The Circus of Dr Lao and Other Improbable Stories

by Ray Bradbury

  “Those red spots; it was rotting last week—it never really had a chance.”

  “You aren’t feeling sorry for it, are you?”

  “Well, in a way,” Hogan admitted. He kicked a cindered two-by-four apart with his foot and stood there frowning. “It was just a big crazy freak shooting up all alone in a world where it didn’t fit in, and where it could only blunder around and do a lot of damage and die. I wonder how smart it really was and whether it ever understood the fix it was in.”

  “Quit worrying about it!” Julia commanded.

  Hogan grinned down at her. “O. K.,” he said.

  “And kiss me,” said Julia.

  THE LIMITS OF WALTER HORTON by John Seymour Sharnik

  One Sunday morning, led to the piano by an unexplainable impulse, Walter Horton sat down and played the whole of the Chopin B minor sonata. The performance was quite flawless from the standpoint of both technique and interpretation. It was otherwise remarkable in that Horton had never played the piano before in his life.

  Until that moment, as a matter of fact, he wasn't aware that he was capable of playing any sort of musical instrument. Nor had he ever felt the slightest desire to do so. He listened to music only when waiting for the hourly news summary on the radio, and then with no more effect than if the program had been, say, a speech to some Indonesian patriotic group in their native tongue.

  The presence of the piano in the Horton household was his wife's responsibility: ever since their marriage, nine years before, she had talked about resuming the music lessons she had discontinued when she was sixteen. Walter himself was indifferent to his wife's unfulfilled intentions and to the instrument itself. He considered it more or less in the category of furniture, an article that filled a certain space in the living room of their apartment—about as adequately and not much more expensively than a cabinet and a couple of occasional chairs might have done.

  When Mrs. Horton discovered that the music was not, as she had assumed, coming from the radio, she was dumfounded. Her husband's explanation of the performance was hardly plausible—if it was an explanation at all.

  "I don't know, dear," he said. "I just woke up this morning with a kind of hankering to play the thing. I came in and started to run my hands over the whatchamacallit—"

  "The keyboard," she supplied, patiently.

  He nodded. “The keyboard. And . . . well. . . .” He shrugged.

  Mrs. Horton turned and went back to fixing breakfast. If her husband had known how to play the piano all these years, or if he had learned quite recently, why had he made such a point of secrecy? It occurred to her that he might have been nurturing, through the years of their marriage, some inarticulate and peculiarly male resentment of her own musical interests, modest as they were. Now, perhaps, she was being made the victim of a grim attrition, such as quiet and self-contained men are sometimes given to. She felt a twinge of guilt through the quavers of uncertainty.

  Craftily, yet sympathetically, she asked, as she set down her husband’s orange juice, “What else can you play, dear?”

  Horton looked up at her with an expression of surprise. Still absorbed as he was in the phenomenon that had just taken place, the question hadn’t even occurred to him. The truth was that he didn’t even know what he had played—neither that the music was Chopin’s nor, much less, that it was a particular sonata keyed in B minor.

  When he tried to explain this, his wife turned, tight-lipped with bafflement, and left the room. Horton lazily left the table, returned to the piano, and amused himself the rest of the morning with the Mozart Sonata in C, the Fireworks prelude of Debussy and some Liszt waltzes.

  Although the music itself meant little to him, he was quite charmed with his suddenly acquired talent, and the next day he postponed going to his office until he had run through two or three Chopin etudes and a Brahms capriccio. The day after that he stayed home from the office altogether and spent the entire morning and much of the afternoon at the piano. He was almost reluctant to leave it at all, for fear that by the time he returned, his strangely bestowed gift would have been lost.

  But there was no apparent diminution of his powers. If anything, he seemed to play more and more prolifically. Each phrase was perfectly formed at his touch. He never repeated himself; in fact, he seemed to be quite incapable of doing so. The music passed through him as if on some endless recording tape. Once he had played any composition, it was lost to time, his part in it having been achieved.

