Magic Words
Page 21
Maskelyne’s smile vanished. “This would seem to be common sense, sir. But with all due respect, I fail to see why my financial condition should interest you.”
Compars shrugged. “Because, my dear Masklelyne, the sad truth is that you lack the capital to make all this work. In fact, my sources inform me that without a substantial infusion of money, you will likely be facing bankruptcy within a matter of weeks.”
Maskelyne’s eyes opened wide.
“You know, my boy, it is a fine thing to have money; it was money that motivated the source of my information to supply it to me. It was money that helped verify that information; and today, if you are as clever as you appear to be, it is money that will be the source of your salvation.”
The younger man’s face fell. “Professor Herrmann, I still do not understand how you can know this or why you believe it to be any of your business.”
Compars smiled soothingly. “Relax, my friend. I understand you are embarrassed that I have uncovered your unhappy state. But please believe me when I say that it is no disgrace. At one time or another, all we poor players have been where you are. I have come here today with a proposition that will not only allow you to finance this marvelous invention, but will catapult you before the kinds of audiences you truly deserve and that deserve to see you.”
“Really, Professor, this is too much.”
“Come, come. Let us not play about-the-pea-patch. Just as I know about your ingenious toilet, I am also aware of the other invention you are working on here. And if I am not mistaken, it should be located behind that curtain.”
Compars pointed to a shimmering purple cloth loosely stretched between two metal stanchions.
Maskelyne’s hands began to quiver in rage.
“So is this what the Great Herrmann has been reduced to? Buying off younger, more creative men so that he may claim the fruits of their labor as his own? Taking advantage of their poverty so that he may increase his fame at the expense of the advancement of our art? Sir, I am sick at heart.”
“You misunderstand me,” Compars said calmly. “Yes, as you say, I am here to ‘buy off’ your invention; but only for a prescribed time and not to be premiered in my act or any other. In fact, if a bargain can be reached, I will ask you to keep it here in your shop, even perfect it further. So long as it does not see the light of day.”
“And suppose, Professor, there is nothing behind that curtain but dust and cobwebs?”
“Let’s see, shall we?”
Before Maskelyne could stop him, Compars pulled the silk from the object. As the dust settled, he saw what he expected to see: a large trunk standing on a black plinth surrounded by machinery and tools. He turned to the younger man and grinned.
“I understand that you have gotten the substitution time down to forty seconds.”
“Thirty,” Maskelyne said, sounding defeated.
“Most excellent,” Compars said. “At any rate, let us not waste more time—I have resources, you need them. I will buy the world rights to your substitution trunk, as I believe it is called. You may perfect it until the exchange of magician and assistant is a matter of two seconds, if you are able. You merely agree not to show it to the public for a period of ten years or the unlikely death of my brother.”
“Your brother?”
“Yes. The more famous little Alex becomes, the more increasingly ungrateful. He has already attempted to change the elements of the infallible act I gave to him out of filial love and generosity. He adds pigeons! He enlarges boxes! He shamelessly rewrites a stage patter that captivated the world for twenty-five years. There are even critics who have had the temerity to suggest that he, an imitator, may be the greater of us two.”
Compars tripped a hidden handle on the back of the trunk; its back panel opened noiselessly in less time than it took to register his surprise.
“He has long told me that a substitution trunk is possible. I have told him it is not possible. The public appearance of your apparatus would prove me wrong—and I cannot have that.”
“And if I refuse?”
“That is your right, but first hear my terms. I will pay you ten thousand pounds sterling. I have this in notes, but should you prefer it in gold, that can be arranged. I will also pay an additional one thousand pounds toward the development of your penny-commode. Then, tomorrow, I shall visit the offices of Mr. Henry Irving, actor-manager. A few words from me, and you will soon be engaged at the Lyceum, a far higher class of house than the Marylebone, I’m sure you will agree. My personal endorsement will decorate every posting, handbill, and newspaper broadside. ‘Amazing,’ they will shout, ‘stupendous!’ From there, how well you succeed is up to you. But even if all your rabbits escape and every dove dies, you will be a very rich man.”
Compars reached for the Gladstone bag and unlocked it. It was filled to the top with Bank of England currency.
“Eleven thousand quid. Right here, right now.”
Maskelyne put his hand to his forehead. “All this. You would do all this simply to prove your brother wrong? To prove him wrong even if he is right?”
Compars’s face darkened. His voice grew louder.
“This is about far more than mere pride, my dear Maskelyne. It is about the continuation of a tradition. After all, there may be two men called the Great Herrmann, but I believe posterity can tolerate only one legacy.”
Compars closed the bag. “Think it over, dear boy. I am stopping at Durant’s Hotel. I will be leaving England the day after tomorrow. I do hope that by then, we can reach an accommodation.”
He smiled and bowed from the waist. Picking up the bag, he once again accompanied the starved boy through the fetid corridor and into the street.
Compars whistled for a cab. As he felt the heaviness of the bag, he mused that only the pride of the young could outweigh eleven thousand pounds sterling. A hansom stopped at the top of the street.
