by Terry Griggs
He scanned the room. All appeared to be in order, everyone was in their assigned position and the seats were filling up nicely. There was bound to be a crowd. No one in this rustic thorp, this one-eyed town, was going to miss such an opportunity. Demonstrations had already occurred in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and some here would have read about them in the Globe or the local papers, the Gossip, the Expositor. Fenwick had no great desire to be a cultural missionary, bringing his enchantments to the periphery of civilization, but he had a particular reason for stopping here, and at present she was seated in the front row, about as far away from him as it was possible to get. Her aversion not an obstacle in the least. He didn’t need proximity for the kind of intimacy he was after.
Avice fidgeted in her chair and reached up to touch the back of her neck, as if to swish away an irritant, as if she were the one with a tick stuck in it. This was an uncharacteristically self-conscious motion, and a sign of her much larger discomfort. She knew he was staring at her. (Actually, she was garnering more than a few searing looks from a number of respectable ladies, who, fretting about the advisability of these democratic entertainments, were keeping her under close observation.) Go hang, she thought, still amazed that he had stopped her from leaving. How overwrought she’d been! It was hard to credit, for he was nothing but a stage ham, a two-bit huckster, which she realized the moment they sat down together in the lobby of the Sun to discuss his moving picture plans. Her initial fear of him had been ludicrous. She’d gotten a bit carried away, but before she could actually sail away on the Northern Belle (she hadn’t liked the way the captain had regarded her, with such fascinated attention, as if she were a specimen of some sort), she came to her senses. He’d been all deference and courtesy. (No mention of that incident with the fly!) Some of his ideas weren’t bad, either, and to these she had privately added a few of her own. Not that she trusted Fenwick one jot—the crook!—but she knew now that she could better him at his own game.
She glanced at the screen they had set up, a pair of sheets from The Dancing Sun sewn together and strung across a line. These would already have hosted more than a few performances in the line of duty, she smiled, although there weren’t any telltale stains. How strange that what they were to see today would leave nothing behind, not a trace; that the images which were to appear, supposedly, would then evaporate off the sheets like apparitions. Her eye strayed over to Roland Avery, their sound effects man. A man, anyway, seemed to be concealed in his child’s skin, he looked so replete.
Roland was standing on one side of the room, near the front, with a table before him that was piled with a range of objects: a sheet of tin, a bicycle horn, two coconut halves, a whistle, drumsticks, bottles filled with varying levels of water. Most of the aural accompaniment Fenwick had instructed him to provide was to issue out of Roland’s own throat, but he’d gotten creatively involved in the project. For the moment he was silent and still, letting the buzz and hum of the gathering audience fill him with a helium of delight. Levitation was not out of the question. With his keen anticipation of this novel entertainment, and the part he was to play in it, along with the steady sound of coins raining into the cash box that Raewyn (the comely Miss Hays) was commandeering at the door, Roland’s spirits had expanded to a gravity-defying degree. He fired a wink in Grif’s direction, but his friend’s attention had been diverted by a late arrival.
It had taken Hugh some time to scare up the price of admission, but finally he had managed to extract it from a tight-fisted, and currently broken-fingered, kid on the street. One last seat remained unoccupied at the back of the hall, and Hugh threw himself into it like a sack of dead cats, and smelling about as pleasant. There were a range of fragrances already in the air, most domestic and identifiable: cedar from the shavings in a wardrobe, vanilla daubed behind the ears, onions on someone’s breath, woodsmoke clinging to fabric, horse liniment on the hands. Pleached together, this formed a kind of aromatic blanket that rested lightly over them all. Until Hugh arrived, that is, and brought with him an essence more troubling that infested the weave, a sweaty, sour, pukey, gaseous, rotting-under-the-porch smell. It was the smell of treachery, if that can be said to have an odour. A bad smell, in any event.
