The Mercury Waltz (37 page)

—and then he exits, angel in hand, as Istvan lies back against the coverlet, earring happily resumed, to read with half-closed eyes a new letter from Lucy, valiant Puss who would have added such dash to this show—what a pity that she can neither play nor watch it, in
that fine
palais
of yours!
—though her own theatre continues to offer superior opportunities to many young actors, and to stray travelers, even in this very modern age.

There are no pictures on the placards that Haden’s boys parade through the streets, only the show’s title—
THE
MERCURY
ROULETTE
—and
FOLLOW
ME
on the reverse, daubed in black paint to match the masks they sport, and the jingling bells some of them wear about their wrists and ankles: “Such evil-looking little creatures,” murmurs an anxious lady to her friend in a beaver hat, that friend wondering aloud where such minions might lead, half turning in the avenue to watch them before he is tugged away by the lady’s warding hand. Others, braver or more foolhardy, choose to follow, through the sunset’s luxurious gloom: a pair of curious whores, a few furtive students with satchels, a few men in burghers’ coats and calm defiance, a few more and then more, as the streams of those behind the boys coalesce into one column, one line through Rottermond Square, marked by several distrustful constables—that theatre again!—past the shoemaker’s and the printer’s, the quiet fiacre cab in the alley, the Heads or Tails, where the avid patrons, with prudence or prescience, take themselves inside the bar to watch, while the owner of Die Welt swears violently beneath his breath and hurries to lock the shutters and the door.

And all present watch as a large black brougham rolls to a stop across from the Mercury. Inside, the men—one a gentleman, with his hard stare and exquisite top hat, black overcoat of Russian fox, the other a humbler deputy, in less distinctive weeds of wool and brown—note another conveyance immediately in their wake, a constables’ van with half a dozen more officers and a locksmith, all of whom exit to stand by the theatre’s doors, waiting for the men in the cab to give the word. Inside, Martin Eig turns to Benjamin de Metz and “You,” he says, “do the city a service, sir, by closing down this place. Nothing worthy could ever be found here.”

“No,” says Benjamin de Metz; is he smiling? “It was not.”

“And recall that Bok may still be charged for the constables’ battery and assault—the assault on Cowtan, too; his suit is pending—if you should decide that—”

“No. Not yet.”

“As you say. —What is that?” as the dirty, scampering, simpering boys, masked and sinuous as shadows, pass by the brougham, followed by the audience, itself a shadow, stretched long and cold across the square. “More clownishness! We ought have come at dawn, as I’d suggested, and forestall all this—”

“No, I’d expected some showing. Those placards in the streets—I mean to see,” and Benjamin de Metz swiftly disembarks to mount the steps, Eig tight-lipped a step behind to pause and direct the staring constables—“Wait on my orders”— then follow de Metz into the dark.

Tilde, arrayed for the last time in white wrapper and Infanta’s hat, stands waiting at the door: she takes no coin, she wipes at her eyes, she barely seems to watch as “This way,” she mutters to all who enter past the nailed eviction notice, into what seems to be a heaped and dusty chaos, half the seats piled with old props, swathings of cloth and pointed broomsticks, all the detritus of flight and defeat; the stage itself is sadly nude except for a Wheel of Fortune, decked in foil and false gold, the black figure of Everyman set waiting at
DÉPART
, departure. The boys, their black bells jingling, dart and push rudely between each other and the patrons, clambering onstage, backstage, half up the catwalk stairs, calling to one another in little shrieks and whispers, like the half-heard midnight voices of bats or efreets. Martin Eig stations himself near the door, as if it might degrade him to go nearer; Benjamin de Metz takes a seat right up front, seeming in better humor with every moment that passes; he takes from his coat an onyx flask, the scent of fine whiskey blooms. If he but knew, which in no way he can, he sits within an arm’s-length of the half-body of the Snow Youth, rolled in stained canvas like a pupa or a shroud, boxed like a dupe or victim past the second row of seats, that fill now with patrons who glance at the lordly, waiting figure as if he might be part of the show.

At a certain point—perhaps there is a signal—the doors are quietly locked, though patrons still queue to be admitted. Those men and several women mingle with the constables and locksmith left outside, several of them sharing theories as to what the strange parade’s performance might portend—

“It’s to be a last hurrah, with girls, that is, sporting girls, one of those little devils good as said so. Bare as Godiva they’ll be, and who knows what’s to happen!”