  One day, after a few weeks, Mrs. Horton came home in midafternoon from a shopping trip to find him at the piano. It had become almost the only place she ever saw him. Leaving her packages on the bench in the foyer, she went over and gave him a wifely kiss on the forehead, suppressing her anxiety at finding him home so early. He glanced up at her with an abstracted smile.

  Hanging up her coat, her eyes lingering sadly on her husband’s spare, square-shouldered form, she noticed how much of a studious, preoccupied cast had overtaken his features. She could almost have believed that she had been living with a stranger—a man bearing an amazing superficial resemblance to her husband but another person beneath the sharply drawn lines of his face and behind the familiar gray eyes.

  She straightened herself and said in a tone as briskly matter-of-fact as she could summon, “It’s nice to see you home so early, dear.”

  “Hm?” Horton’s voice drifted dreamily through the measured tones of a Bach sonata.

  “I said you’re home early.” She couldn’t seem to control the waver in her throat. “An easy day at the office?”

  “Oh. Yes.” His fingers rested quietly on the last chord. He straightened up, then leaned back on the piano bench. “I’m through with it. I’m selling out.”

  Mrs. Horton felt the ground shift dangerously beneath her feet. His business had come to represent what little was left of normality, of contact with the past, in their life, and she felt desperately that it must be defended. She began gently, then more and more excitedly, to try to dissuade him.

  “But,” he answered blandly, “it isn’t as if I were giving us up to poverty. We have no debts, we’ve got a bit in the bank, and. . . . Anyway, you always used to say you hoped some day I’d be able to shake free of the office and retire—”

  “Retire, yes,” she interrupted bitterly. “But at your age it’s . . . why, it’s almost indecent. And to give yourself up to such —such whimsical nonsense as this!”

  “I really don’t see what difference it makes,” said Horton. “After all, most men find some other interest when they leave their business. Fishing, or stamp collecting—something of the sort.”

  Mrs. Horton realized helplessly that her argument was futile. The sounds of the piano, echoing magnificently through the house—now in the rich, dramatic periods of Beethoven, now in the delicate traceries of Couperin or Lully—became more and more infuriating, seemed to fill an ever-widening distance between her and her husband.

  Since Horton had been one of the most promient young members of the town’s business community, his retirement evoked more than a little interest. It was understood that he had decided to devote himself to music. This came to the attention of the music critic of the local paper—a man named Farley Gresham.

  Gresham was a grave, solitary man who lived restlessly with the knowledge of his own failure. As a would-be composer, he had never succeeded in persuading any musician or conductor that his work was worth a public hearing. The job he’d settled for as a music critic neither satisfied his ambitions por impressed his neighbors. Consequently, he was always somewhat on the defensive in the community and always on the watch for a possible ally.

  Gresham paid a call on Horton one evening, heard what he later referred to as “an absolutely unsurpassed rendering of the Appassionata,” and was struck with the inescapable fact that he had discovered a prodigy—one of rather advanced age, as the species goes, but unmistakably a prodigy.

  “My dear man,” Gresham said, almost tearful with gratitu
de for the opportunity to patronize, “my dear man, such a talent mustn’t be kept concealed. You’ve got to give a recital.”

  Horton was startled. He began to protest. “Really, I’m not interested—”

  “You owe it to the audience,” Gresham insisted. “You owe it to music.” He made a gesture of finality. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

  Although he was genuinely taken aback and even a little awe-struck at first by the idea of performing in public, Horton could see no reason, after all, for opposing the project. Then he began to think of the audience—his neighbors, the friends for whom he was able to spare less and less attention. The idea of appearing among them in a new and special guise began to amuse him and finally it excited him. He asked his wife what she thought of the idea, but didn’t even hear her weak objections. He stood looking across the music rack, over the top of the piano, into the mirror, picturing himself in white tie and stiff shirt on the auditorium stage, and didn’t even notice the trail of muffled tears that his wife left on her way to the bedroom.