Grif, also seated at the back but on the opposite side, watched with irritation as Hugh settled, like a pile of dung, then redirected his attention back to Avice. If he leaned forward slightly, the woman in front of him, the one in the fancy-dress hat that resembled a camera, no longer obstructed his view, and he was able to observe the white slice of his wife’s neck, which was visible above her collar, as well as the back of her own daringly unhatted head. Her hair had been carelessly dressed, scooped up into a tattered knot that was slightly askew, as if someone had given it a smart tug. He knew that the someone responsible was no longer Hugh, although he wasn’t so sure about Fenwick, because Avice was now staying at the Sun, and receiving no callers, according to Roland. She had not spoken to Grif. That was fine, he didn’t care—as long as he could be near her. That he needed to be near her, he had, to his dismay, recently discovered. An exasperating and cumbersome need it was, too, and not one that was going to improve his health—and he had the bruises to prove it. Indeed, she made him sick. The closer he got to her, the worse he felt. Was that love?
Grif wished that Fenwick would get on with it, start the show. He hadn’t thought much of the actor’s plans, once he’d finally gotten the true gist of them. Fenwick claimed that he could heal the wound in their marriage, the rift, with an application of celluloid. Art as a corrective, a retriever of what was lost. Not that what was lost had existed in the first place. Grif’s job this evening was to observe the impact of Fenwick’s demonstration on this gathering. He was to take a reading of the audience’s response. Easy enough to predict: some would be tickled, some dazzled by the gimmickry, some dismissive. Like the fellow sitting beside him, sucking on the end of his moustache—suck, suck, suck. He had a critical and sceptical air. It was going to take more than a fancy new machine from France to impress him, whereas the man on Grif’s other side was clutching a missal to his chest like a protective amulet, a prophylactic device to ward off the evils that Fenwick, the sorcerer in the red satin waistcoat, was about to unleash. Grif took a deep breath, and almost choked. Somebody had already unleashed an evil, and by God, did it stink.
Coiling, side-winding, it made its way to Avice, a particular pungency that could only be Hugh. Her back stiffened. Who would have guessed that he’d attend an event such as this, with most of the town’s upper crust, thin as it was, present: Mayor Reilly (scratching his neck), the Turners, the Vincents, Ted Runnalls, the mill owners and their wives. Who would have thought that Hugh could attend to anything. The blow that Fenwick had so smartly delivered had driven him into an incommunicable distance. Not that communication was ever the point. Although she and Hugh had understood one another on a certain low level. But no more. When she spotted him for the first time after her hasty desertion, he showed no signs even of recognizing her. Drunk, she had thought, too far gone to speak. He was leaning up against a post in front of Howe’s Ice Cream Parlour, staring into space and mumbling to himself.
“Hugh,” she had said, then louder, repeating his name several times but getting no response.
He looked right through her, venting her with his newfound visionary power. He was drunk—but with inspiration. She didn’t know it, but he could read now and get the message, and the message came directly from the Lord. Almost, anyway, for it was refracted through that journal of hers.
Avice was pained by his absent expression and tried to extend to him a verbal lifeline, mouthing some womanly nonsense that he could not hear. Not a word of it. The Lord’s words were sizable and took up most of the room in his head. Besides that, they were scrambled, in code, as one would expect in a communication so private and of such extreme importance. Why, this was intelligence from the highest source there was. Hugh had been chosen to b
e the Lord’s translator, and he understood that it was his duty to spread the word. Once he figured out what it was, he had every intention of doing just that. He’d spread it like paste.
He’d finally cocked an eye at Avice and grinned. One thing the Lord had confided: He didn’t much care for women (excepting His ma, of course, Mary, Holy Ma of God). Women had been disobedient right from the start. Troublemakers. Harlots.
Avice had turned and walked quickly away.