Before he could walk toward it, he heard footsteps behind him.
The Great Herrmann turned around to see John Nevil Maskelyne halfway up the alley, his right hand waving in the air.
25
THOMAS HENRY TIBBLES WAS SEETHING AS HE ENTERED THE stockade at Fort Omaha. Over the course of a lifetime, he had almost become used to anger as a natural state, the lot of a man who had battled to bring justice to an unjust world and frequently lost.
That battle had begun in 1856 in “Bleeding Kansas.” By the age of fifteen, Tibbles was a guerrilla in the brigade of Jim Lane of Indiana, an abolitionist second in his zeal only to John Brown himself. Tibbles had been proud to wear the scarlet gaiters over his boots and to be christened one of Lane’s “redlegs,” a name that pro-slavery “border ruffians” soon learned to dread. The redlegs were experts in ambush, defeating their enemies before they could draw a single weapon. They stood their opponents before firing squads or hanged them from trees. By the time two years had passed, Tibbles had killed more men before the Civil War than many would during it. “As Christ is my witness,” he would say, “no bastard is going to kidnap a black man to Kansas and live to see him work.”
Now as he walked through the prison corridor, he thought of the work yet to do. The negro had been saved, yes; but if the Army and the politicians and the Sioux could conspire to imprison a great Indian for his suffering, no American of any color was safe in his home, on his farm, or even in his church.
The turnkey inserted a long skeleton into the lock. “Two gentlemen to see you, chief,” he said, as if the occupant could understand a word.
The door swung wide to admit the visitors. Standing Bear rose and embraced Julius Meyer.
“Father,” Julius said, “I hope the blue coats are treating you well.”
“As well as one man may treat another he has deprived of sun and sky.”
Julius nodded and dropped a large canvas sack to the floor. “I have brought you food and medicine, Father. You must be strong when you face the judge. In this bag are fresh fruits and buffalo jerky. There is good br
ead baked by Mrs. Jo Ann McGreevy and provided by my uncle, Mr. Eli Gershonson, with his compliments.”
Standing Bear looked into the bag but touched none of the items inside. “Please return those compliments to the fine lady and your good and generous uncle. Tell them Standing Bear will repay the debt.”
Julius smiled and gestured toward his companion. “Allow me to introduce Mr. Thomas Henry Tibbles. He is the man who has been making the good newspaper writing that I have read to you in the past few days.”
Tibbles bowed as if before the king of France. Standing Bear took the white man’s hands in his own as Julius translated.
“You have the thanks of Standing Bear and all the Ponca,” the chief said. “There is iron in the words you write.”
Tibbles looked into the weathered face; could this really be the great chief of the Ponca? He looked more like one of the Indian beggars he saw outside the saloons. He was thin and shriveled, his speech often interrupted by a wet, hacking cough. His clothing was little more than a patchwork of buffalo leather held together with only enough rawhide to keep it from falling off his back. The necklace of bear claws, once the chief’s trademark, was like a mouth with missing teeth.
“Standing Bear honors me with this audience. The Speaker has told me much of your travail. As editor of the Daily Herald, I am outraged that such a personage as yourself should be treated like a common criminal. Owing to the recent stories, many of our readers have begun to write the territorial governor and their representatives on your behalf. I believe this interview will go a long way toward building support for your cause.”
Standing Bear bade his visitors sit. Tibbles reached into his breast pocket and retrieved a pencil and a leather-bound notebook.
“Now, sir, if you will simply tell what happened.”
Standing Bear took his pipe from a low table and lit it. He passed it first to Tibbles and then to Julius.
“Over a hundred of your years ago, we came to the Niobrara. You cannot imagine what it was like to be an Indian there before the white man came! The game walked up to us and practically asked to be killed. Yes, there was bad weather and war. But it was a good life and nothing was defiled or wasted.
“When your people first arrived, we welcomed them. We traded with you and you brought us the gun. When I was a young man, the gun was my greatest friend. With it, I could shoot the buffalo quickly and with less pain for the animal. But then more whites came. These were different—impolite. They shot the buffalo for heads and horns and even killed them from trains. The animals melted away like the dream when I wake. But still the Ponca were peaceful. When the whites told us we must live by the plow, we agreed. After all, the ground could not melt away. Even the white man could not slaughter the ground.
“We gave up hunting. We gave up the tipi and built lodges and houses. We wanted to be like the white people who always have clothing and shelter and food to eat. We wanted our children to read and write. We would give up all it had meant to be an Indian if it meant we might have this. We kept our word.
“Then, your government told us there had been a mistake—and that we could no longer keep the ground of the Niobrara—that it was to be Sioux land. They said we had agreed to this. And so we marched many days in the wind and snow and rain and heat to the Quapaw reservation. When we got there, we found nothing—none of what the government had promised us. No mill for grain, no beasts to help us, the ground more rock than earth. Of this, you have already written.
“After a year, we were a third our number. The weather no good, the earth no good, the slow deaths came. One by one the children died, including my daughter Prairie Flower, beloved of One Tongue and betrothed to him. On his deathbed, my last son, Bear Shield, made me promise to bury him with our grandfathers. The last word from his lips was ‘Niobrara.’ I buried his body—promising that I would one day return for both my children.
