World of Wonders

“Whoever taught Willard did it very well. He never gave names to the things he taught me, and I am sure he didn’t know them. But since that time I have found that he taught me all there is to know about shuffling, forcing, and passing cards, and palming, ruffling, changing, and bridging, and the wonders of the biseaute pack, which is really the only trick pack worth having. With coins he taught me all the basic work of palming and passing, the French drop, La Pincette, La Coulee, and all the other really good ones. His ideal among magicians was Nelson Downs, whose great act, The Miser’s Dream, he had seen at the Palace Theater, New York, which was the paradise of his limited imagination. Indeed, it was a very much debased version of The Miser’s Dream that he had been doing when I first saw him. He now did little conjuring in the World of Wonders, because of the case of managing Abdullah.“Inside Abdullah I was busy for perhaps five minutes in every hour. My movement was greatly restricted; I could not make a noise. What was I to do? I practised my magic, and for hours on end I palmed coins and developed my hands in the dark, and that is how I gained my technique which has earned me the compliment of this film you gentlemen are making. I recommend the method to young magicians; get yourself into a close-fitting prison for ten hours a day, and do nothing but manipulate cards and coins; keep that up for a few years and, unless you are constitutionally incapable, like poor Ramsay here, you should develop some adroitness, and you will at least have no chance to acquire the principal fault of the bad magician, which is looking at your hands as you work. That was how I voided boredom: constant practice, and entranced observation, through Abdullah’s bosom, of the public and the Talent of the World of Wonders.

“Boredom is rich soil for every kind of rancour and ugliness. In my first months on the show this attached almost entirely to the fortunes of the War. I knew nothing about the War, although as a schoolchild I had been urged to bring all my family’s peachstones to school, where they were collected for some warlike purpose. Knowing boys said that a terrible poison gas was made from them. Every morning in prayers our teacher mentioned the Allied Forces, and especially the Canadians. Once again knowing boys said you could always tell where her brother Jim was by the prayer, which was likely to contain a special reference to ‘our boys at the Front’, and later, ‘our boys in the rest camps’, and later still, ‘our boys in the hospitals’. The War hung over my life like the clouds in the sky, and I heeded it as little. Once I saw Ramsay in the street, in what I later realized was the uniform of a recruit, but at the time I couldn’t understand why he was wearing such queer clothes. I saw men in the streets with black bands on their arms, and asked my father why they wore them, but I can’t remember what he answered.

“In the World of Wonders the War seemed likely at times to tear the show to pieces. The only music on the fairgrounds where we appeared came from the merry-go-round; tunes were fed into its calliope by the agency of large steel discs, perforated with rectangular holes; they worked on the same principle as the roll of a player-piano, but were much more durable, and rotated instead of uncoiling. Most of the music was of the variety we associate with merry-go-rounds. Who wrote it? Italians, I suspect, for it always had a gentle, quaintly melodious quality, except for one new tune which Steve, who ran the machine, had bought to give the show a modern air. It was the American war song—by that noisy fellow Cohan, was it?—called ‘Over There!’ It was less than warlike on a calliope, played at merry-go-round tempo, but everybody recognized it, and now and then some Canadian wag would sing loudly, to the final phrase—

If Ha

“Em didn’t have a chance to reply, because Ha

“The battle went on for weeks, during which Joe Dark suffered the humiliation of having Em tell everybody that he wasn’t in the Canadian Army because he had flat feet, and Ha

“It all came about because of boredom. Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in. But a worse and more lasting source of trouble was the final show in each village, which was called the Last Trick.

“It was agreed that the Last Trick ought to be livelier than the other nine shows of the day. The fair was at its end, the serious matters like the judging of animals and fancy-work had been completed, and most of the old folks had gone home, leaving young men and their girls, and the village cutups on the fairground. It was then that the true, age-old Spirit of Carnival descended on Wanless’s World of Wonders, but of course it didn’t affect everybody in the same way. Outside, the calliope was playing its favourite tune, ‘The Poor Butterfly Waltz’; supposedly unknown to Gus, the man who ran the cat-rack had slipped in the gaff, so that the eager suitor who was trying to win a kewpie doll for the girl of his heart by throwing baseballs found that the stuffed pussy-cats wouldn’t be knocked down. It was a sleazier, crookeder fair altogether than the one the local Fair Board had pla