by Paul Gallico
There were two more persons in the gathering who were feeling most uncomfortable, worried and ill at ease as the result of Adam’s performance. One was Fussmer. Try as he would, he could find no natural or mechanical means either for the manner in which his false teeth had been stripped from inside his mouth to land in Adam’s cap, some ten feet away.
And the other, of course, was Ninian who, although he was still filled with gratitude to Adam, wasn’t all that happy over the way in which he had passed his test.
For he was already terrified at the prospect of what would happen to him when called upon to perform the following night. He certainly would not be able to repeat the trick of bird cage into goldfish bowl and he was quite well aware that he had not done it by himself. But if he had not done it, then it must have been Adam. And if it was Adam—how? And what could it all mean?
His discomfort was not lessened when suddenly The Great Robert who had never even deigned to notice him in the past, came over, threw an arm about his shoulder and said jovially, “And I’m sure we’d like to have our old friend join us at dinner tonight, where we can all discuss in peace and quiet some of the wonderful routines we’ve seen today. Now, now, Ninian, you mustn’t say no. My wife will be delighted to have you. Plenty of room—eight o’clock. Come as you are.”
X
FEAR COMES TO MAGEIA
“Faugh! I don’t like this place one bit,” Mopsy was saying. “I wish we were out of it. This house gives me the willies. And as for the conjurers, I haven’t seen a real good trick since we’ve come here. Paper flowers, cards, making coins disappear up their sleeves, billiard balls, colored handkerchiefs and pulling rabbits out of silk hats! What kind of magic do you call that? And what a silly place to keep rabbits.”
“Mopsy, you mustn’t talk like that,” Adam admonished. “These are some of the greatest magicians on earth and they are loved and admired all over the world, especially by children.”
“Huh,” said Mopsy, quite unabashed. “If I were a child, I’d be scared to death by creeps like Malvolio and Mephisto. Jane said that oily fellow, Hamid what’s-his-name, gave her the shivers.”
“Oh now, Mopsy, come on, be sensible,” Adam said. “They’re not really like that. It’s just part of their act, to seem more mysterious and excite people. For instance, those two magicians, one dressed up as a Chinaman and the other as an Indian, it’s all showmanship.”
This conversation took place in the bathroom which had been assigned to Adam and which was really quite extraordinary. It had, among other conveniences, an all-purpose chair with a whole panel of push buttons from which to choose, listing, “HANDS. FACE. TEETH. BRUSH AND COMB. SHAVE. LOTION. POWDER. HAIR TONIC. MANICURE. MASSAGE,” etc.
While The Great Robert’s residence was in the old-fashioned style, with gables, timbers and leaded windows outside, it was a real magician’s house within, where everything worked by electricity. Whatever one needed, practically, all one had to do was turn a knob and there it was.
“Look here,” Adam said, “isn’t this marvelous? I call this real magic.” He pushed half a dozen or so buttons, pulled a lever and sat back.
Immediately a nailbrush vigorously chased the travel grime from beneath his fingernails; a whirling brush polished his teeth; a razor shaved him; bottles poured lotion onto his face and tonic onto his red hair; a comb and brush arranged the latter neatly; an arm came up and patted powder onto his face and a vibrator gave his neck and shoulders a massage.
Previously the Chief Magician had shown Adam and Mopsy about the house, displaying with great pride its many mechanical, magical marvels. For instance, in the library it was not necessary to take down any volume from a shelf. One merely dialed its number, moved an indicator to chapter and page, and the book would begin to read itself out loud.
When one smiled at a solemn portrait hanging on the wall, it would smile back. “An example of one of my earlier illusions,” The Great Robert had commented. “I’ll show you how it works later, if you’re interested.” He had taken infinite pains to explain everything to Adam, which was all a part of his plan to get hold of the stranger’s secret.
“Our magic kitchen is wired for sound,” he explained. “In addition to the usual peelers, scrapers and slicers you see there, nothing needs to be touched by hand. I’ll get you a report from the oven.”