“We planted the bodies of the others and left the hell in Oklahoma. We did not ask anyone’s permission. Some of us rode, others walked. When we reached the Omaha reservation, our cousins welcomed us; but word had reached the great Sherman in Washington. He said we were rebellious and sent a party to arrest us. And now you find me here.”
Tibbles nodded. He walked to the small, barred window and peered out.
“I do not doubt that Standing Bear speaks the truth—a truth I will print. When your trial begins, my little newspaper will put your story on the talking wire that speaks to bigger papers in bigger places. The whites will read these papers in Washington and New York and Philadelphia and Boston where the most righteous whites live—the same whites that freed the black men. They will believe you. They will make trouble for their chiefs to set Standing Bear free so that he may return home and bury his children where his ancestors lie.”
Standing Bear inhaled some smoke and let it out slowly.
“To have the great Tibbles as an ally is indeed an advantage. But I fear it will take more than this for the Ponca to win in your court.”
“What do you mean, Father?” Julius said.
“Lawyer Poppleton, the one who will speak for me, says that this trial will be about more than our right to sacred ground. Before anything else, Standing Bear must first prove to the judge that he is human.”
“Surely you must misunderstand him, Father,” Julius said. “You are standing here, a living man. Perhaps I should interpret with this Poppleton for you.”
“The Omaha woman who says my words is the daughter of Chief Iron Eyes. She has attended your schools and dresses as your women do. She is born to our tongue and makes all clear to me. Through her, this Poppleton has told me that your law has never established that the Indian is a person—that there are many who say that our hearts are in the location of the white man’s liver. There are books that write we are first cousins to the wolf. Some of your priests and shamans have claimed that we do not have souls—and without a soul, we cannot be people.”
Tibbles’ neck grew red. “Such bigotry makes the blood boil. Good! I will use this anger. I shall work day and night and enlist every right-thinking person in this country to help you prove your innocence and humanity.”
The turnkey appeared at the door.
“Time, gentlemen.”
Tibbles and the chief shook hands. As the door opened, the editor turned once more toward Standing Bear.
“Many righteous whites have written to my paper concerned about the rampage of Chased By Owls. In the past month, he has burned two settlements and attacked a train. These whites worry that his savagery will prejudice the judge against you, providing evidence that the red man is an animal unfit for the company of the civilized.”
Standing Bear drew on his pipe but no smoke came. He laid it down on the bed.
“Chased By Owls is tortured by a memory that is not his. Somehow, this memory has migrated from an old warrior’s brain to his own so that he does not see the time in which we live, but the free time before the whites. And so, he paints for war; hunts what little game remains; and takes the rest from those he kills. Inside himself, he knows our day is over and that he will be hunted down. But for him, it is only his vision that matters.”
The two watched as the door clanged shut. Waving the turnkey off, Tibbles spoke through the bars.
“I will write in my paper that you condemn his acts—and that you hope that he will soon be brought to justice.”
Standing Bear shook his head.
“You may write as you please—sometimes truth must be strangled for peace. But as my friend, I must tell you my heart. Your people have always called us ‘wild’ Indians. But soon we shall be civilized—farmers and herders—shadows of what we once were and paler shadows of the white man.
“But Chased By Owls will never be a shadow. He can only be alive as an Indian or dead as a spirit. When your people write their books about us, Standing Bear will be forgotten—a mere politician who valued life more than freedom. Chased By Owls will be a legend.”
26
Although he did not pretend to understand most of it, Lemuel listened closely to the government’s case as laid out by the Omaha district attorney, the honorable Mr. Genio M. Lambertson.
“This entire exercise,” Lambertson told the judge, “is outside the bounds of established law. The Indian has never been declared a human being or a citizen. And thus, cadit quaestio, is not a person nor a naturalized resident, and therefore has no standing to bring suit against General Crook or the United States.”
The statement left Lemuel puzzled. Hadn’t he played with them as a boy? Hadn’t they laughed when they won at games and cried when they skinned their knees? When he and Little Pony and Talks As He Walks drank their first alcohol and fell down in the street, hadn’t their mothers beaten them as hard as his own? And later on, when there was hell to be raised around the hidden stills and low-rent whorehouses, had the arresting lawmen asked whose hell it was? They had simply and unceremoniously thrown them all in the drunk tank—together.
Lemuel hoped that Mr. John Webster, attorney for the defense, would make more sense.
“The new fourteenth amendment to the constitution makes clear that he who is born in the United States is entitled to life, liberty, and property,” Webster said. “This is not a dangerous horde of wild savages with which we deal. With the exception of one bloodthirsty hothead who will soon be brought to heel, the Ponca have seldom broken our laws nor caused their white neighbors to fear them. They have never favored the war axe and the longbow, but the hammer and plow. In this, they have become like the white farmers in this region and so I submit that they are, ipso facto, persons—and therefore entitled to the rights of said persons.”