Not watching her step, she slipped on a greasy coil of fish guts that a fumbling and chagrined gull had dropped on the planks of the sidewalk. She slid, skated across the walk, arms windmilling, but caught her balance before breaking her own head open. She retreated hurriedly into the shelter of the Sun, mortified. Once in, she couldn’t shake the sense of things gone awry generally, as if some unidentifiable force had given the whole town an unbalancing knock. Emotions that she had held in check since her wedding night were surging in her, uncontrolled. Good thing Grif wasn’t around. Avice couldn’t bear to look at him, his face still a mess from the beating Hugh had given him. She didn’t completely trust herself anymore. Hugh might well have stolen a snippet of her own sanity when he had slipped irretrievably through that crack in his head. She didn’t even trust her eyes anymore, for when she entered the dim bar of the hotel that day, she caught sight of a ghost in the mirror standing behind her, a young woman drained of life but not of its residual longing.
That was nothing. Fenwick Nashe had a whole cast of spirits preserved in flat tins who were about to dance and cavort at his bidding. The time had come to release them.
He kept his introductory remarks brief . . . Ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to witness today . . . quack, quack . . . Just long enough to ratchet up the excitement, but not so wearyingly long that in their excitement they started hurling rotten tomatoes at him. He was a seasoned showman, after all.
At a nod from him, Roland drew the window shades against the waning afternoon light, and Ritchie’s Music Hall, venue for travelling vaudeville shows, local theatricals, dramatic monologues and musical evenings, was erased in darkness, the memories of these former diversions instantly forgotten. Everyone sat hushed, curiosity primed, listening to Fenwick in the back as he fiddled with his contraption, clicking something, cranking something, until suddenly a strange flicker of light passed through the screen up ahead, and then a living being appeared there before them. An apparition. Someone in the audience gasped loudly. There were exclamations of surprise as the figure continued to move. It hopped around. It was a demon God preserve us with a pointed goatee stuck on his chin, a receding hairline, a dashing cape, tight breeches. Disturbed murmurs snaked through the crowd, then a soft, helpless cry. The prancing figure had pulled off its own head and tossed it into the air. The body continued to caper around without it, while the detached head, hanging like a planet above, leered and chattered wordlessly. Finally, the hideous thing sailed down and the demon reattached it to his neck with the ease of one securing a hat, then vanished in a sudden puff of smoke. (How Fenwick envied the beauty of that trick. Such a clean getaway was virtually impossible, unless you really were a devil.)
Darkness reclaimed the room, as did a total, stunned silence. Even Roland was speechless, his own excited breathing the only sound effect he had produced. It had been a bizarre, thrilling and completely mesmerizing spectacle. Most present had seen amazing things before; the world was full of them, ever since Mr. Edison had flicked on his electric lights and chased all the spooks and shadows out of the corners. But such things, though incredible—Constable Wilkin’s talking watch (press a spring and it told you the time of day), the giant Edward Beaupré, who was over eight feet tall and wore size twenty-four shoes, the woman in town whose own hands were given to attacking or fondling her—amazed less, and were less disquieting, than this.
Fenwick had wanted to begin his program with a real stunner, a knockout, and was most pleased with the result. He had them, he could tell. There was a definite change in the atmosphere of the hall, a heightened readiness and desire. They wanted more. In the darkened room, tremulous as a herd of cornered deer, their eyes were opened wide, ready for these images to drift in and settle to the bottom of their souls like a layer of fine silver silt.
Fenwick was only too happy to comply. He did not like to disappoint. He set up the next reel, and the next, some of the living pictures lasting under a minute, others as long as five or six. His audience was voracious, and as the show proceeded, they began to enjoy themselves even more. They clapped until their hands were as red as their flushed faces. They began adding commentary to augment the sounds that Roland had begun inventively supplying.
“Very refreshing,” quipped the moustache-sucking man beside Grif as they watched a small ship sailing on a rough sea. Roland whistled like the wind.
The next film was of horses galloping (coconuts), followed by workers leaving a factory (footsteps) and then a man feeding a baby (coos, gurgles). This last subject, a marvel in itself to many of the mothers in the audience, caused more than a few thoughtful and appraising glances at mates seated open-mouthed beside them.