He pressed a small switch at the side, whereupon a voice announced, “Everything going fine in here; roast browning evenly; ought to be done in about an hour.”
“You’ll sleep well in our magic bed,” Robert had said, demonstrating the bedroom. “Some little inventions of my own. Turn this and that hand comes down from the ceiling and rubs your back until you get drowsy. This one activates the pillow-puncher, which punches up and turns your pillows to the cool side while you sleep. Here’s your blanket-returner, when it slips off during the night, and your sheet straightener, if you’re one of those tossers and turners who get the bottom one full of wrinkles. Your alarm is vocal, of course. I’ll set it for you. It says, ‘Sorry, time to get up’ and you have four variations on the dial: whisper, murmur, firm tone, or an irritable shout.”
During all this Mopsy had trotted along behind muttering to himself, sniffing suspiciously at everything and giving little yelps of alarm when things suddenly jumped out from walls or cabinets, or drinks popped up mysteriously out of the arms of drawing-room chairs.
Having had a bath, changed his clothes and submitted to the ministrations of the bathroom chair, Adam was now rested, fresh, tidy and ready for dinner later. He said to Mopsy, “How about you? A little clean up wouldn’t hurt you, either.”
“What, me get up into that thing?” Mopsy replied. “Thank you for nothing! I wouldn’t mind you running a comb through me and maybe giving my face a bit of a wash, but all this funny business upsets me. I like a house to behave like a house and not like a midway. I wish we were staying at a hotel.”
“Well, we’re not,” Adam said, “and I’ll thank you to be more polite and mind your manners, particularly at dinner. It’s a great honor to have been asked to stay by the Chief Magician, Mayor and Head of the Guild of Master Magicians.”
“That old fraud!” Mopsy replied. “Honestly, Adam, can’t you see what he’s up to, taking us all over his house and explaining everything?”
“It seemed to me most kind and hospitable.”
“Ha-ha!” scoffed Mopsy. “Kind and hospitable! He’s just getting ready to ask you to tell him the secret of your tricks in return.”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?” Adam demanded. “If he asks me, I shall.”
“Adam, please don’t.” The dog had become suddenly serious and getting up on his hind legs he placed a paw on his master’s knee. Some of the hair had fallen away from his face to show his eyes filled with love and concern.
“But Mopsy, old fellow, what’s wrong? Why not?” Adam said.
“I don’t know,” Mopsy replied, “but there’s something funny going on somewhere. I can’t just say what it is, but sometimes dogs often feel things that people don’t—in their whiskers, or down at the ends of their spines, where their tails begin. I wish now you hadn’t done that egg trick. That’s when the trouble started.”
“But there isn’t any trouble, Mopsy, everything is going beautifully.”
“Then why have I got that funny sensation?”
“Mopsy,” sighed Adam, “you’re incorrigible. You simply mustn’t be so suspicious of everything and everyone.” Sometimes he wondered whether he had been wise to teach Mopsy to talk. Other people with dogs sometimes never understood what their animals were feeling or thinking except when they were hungry, or wanted to go out or come in. But Mopsy, having learned to express himself, did not hesitate to do so. Hence, he was often a bit of a problem. “Come on,” said Adam aloud, “cheer up. We’ll go for a little walk together before dinner and get some air.”
Nevertheless, that sensitive spot at the base of Mopsy’s spine which at times makes a dog
’s tail wig-wag frantically with joy and at others causes it to be drawn flat under his stomach as he cowers nervously under the bed knew something.
For at that moment, Malvolio the Mighty was passionately addressing a secret meeting of Magicians in the basement of the Town Hall in a private room next to the Mageian Historical Museum of Magic, which was also located there.
“Do you know what it would mean to you all,” he was saying, “if ever a real magician were to appear? One who could do better tricks with a wave of his hand than we have been able to accomplish in a lifetime of practice and scientific invention?”
There was no reply. They all sat silently staring before them. For the first time someone had given voice to that fleeting, yet nagging thought, passing through the minds of those who had watched the stranger with the dog that talked who claimed he had come from over the Mountains of Straen unscramble an egg and put it back together again.