  The selection of a program, of course, presented something of a difficulty, since Horton didn’t know the names of compositions or their composers, nor was he able to predict beforehand what he might play at any given time. He didn’t want to try to explain this to Gresham because he knew it would seem ridiculous, if not utterly insane, so he was merely evasive. Gresham shrugged off Horton’s reluctance to commit himself as evidence of temperament that merely proved the presence of the artist in Horton. At any rate, he didn’t want to press his protege for fear of losing him, so he arranged the recital without any announcement of the program.

  The performance attracted a sizable crowd, most of whom came out of neighborly pride, interest, and curiosity. But among them also were a few well placed city critics and reputable musicians whom Gresham, through his connections in the field, had persuaded to attend. They were, of course, overwhelmed by the quality of Horton’s performance and the taste with which his program of Clementi, Chopin, Bartok, and Szymanowski had been “selected.” “A discreet combination of scholarship and catholicity,” one of the critics remarked in his column the next morning, “performed with faultless judgment and incredible technique.”

  With this encouragement, Gresham arranged a recital in New York. It proved equally successful. The reviews made considerable point of Horton’s unique unprofessional background, and this, along with the unanimously laudatory tone of the reviews, earned him a good deal of publicity. The result was a flood of offers for further engagements.

  Within a few months, it became obvious that the only way to satisfy the demands of Horton’s public was to send him on a nationwide tour. Gresham took care of the arrangements, and the day the last of the signed contracts arrived in the mail, he walked into the office of his managing editor and, with an air of exhilaration slightly fortified by a self-congratulatory drink, quit his job on the paper. His association with Horton had brought him closer to musical glory than his reviews of orchestra road concerts and performances by the students of the local music school ever had. It also promised to bring him more money than he’d made out of his newspaper job and—who could tell?—perhaps the inspiration, and later the leisure, for another, mature attempt to establish a place for himself in the world of music as a composer.

  So, with Gresham as his manager and with Mrs. Horton trailing helplessly but devotedly in his wake, Horton undertook a series of recitals whose uniform brilliance reduced Rubinstein, Horowitz, Arrau, and Gieseking to second rank among modern keyboard musicians. Horton’s continued reluctance to announce his programs beforehand aroused some comment at first but, as with Gresham, it was dismissed —if not respected—as an artistic whim.

  Attempts were made by the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony to engage Horton as a guest soloist, but of course he was obliged to reject them in view of the fact that he couldn’t commit himself to any particular piece of music and it was unlikely that what he played would coincide with what the orchestra was playing. This elusiveness made Horton’s services even more attractive. His insistence on playing only; works written for the solo instrument even added to his” prestige as an artist of intense conviction and integrity.

  Mrs. Horton, by now feeling hopelessly out of contact with her husband, had long since given up her struggle to restore him —and their marriage—to the normality of his premusical life. But once, quite by accident, she was given a chance to attack this monstrous change with a new weapon. She was being interviewed, between concert tours, by a woman reporter on her role as the wife of an internationally famous artist.

  “I suppose,” said the reporter sympathetically, “you feel rewarded for the years of struggle and pain you and your husband must have suffered while he was preparing for his career?”

  “Struggle?” Mrs. Horton began to laugh hollowly, then broke off with a gasp. In a moment, she found herself telling for the first time Horton’s version of how he had learned to play the piano.

  The reporter, assuming that Mrs. Horton was either a wanderer in some mental fourth dimension or was elaborately trying to ridicule her, naturally checked the story with Gresham before doing anything so foolish as putting it on paper,

  Gresham, when she broke in on him with her question, was in the midst of a kind of transformation of his own. He had had a month of freedom since Horton’s last tour, and in this time he had begun—tentatively, doubtfully—to resume the work he had promised himself he would one day return to. He had spent the whole month at a composition of his own— a sonata based on a simple but strangely magnetic theme that had attached itself to his mind years before but that he had been fearful of trying to capture and reconstruct on paper. But now it flowed from his pen exactly as he had imagined it all those years.

