also wizards even more excitingly costumed, the Oriental types purporting to come from the mysterious East. These marched about in gorgeous fabrics of every hue. The Chinese wore brocaded mandarin gowns with wide sleeves, black pillbox silk caps and their hair in long pigtails. There were Indian magicians in snow-white suits woven with gold thread, their heads wound about with red, green, blue or black turbans; Arab necromancers in cream-colored, woolen cloaks and flowing headdresses; Turkish adepts in their baggy trousers and red fezzes with black tassels and Japanese conjurers in gay, embroidered kimonos.
The women and children were as gaily and pleasingly clad as the men. The boys were dressed in miniature like their fathers, and the women and girls in the garb of magician’s assistants. Those who worked for the Eastern magicians were robed in bright, oriental garb; the Indians in saris, the Chinese in embroidered satin trousers and cheongsams, the Arabians in loose gauze pajamas fastened at the ankles and close-fitting jackets stitched in gold and silver thread.
The basic costume of the assistants from the Western world consisted of full-length tights with short, ruffled skirts and spangled or embroidered bodices, but these came in every color and combination of the rainbow and were set off by short capes that swung from their shoulders.
This was the scene that greeted Adam and Mopsy as the gates closed noiselessly behind them. Adam stared and, for once, even Mopsy was speechless and could only shake some of the hair out of his eyes so that he might see better.
“Surprised you, eh?” said the Gatekeeper.
“Oh yes indeed. How do I get to the Town Hall, please?” Adam asked.
The ancient porter gave him instructions but they were very long and confused, consisting of, “First turning up the hill, then left at the pump, you’ll see a magic shop on the right-hand side, go two streets left and three right, beyond the house with the five gables,” and so forth and so on.
Adam and Mopsy moved off trying to follow the directions and soon were a part of the throng filled with holiday spirit. The city, gay with flags and bunting, hummed, bustled and seethed with magic. Everyone was not only thinking and talking magic, but doing it as well. It seemed impossible for two prestidigitators to encounter one another upon the street without producing some kind of a trick, or a bit of sleight of hand.
Adam saw a pair meet, doff their silk toppers and bow to one another with old-world courtesy. One dipped into his hat and pulled out a live white rabbit which he gave to his friend, who immediately reciprocated by reaching into his own for a fine-looking chicken in exchange. They then stowed the creatures somewhere about their persons where they seemed to disappear, chatted for a moment and passed on.
“Jolly good,” commented Adam.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mopsy. “You can do better than that.”
Another pair paused for a moment. “Care for a smoke?” one asked the other.
“Don’t mind if I do.”
“Cigar? Cigarette? Pipe?”
“Anything that’s going.”
Whereupon the first magician made a swift pass with his hand, faster than any eye could follow, and there, between his fingers, was a lighted cigarette which he proffered to his friend. “Your brand, I believe.”
“Quite so. How very kind.”
Little knots at corners were being invited by this or that magician to pick a card. No passer-by was able to do something as simple as reaching into his pocket for a handkerchief with which to blow his nose. Instead he would produce dozens of them, in every color.
Even the youngest children on the street instead of carrying dolls or teddy bears, or towing toys on wheels behind them, played and practiced interminably with nests of boxes, pieces of rope, flags, coins, paper sacks, or bits of silk and filled the air with their cries of, “Look! Watch me! See what I can do!” or, “Here, have you seen this one?” and, “Let me show you.”
Thus both bewildered and fascinated by the novelty of the environment and the inhabitants, Adam completely forgot the Gatekeeper’s instructions and he and Mopsy shortly found themselves in a maze of narrow, side alleys and crooked houses, thoroughly lost. Nor did there seem to be anyone whom they could ask for the part of the town where they now found themselves appeared to be empty and deserted.
When they came to the next corner, Adam simply did not know which way to go. In his mind he flipped a coin which came down heads and so, turning left, he passed by an open window where, sitting upon the floor inside, he saw a little girl with brown hair but he did not notice that she was dissolved in tears.
III
JANE
For there was one child in Mageia who was not a member of the happy, carefree throng that Adam had seen elsewhere in the city in holiday mood, and most certainly she should have been, for she was the daughter of The Great Robert, Mayor of Mageia, Chief Magician, Chairman of the Board and President of the Guild of Master Magicians. Her name was Jane and she was eleven and a half years old.
All the resplendent titles of The Great Robert indicated what an important person he was, but did not show that in his home he was sometimes not exactly the best of fathers.
To meet him, he was a huge, imposing-looking man with an affable manner and a too-ready smile and handshake, coupled with piercing eyes and a flattering way that people found irresistible. He was also a superb magician; indeed no one in the community knew more about stage magic than he, unless perhaps it was old Professor Alexander who was almost ninety and still active. But his public image which was wonderful for getting votes was quite different from that of his private one when with his family.