In addition to Malvolio’s sycophants and cronies such as Mephisto, Zerbo and Abdul Hamid, not to mention Fussmer the Town Clerk, who was playing both sides until he found out which one was likely to win, there were some dozen magicians at the meeting who had been present at the elimination tests either as Judges or guests.
What Malvolio was suggesting seemed ridiculous to the majority who were sensible men and well-disposed, and who were certain that the only magic there had ever been on earth was their kind: tricks of physical skill or mechanical apparatus, carefully prepared in advance to delude or entertain people. And yet—
If one so much as even whispered those two words, “and yet” (and Malvolio had been shouting them practically for the last half hour), the vistas they could open up in the mind in an instant were terrifying. Who would ever want to see theater magic again, if a day dawned when a man might really make a lady or, for that matter, an elephant disappear on the stage before the eyes of everyone, without complicated machinery—mirrors, trap doors, or hordes of assistants?”
The mind leaped to the next step; starvation for themselves and their families at the worst; at the least, their life’s work gone down the drain.
“I tell you The Great Robert is a fool!” Malvolio was now saying. “He takes everything that old dodderer Professor Alexander says for gospel truth. All he’s thinking about is himself and discovering how the egg trick is done, so that he can use it. That’s why he’s entertaining him in his house. He’s not concerned with all of you, as I am, and thinking of the good of Mageia.”
Somehow just the mention of old Professor Alexander’s name had a chastening effect upon a number of those present and helped to drive away the visions that had opened up before them.
“Oh, come on, Malvolio,” interrupted Dante the Dazzling. “You haven’t got an iota of proof. You’re as bad as some of those clods in the audience who, after a good show, are convinced we have supernatural powers and come up and want us to put them in touch with their dead grannies.”
Not one wit abashed, Malvolio flashed back. “What if I could get you proof?” They were silent again.
“Aha,” sneered Malvolio, “that stopped you, didn’t it? And I know what you’re thinking—just like I am.” Here he passed his fingertip across his throat in an unmistakable gesture which horrified a number of them. For one fleeting moment that is what many had been thinking before. Of course, they immediately rejected it as impossible and uncivilized. If everyone went about cutting the throats, or otherwise getting rid of people who got in one’s way, or imperiled one’s livelihood, the world would hardly be a fit place in which to live.
“You, Fussmer,” Malvolio snapped, “how did you let that fellow in? I’ve had a look at his application form. You could have disqualified him on half a dozen counts.”
Fussmer suddenly turned first red and then pale. “That’s my business,” he protested. “I prefer not to say.”
“Oh, is that so?” Malvolio threatened. “Well, you’d better, if you know what’s good for you. I haven’t called this meeting for fun. There’s an election coming up next month and if I’ve anything to do with it, you’ll find yourself out of a job.”
There wasn’t much backbone in all Fussmer s fat. “Well,” he quavered, “h-he m-made me. He stole my teeth out of my mouth.”
“How? Where? Who?”
The questions were thundered at him by the entire gathering of Magicians. The Town Clerk, now once more beet red in the face, confessed, “Well, you see, they’re not real.” And then he told the whole story of what had happened at Adam’s interview.
“Let’s have a look at them,” Mephisto said.
“Do I have to?” Fussmer asked, miserably.
“Come on, give!” ordered Malvolio.
Shamefacedly, the fat little Clerk removed his uppers and lowers.
“And you didn’t feel anything?” asked Zerbo.
“Foff a fing.”
“Okay, put ’em back,” Malvolio directed and then, challenging the group, he asked, “Well, can any of you do that?”
“What, steal the false teeth out of a man’s mouth without him knowing it?” said Mephisto. “Are you crazy? That’s magic.”
That word spoken in that way in this group seemed to fall to the floor with an iron clangor, as though someone had dropped a poker.
“Well,” said Malvolio, “what more proof do you want?”
Boldini the Brilliant stood up and said, “Oh, come on, old boy, you’ve only got Fussmer’s word for it and everybody knows he’s the easiest gull in Mageia.”