  Gresham tossed aside the sheaf of staff paper he was writing on and gave the reporter a generous smile. He listened to her story and, naturally, laughed it off extravagantly. “I’ve heard Mrs. Horton tell that gag in the company of some of the country’s greatest artists,” he said, “and you know, my dear, she almost had them believing it. Why, Graustein himself—the magnificent Graustein—sat down on the floor and wept because he’d been practicing nine hours a day since he was knee-high to a cello and hadn’t acquired half the technique that—to hear Mrs. Horton tell it—Horton had acquired overnight. Of course, Mrs. Horton was horrified to think Graustein believed her—nearly died of shame.” He shook his head admiringly. “Incredible sense of humor that woman has.”

  The story, of course, never appeared in the papers. It did not fail to impress Gresham, however. For some time, he’d been taking notice of the amazing variety of Horton’s programs. He’d noticed also that Horton’s refusal to repeat a composition applied not only to his public performances but even to the most casual frittering away of time at the piano in his own living room.

  Thinking back over the period of their association, Gresham could not recall having heard Horton play any single composition, nor even so much as a single passage, more than once. Furthermore, he had been struck by a rather odd development in the character of Horton’s recent programs. More and more they tended toward the obscure and pedantic —the lesser known compositions of the masters and the works of half-forgotten composers. Just recently, Horton had performed a suite that was unfamiliar even to the avant-garde among the reviewers, and a number of them had assumed that it was an original work. Horton, characteristically, had refused either to confirm or deny that he had written the suite—it was widely known and accepted that Horton never deigned to discuss what he had played any more than he’d announce what he was going to play—so the assumption had gone unchallenged. To Gresham the thing had sounded like something by Scriabin. That is, he would have said Scriabin, except that to his knowledge Scriabin had never written any such work. Gresham decided to do a little research.

  It took him almost a month to establish that the suite was indeed a work of Scriabin. He traced it to a manuscript in a university mu
sic-library collection, but he was puzzled by the curator’s insistence that the composition had never been published, nor even previously performed.

  Gresham began to wonder seriously about Mrs. Horton’s story. Not that the events she’d described to the reporter were the important thing. Even if one accepted Horton’s rare talent as the purest sort of inspiration, that didn’t explain what was happening. It occurred to Gresham that perhaps he’d been witnessing some phenomenon even more fantastic—a phenomenon that even Horton himself wasn’t fully aware of.

  Was it possible, Gresham asked himself, that all of the best of music—the greatest works of the whole historical field of musical creation—was being transmitted through Horton, each single work achieving through him its perfect, its ultimate, form? If that were true, then through what accident or what cruel irony had he been selected as its pure instrument? And what were the limits of this process? Time? History itself? Indeed, were there limits at all? Gresham found himself jealous, appalled, shaken with awe and apprehension.

  One evening, several months after these questions had first occurred to him, Gresham was seated at the small piano in the study of Horton’s New York apartment, snatching a few moment’s work at his own manuscript while waiting to see Horton about some details of his next performance. He felt a sense of exhilaration, for he was nearing the end of the sonata now and he had as yet found no reason to give it up. He almost dared to hope it might be worth trying to persuade some young pianist to perform it at one of those small downtown recitals sponsored by groups of experimental-minded amateurs of the arts.

  At the large piano in the living room, while Mrs. Horton sat trying to absorb herself in a detective novel, Horton was playing the final movement of one of Prokofiev’s recent works. There was a pause as the final, perfectly struck chords of the allegretto died away, and then Horton began to play something else. As the music drifted in through the door of the study, Gresham became aware that the composition was one which he himself had listened to on a television concert only the night before. It was a fantasia by a young California composer named Shorrer. The puzzling thing about it was that it had been introduced on the television show as the first performance of a new work.