“What will happen,” glancing warily to the listening constables, “is they’ll all end up in jail, or someplace worse—that’s why it’s being closed, you see? There’s no place for such things anymore, there’s no—”

“No, you saw His Lordship Whoever-it-was, it’s to be a private party. They buy those street boys for suchlike, I’ve read all about it in the
Globe—
”

—as inside, gaslight shines—first dim and then much too brightly, there may be some trouble with the gas—while as if by magic, the Wheel begins, on its own, to spin: from departure to aspiration to the bright cusp of
SUCESSO
, pausing there as if again by magic while two small figures make their way onstage, accompanied by two men in dark clothing and dark half-masks, like peasantry or rude attendants: a devil and an angel, side by side. Benjamin de Metz starts, then smiles; he toasts the figures extravagantly with his flask, as if this performance is made solely for him, which in a manner it is. Offstage whistling is heard, a soft and jaunty accompaniment, the tune of “A Lad Makes His Way,” as the absence of piano, or at least violins, is privately mourned by the evening’s orchestrator.

“Whence do you come?” asks the angel of the devil. The angelic voice is somewhat muffled, the actor is more than somewhat nervous but “The angels brought me,” says the devil, who is not nervous, “from the bastards’ paradise, and left me on the doorstep in a bulrush basket.” He plucks at his horns, dislodging a few stray twigs; there is uncertain tittering; Benjamin de Metz laughs aloud. “But we’ve always been here, haven’t we, you and I, to make our play. We don’t even need a theatre!” waving one hand in dismissal as the Wheel turns again, its clicking audible over the whistled aria, turning from success to disgrace, the little man stoic as it spins. “We come from nothing and we go to nothing, it is the human condition. —Oh, you’ll pardon me,” laughs the devil to the audience. “But
mesdames et messieurs,
it is only the truth.”

Inside the dark mask, perspiring, aglow, Frédéric the devil thinks that he has never been—so strange!—so happy. His Haden is beside him, the stage is before them, the world—of hazard, of passion, of eternal bliss—is theirs, as long as the tale unfolds. He thinks of the engravings in his old book of the gods; he thinks of his next line; he cuts his gaze to watch Haden bite a moment at his lips, Haden his angel—

—as “Gentlemen,” says a third voice, the trickster voice of Mr. Pollux, “have we met?” sauntering up to the two, who turn and wait for his arrival, their inferior motion skills thus less on display; Mr. Pollux in comparison moves like a cat, graceful and dangerous, very much amused. “Was it on the road, mayhap, in some glen or den or other? Or was it at the place they call the Poppy? ‘Enter whoso hither entry seek/Reckless of bawdy-house’s blackened reek!’—and my, didn’t we have some jolly times there! What with the war,” reaching out to give the Wheel a spin unnecessarily hard, Everyman a-gallop through life after life after life, “and the playing, and the fucking, there was never a dull moment beneath
that
roof. Though I must confess,” with a glance offstage, “I should never have gone there myself, if not for love…. ‘We are two,’” sings Mr. Pollux, the old, old tune, “‘we need none other,’” as Benjamin de Metz, unsmiling now, shifts in his seat, while the gaslight flares again, making shadows of shadows, showing the boys a-perch, restless to tug and ankle one another, their eyes bright, Tilde mute below in white, Martin Eig set like a statue by the door. If in the air there is a faint dry smell—of cigar smoke? Of paper, smoldering?—no one fully notes it, the gaze of the audience turning, rising as one as Mr. Castor appears, not onstage at all but high up on the catwalk itself, his handler barely a shadow as “I know that song,” calls Mr. Castor, Rupert, Mouse from whom he chooses to hide nearly nothing—

It will make the end and then some.

It’s your wheel to spin, messire. Do as you like.

This place—

I told you, I’ve done with it. Do as you like.