A window had been conjured through which the townsfolk could see far beyond their own limited horizons, into distant lands, or into the intimate moments of other people’s lives—even if they were foreigners and had more of them. Fenwick only wished that he had on hand the first picture to be publicly shown, the one that had caused an excitable Paris audience to flee into the streets. It showed a train arriving at a station, and to such realistic effect, barrelling head-on, seemingly right through the wall, that some believed they were going to be crushed by it and fled. He suspected that his Anglo audience would only grip their seats tighter while waiting stoically for the locomotive to thunder over them, not yet accustomed to the whimsy of iron melting into the air but too proud to clear out of the way.
Instead, to relax their grip, he showed them one called The Sprinkler Sprinkled, a simple piece of nonsense in which a gardener is seen watering a lawn with a hose that stops working when a young boy happens by and steps on it. The gardener can’t figure out the problem and, staring into the nozzle just as the boy steps off the hose, gets a blast of water in the face. He jumps up and down shaking his fist, and the boy runs away. Fin. And how they laughed at this, holding their sides, wiping tears from their eyes. Very agreeable it was to draw this out of them, to be the master of all this lighthearted merriment; master and manipulator, for he was the one who controlled the tempo of the pictures by cranking the projector faster or slower. He had a true feel for the action, he thought, his long, fine fingers on the pulse of these animations, thereby also controlling the tension and emotion in the hall. In a way he was as much a creator of these innovations as the original artists.
Admittedly, Fenwick couldn’t control everything, for he was not the one who caused Mrs. Fertuck to screech in alarm during the screening of The Laboratory of M., the evening’s finale. Nor was the star and director, Georges Méliès, the guilty one, with his brilliant deviltry, his dazzling editorial hijinks and sleight of hand. No, what made Mrs. Fertuck scream was the man sitting behind her, who, under the cover of darkness, performed his own act of prestidigitation by running his hands lightly, but feelingly, over her rear, cupping the abundance of what her chair could not quite contain. He had always admired a woman who had no need of a bustle, and in Mrs. Fertuck’s case he was just checking. Pure magic, he thought, while on screen M. Méliès performed it.
“Very clever,” confided one of the audience members to his wife when the show was over and they were all drifting out of the overheated hall into the fresh evening air. “I’m afraid it will never catch on, though, my dear. After people see this sort of gimmick once or twice, they will tire of it. Mark my words.”
Fenwick marked them, and congratulated himself. One look into the eyes of those who passed him on the way out, eyes slightly blurred and dreamy, blinking awake,
bringing everyone back to the real world—of drudgery, hardship, boredom, cruel husbands, neglectful wives—and he knew they would return for more. And more. Why would they not? He had what they desired above all else: access to the impossible.
“Can you imagine!” he overheard another, more astute gentleman say. “You photograph your loved ones with this device and you will always have them, alive, before you. Don’t you see? Death will be cheated, no longer absolute.”
Fenwick turned to his helpers, to Roland, Raewyn, Avice, Grif, his fledgling company—for every person has their price and is eventually persuadable—and was delighted to observe the same healthy and greedy burnish on their faces. Even the young girl was too het up to make her usual prohibitive noises about inebriating pleasures. One audience member had left early, he noted, a familiar form, hulking and shadowy, that had slipped by him, but not before casting an ogreish silhouette on the screen. That was to be expected, naturally. Not everyone was going to be quite so smitten. Dissent, after all, was never without its uses.
True, Hugh had been completely unimpressed with the show. He couldn’t figure out what the big deal was, when an incredible book had already come to life in his hands, and through it he had witnessed wonders far greater than those seen this night. Daily life was already like a silent film for Hugh, composed of jerky, juddering scenes, disconnected and meaningless, sunk into a backdrop of darkness. He knew mystery, was submerged in it up to his hair ends, and what he had seen here in this airless room wasn’t it.