And at this particular time it so happened that home relationships were at a lower ebb than usual because The Great Robert was encountering some political trouble as head of Mageia, from a clique led by a magician called Malvolio the Mighty, who in a quiet but efficient way was doing everything he could to oust Robert and take his place.
It was known that Malvolio had already talked four other members of the Council of Thirteen around to his side. Most of the remaining councilors were pretty well satisfied with their President, but it would only take two or three waverers for him to suddenly find himself out of a job of which he was very proud and Malvolio was doing his utmost to be disagreeable. Anything that Robert was for, he was against. He was always niggling and criticizing and finding fault. And of late, this had been getting more and more on the Chief Magician’s nerves.
Outwardly this seemed to have no effect upon The Great Robert, who was still as quick with his too jovial laugh, hand pumping and backslapping, but at home it only seemed to aggravate a situation which had already made Jane rather a lonely and unhappy child. For not only her father but her mother as well always gave preference to Peter her older brother, who was fifteen and who they prophesied would someday become the greatest ma
gician in the world.
They were always praising Peter: how brilliant, how clever, how talented and handsome he was, what charming and wonderful manners, what a magnificent future lay before him, and they did not hesitate to tell Jane that she was awkward, clumsy, stupid, dull and ugly as well.
She wasn’t really clumsy; she was actually quite a graceful child. Nor was she stupid. In fact she was far brighter than her brother, who was adept at making a five-tingal piece disappear and then producing it from behind someone’s ear, or the back of a neck, but not very good at sums or remembering what he was told. And Jane certainly wasn’t ugly.
But neither was Jane a tremendous beauty either. She was rather nice to look at in a quiet way, with her dark, chestnut-colored hair, large brown eyes, an attractively shaped nose and a mouth which would much have preferred the corners turned up as they were when she was happy than turned down when she wasn’t, which was more often the case.
However, if one is continually told one is awkward, shocking to look at and not very bright, one does tend to find oneself falling over things that aren’t there, giving silly answers or no answers at all when asked a question and not liking to pass mirrors or shop windows reflecting one’s image. And the attitude of her parents was beginning to have just such an effect upon Jane. Added to all this, she most desperately wanted to be a magician herself.
But who ever heard of a girl or a woman conjurer? It was only the boys who from earliest infancy were trained in palming objects, fanning cards and developing the muscles of their wrists and fingers so that they would move with lightning speed—faster than an eye could follow—and who inherited the tricks and routines of their fathers. All that girls were good for was to be assistants. Magic was for men.
“We’re nothing but servants,” is what Jane said to herself, “to fetch and carry and stand about looking simple, while the men get all the applause and take the bows.” Perhaps it was for this reason that Jane wasn’t even proving to be a good assistant-in-training and thus earned the scorn of her parents and the dislike and perpetual teasing of her brother Peter.
And so as it was, affairs with the children in the household of The Great Robert always seemed to be at sixes and sevens. For whenever the Chief Magician tried to teach his daughter to act as assistant to her brother, things seemed to go awry and since they insisted that she was blundering and heavy-handed, well then she was and would bring on the wrong piece of apparatus, or trip over a concealed wire, or get the giggles, spoiling the effect of Peter’s trick. Then he would scream and shout that she was doing it on purpose.
Often he would lose his temper and tweak her nose and she would be driven to retaliate by pulling his hair. Whereupon he would slap her, receive a kick in return and then there would be a tremendous uproar. Her father and mother would be furious and a punishment would follow. But somehow the punishment always seemed to fall upon Jane, sent to her room without supper, or no one speaking to her for a day, while Peter was let off lightly because of having been so provoked by that stupid bad-tempered girl.
There had been a quarrel that very morning and it so happened that the night before at a meeting of the Council, who were also to be the panel of Judges at the trials for the Guild, Malvolio had been particularly troublesome and sarcastic. The Great Robert had got out of bed on the wrong foot in a black mood and more than usually impatient with his daughter. While he, Mrs. Robert and their son Peter mingled with the gay holiday makers in the Town Square, before the last elimination of candidates, Jane was shut up in a back room that looked out at ground level upon a narrow, cobbled alley.
She was miserable and lonely but she was not feeling sorry for herself. That wasn’t Jane. She was lonely because there was nobody there, and unhappy because she was beginning to believe not only what her parents told her, but that she would never be a magician. Clumsy, stupid, ugly people certainly could not expect to go on the stage and be charming, handsome and clever.
Now that she was locked in a room all by herself, with no one watching her, she had taken out the little red rubber balls and half shell which she had secretly borrowed from Peter’s room. She began to practice the multiplying balls routine that she had watched him do in which first one appeared between the fingers of his outstretched hand, then a second, a third and a fourth, seemingly coming from nowhere. The trick, of course, was that the half shell looked like one of the balls but really wasn’t.