Fussmer began to protest, but Saladin the Stupendous chimed in, “That’s right, if I wanted an easy mark for a trick, I’d pick Fussmer. The fellow probably gave him a good dose of misdirection and then flimflammed his choppers right out of his head. I think I could do it myself.”
Boldini said, “That’s so. You’ll have to put up something better than that, Malvolio.”
It was now the turn of the squint-eyed, little magician to grow white with anger, as he saw slipping away his scheme to get control of Mageia and oust The Great Robert by sacrificing Adam. It was not enough to have schemers, fools and ready stooges such as Abdul Hamid, Mephisto and Zerbo on his side; he must win over the more sensible and intelligent members of the community as well. He racked his brains and finally snarled venomously, “You think so, do you? Very well then, what about Ninian?”
“Well, what about poor old Ninian?” queried Wang Fu. “He finally got it made. What that’s go to do with it?”
“I say,” interjected Mephisto, “Malvolio’s right. Did you ever know Ninian to do anything successful in his life?”
“I vas vatching heem,” said Hamid. “Ninian couldn’t do zot trick in hundred million years. And I tell you something else; no vun could.”
Now this time the voice of reason fell silent. For everyone in the room experienced in magic knew that this was true. There were only certain things in their craft that could be done, and producing an active goldfish bowl in full view of the audience, without recourse to a cloak or a fêked table, was not one of them.
Malvolio was quick to press his advantage. “There you are,” he said, “exactly what I meant.”
“But only Ninian would know how he did it,” said Frascati the Fantastic, himself a veteran of astonishing manifestations and then added, in a lower voice, “or whether he did it.”
Malvolio pounced on that one too. “Precisely!” he cried. “Ninian is the key. If I can get him here and sweat the truth out of him, will you believe me?”
“I’m afraid we should have to,” announced the magician called Rajah Punjab, gravely, and no one else denied him.
Malvolio tried to keep the flush of triumph from his expression, for he felt that he was closer to success. A ruthless man, he had no hesitation about stepping into the shoes of The Great Robert over the corpse of Adam the Simple and, in fact, this was exactly what he intended to do.
“Very well, then,” he said, “I move we adjourn now. We’ll meet again at noon tomorrow and I’ll send a note to
Ninian to attend. Nothing to frighten him—just routine. And when we get him here—well, leave it to me. And we don’t want The Great Robert to know. Mum’s the word until tomorrow.”
But to his henchmen, Zerbo, Mephisto, Hamid and Fussmer—the last now willy-nilly committed to him—he gave different instructions.
And this was how the whispering campaign was started in Mageia. For by now there was hardly anyone in the town who had not heard from those present at the tests of the wonderful and inexplicable trick that the strange conjurer had performed. Already there was a severe shortage of eggs in the market and grocers’, as magicians bought up the supplies, cracking one after another, studying and wrestling with the problem of how it might be done.
As failure after failure attended them, they were all the more receptive to the insidious rumor that somehow was circulating with the speed of lightning: “It wasn’t a trick at all. Malvolio says he must be a real magician. It’s the only explanation. Keep your eyes open and don’t tell anyone,” which, of course, was just as good as saying, “And pass the word along.”
XI
MOPSY BREAKS UP A DINNER PARTY
If Ninian, now seated uneasily at the somewhat stilted dinner party at The Great Robert’s house that evening, had known what had transpired that afternoon in the basement of the Town Hall and the plot that was being hatched against him, he would have been even more nervous and fidgety than he was.
The Great Robert was very much his public self; bluff, jovial, the expansive host. His son Peter had a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary expression on his countenance, and Mrs. Robert was barely polite, because she had taken a dislike to the stranger and, with a woman’s intuition, was even inclined to be a little afraid of him. Besides, she had not been consulted by her husband about having a guest in the house and this always made her cross. And she was anti-dog as well. She was not an unattractive person, except for her eyes being slightly too close together and her mouth somewhat too small for generosity. She took her position as the wife of the Chief Magician very seriously.