—Mouse who knows and has always known who he is, what he is, what he will always be: and in that knowledge his home and safety, his gaiety, his freed ferocity as “In the hills,“ says Mr. Pollux the immortal, “it is so fair, Herr Knight,” stepping nimbly past the angel and the devil who turn to watch him, who recede in careful steps—Frédéric who turns Haden’s angel’s stumble to a jest, to bring a surer laugh from the audience, Haden who wonders how such a small creature of wood and wire can be so bally fucking balky, so heavy in his hands—as Tilde leaves her post, a white ghost trailed by jingling boys in black, a manner of honor guard as she treads the aisle and mounts the stage, her plodding, small, ungainly body, the Mater and the Woman Alone to spin the Wheel again and again, faster and faster, success and disgrace and departure, love and death and the passion that unites them, her face beneath the domino wet with sparkling sweat as the Wheel wheels and glitters, as the gaslight grows even brighter, much too bright now, the boys clapping and jeering, cheering her on, tossing walnut shells and cigarette ends at the audience, looking to the angel to tell them what to do—

—as Haden reemerges, top hat and mirrored vest to be for the spinning Wheel a kind of human double, its flash his flash, his voice its voice as “Come one, come all!” he calls, taking his place beside Tilde, cuffing a few of the wilder boys aside. “Come and see what the future holds! It’s every fellow for himself now, and free spins for the ladies!”

Now Benjamin stares up, up, up to the catwalk, his handsome, rigid face without expression—does he think, then, of other heights, of slippery rooftops and barred windows, of Rupert’s hands upon him in the dark before the dawn? and thus is first to see the graceless sway, the shudder of metal on metal, sees without fully marking what it is as “The grassy sward,” calls down Mr. Castor, “where a man might lie with his love all night,” turning for descent as if eager to meet that love again, too eager, too careless of his footing as “Come on!” shouts Haden, and the music starts anew, Mr. Pollux in wild whistle shrill as panpipes,
a lad who knows what he knows!
in lineage all the way back to Pan, Pan Loudermilk and all the others created by the gods or the devils for their own amusement, like a gape-mouthed little body once used to bring a general to grief, like the goat-footed gamboler nimble but yet not nimble enough, as the catwalk sways again—are there too many boys still upon it?—as Haden swings his arm in circles, a signal to bring the last of them leaping and clattering down, grabbing hands and jingling bells, one trips and half-tumbles, is snatched up by his fellows from sure disaster while “
Oh!
” a lady’s shriek as the gaslight, limelight, flares like the fires of hell and “Madame,” calls the dark-masked devil. “Ladies, ladies and gentlemen! Please, keep to your seats—”

—as Mr. Pollux takes center stage in the growing chaos of imps, his hands linked as modest as a schoolboy’s, to chant the Mercury’s signature song of farewell, its words modified to suit the night’s occasion: “The purpose of the theatre/Is manifold and gay/To make a way where one is not, or not to make a way –”

—as Rupert on the catwalk waves, Mr. Castor waves, hurrying down too fast, much too vertiginously fast, Tilde sucks in a frightened breath as one of the boys yells “‘Ware up there!” and “Fire!” from a man in the back row, “there’s fire here!” in one of the piles of props, men and women scrambling from their seats as Frédéric rushes over to stamp at the flames, but as the devil does he quell or only fan them? The gaslight flares again, then gutters nearly gone, as on the catwalk stairs now frankly shuddering—from the boys’ departure, from their own rust and frailty—Rupert suddenly reverses, nearly at a run, pounding to the top again, what does he think to do there? Employ the heavy drapes as a firecloth? Make some way to escape? as a curling twist of metal, part of the catwalk railing, gives way, falling stageward with a clang—

“While we here at the Mercury another purpose own/To give you what we mean to give, and send you fucking home! Goodnight,
mesdames et messieurs!
And watch your step!”

—as the fire leaps higher beneath Frédéric’s boot, the harsh spreading stink of smoke, and the audience no longer an audience, but a mob of fearful men and women, push and batter at the locked doors, Martin Eig pushing with them, shouting to the constables outside, “Open this door! Fire!
Open the door!
”

—as another piece of metal falls, the Wheel abandoned to its empty spin as Haden, his vest reflecting the flames, harries the last of the boys through the shrieking crowd to the finally opened egress—“Hurry, go on, go on!”—himself hurrying into the alley as the catwalk groans and rains more rust, while Tilde stands rooted to the center of the stage, mask ripped free, staring up and “Sir!” her cry to freeze all still inside—Istvan, Benjamin, a panting constable and the pair of whores—as Mr. Castor is launched into the air, strings streaming behind, to strike the seats with an ugly, hollow, splintering crash—“
Sir!
”