But she couldn’t make it work properly. Nothing seemed to go right that day and she kept dropping one or two which rolled under the chest or behind the sofa in a most uncooperative manner, until finally she just sat down in the middle of the floor and shed tears of exasperation. Not only was she awkward, ugly and all the other things they said about her, but she couldn’t even learn to do a simple bit of nimble fingerwork which her brother did almost like second nature.
The truth was that her spirit was near to being broken and she was very close to giving up, which wasn’t like Jane either.
Nor did she know that close by, in fact just around the corner and about to step into view of her window, was a stranger whose coming was to bring about the most extraordinary change in her life.
IV
ADAM FINDS AN ASSISTANT
“Excuse me,” said Adam and saw that her face was tear-stained and that there were two tiny pools on the floor on either side of her. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said, “I hadn’t noticed that you were crying, or I shouldn’t have disturbed you. Are you in trouble? Is there anything I can do?”
Jane was so surprised at the sight of the stranger framed in the window (she had not seen Mopsy yet, since he was out of sight below the sill) that she stopped weeping and reflected on what to reply. “Well, not really,” she said finally. “Except I’ve been locked in and made to stay at home all day because I’ve been naughty.”
“I see,” said Adam, “and were you?”
“I think so,” Jane replied, “I suppose I must have been, to make Daddy so cross. But it started when I was trying to help Peter—Peter’s my older brother—and he said I was only fit to assist a pig. And when I said that’s exactly what I was doing, he pinched me when nobody was looking. So of course I had to scratch him and then they were looking, and then . . .”
“Quite,” said Adam, and Jane had the curious sensation that although he really knew nothing, the odd-appearing young man at the window understood everything. He now glanced downwards and added, “What did you say, Mopsy?”
“Who are you speaking to?” Jane asked.
“To Mopsy, my talking dog. We’re lost and I was hoping you might be able to direct us to the Town Hall.”
Jane rose to her feet, tears and troubles all forgotten. “A talking dog! Where is he?” She came over to the window.
Mopsy said, “Pick me up, I want to see her too.”
“Oh,” cried Jane again, “he’s sweet! May I hold him?”
“Let her hold me,” said Mopsy. “She’s unhappy, I’ll give her a kiss.”
Adam reached across and handed Mopsy to Jane who took him and cuddled him to her. A pink tongue emerged through the curtain of hair and gave her a lick on the end of her nose.
“I like her, definitely,” said Mopsy. “That brother of hers must be a brute.”
“Oh, you darling!” said Jane. And then to the stranger, “When will he talk?”
“But he’s been talking all the time,” said Adam. “He said he thought you were unhappy; that he wanted to give you a kiss; and that he liked you most definitely,” skipping the part about the brother.
Jane looked at him doubtfully, “I didn’t hear him saying anything.”
“But I did.”
Jane held the dog away from her for a moment and then said, “Oh, Mopsy, I love you.”
Mopsy wriggled with joy, making happy noises as he waved his silken fan of a tail and replied, “I love you, too.”
“There now,” Adam said. “Didn’t you hear? He said he loves you too. Amazing! I’ve never known
him to take to someone so quickly before. You must be a very nice person.”
“Honestly?” said Jane and for an instant a tear glistened in her eye once more, for it was the first time she ever remembered anyone saying that about her. “Does he really think so?” And then she gave Mopsy another big hug and got a lick on her ear.
“She needs love,” Mopsy said and proceeded to give it to her.
Jane was enchanted. She had never had a pet of any kind—the few live animals such as canaries, pigeons and rabbits there were in Mageia were all used in tricks and trained to work. And here she was, being made a fuss over not only by a strange dog, but a talking one as well.
Now she took in the figure of the man standing in the street outside her window and even before she became aware of his unusual garb, she noted the extraordinary glitter of his eyes, his long, rather droll nose and wide mouth that could break into such a smile that it took up his entire face banishing his eyes into the crinkles at the corners. In his dusty, leather clothes, saucy, feathered cap perched on his copper-colored hair, with staff and knapsack, he resembled no one she had ever seen before. But he made her feel at once that she had known him for a long time.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name is Adam.”
“Adam what?”
“Nothing. Just Adam.”
“Are you a magician? Oh, you must be, or you wouldn’t be here. Have you come for the trials?”
“Yes.”
“But then you ought to be ‘Adam-the-Something,’ like the ‘Glorious,’ or ‘Grand,’ or even just ‘Frabjous?’ ”
“I’m afraid not,” said Adam.
“What sort of a magician are you?”
“Oh, the simplest kind, I suspect. Nothing spectacular, I assure you.”
The serious eyes that still shone with tears now searched him from head to foot. “You’re wearing very funny clothes,” she said.