Magic | Page 8

beg your pardon. I came to get some
programmes. My uncle wants them.
[She walks swiftly across and takes up the programmes.
CONJURER. [Still dashing cards about the table.] Miss Carleon, might

I speak to you a moment? [He puts his hands in his pockets, stares at
the table; and his face assumes a sardonic expression.] The question is
purely practical.
PATRICIA. [Pausing at the door.] I can hardly imagine what the
question can be.
CONJURER. I am the question.
PATRICIA. And what have I to do with that?
CONJURER. You have everything to do with it. I am the question:
you....
PATRICIA. [Angrily.] Well, what am I?
CONJURER. You are the answer.
PATRICIA. The answer to what?
CONJURER. [Coming round to the front of the table and sitting
against it.] The answer to me. You think I'm a liar because I walked
about the fields with you and said I could make stones disappear. Well,
so I can. I'm a conjurer. In mere point of fact, it wasn't a lie. But if it
had been a lie I should have told it just the same. I would have told
twenty such lies. You may or may not know why.
PATRICIA. I know nothing about such lies.
[She puts her hand on the handle of the door, but the CONJURER, who
is sitting on the table and staring at his boots, does not notice the
action, and goes on as in a sincere soliloquy.
CONJURER. I don't know whether you have any notion of what it
means to a man like me to talk to a lady like you, even on false
pretences. I am an adventurer. I am a blackguard, if one can earn the
title by being in all the blackguard societies of the world. I have
thought everything out by myself, when I was a guttersnipe in Fleet
Street, or, lower still, a journalist in Fleet Street. Before I met you I

never guessed that rich people ever thought at all. Well, that is all I
have to say. We had some good conversations, didn't we? I am a liar.
But I told you a great deal of the truth.
[He turns and resumes the arrangement of the table.
PATRICIA. [Thinking.] Yes, you did tell me a great deal of the truth.
You told me hundreds and thousands of truths. But you never told me
the truth that one wants to know.
CONJURER. And what is that?
PATRICIA. [Turning back into the room.] You never told me the truth
about yourself. You never told me you were only the Conjurer.
CONJURER. I did not tell you that because I do not even know it. I do
not know whether I am only the Conjurer....
PATRICIA. What do you mean?
CONJURER. Sometimes I am afraid I am something worse than the
Conjurer.
PATRICIA. [Seriously.] I cannot think of anything worse than a
conjurer who does not call himself a conjurer.
CONJURER. [Gloomily.] There is something worse. [Rallying himself.]
But that is not what I want to say. Do you really find that very
unpardonable? Come, let me put you a case. Never mind about whether
it is our case. A man spends his time incessantly in going about in
third-class carriages to fifth-rate lodgings. He has to make up new
tricks, new patter, new nonsense, sometimes every night of his life.
Mostly he has to do it in the beastly black cities of the Midlands and
the North, where he can't get out into the country. Now and again he
does it at some gentleman's country-house, where he can get out into
the country. Well, you know that actors and orators and all sorts of
people like to rehearse their effects in the open air if they can. [Smiles.]
You know that story of the great statesman who was heard by his own

gardener saying, as he paced the garden, "Had I, Mr. Speaker, received
the smallest intimation that I could be called upon to speak this
evening...." [PATRICIA controls a smile, and he goes on with
overwhelming enthusiasm.] Well, conjurers are just the same. It takes
some time to prepare an impromptu. A man like that walks about the
woods and fields doing all his tricks beforehand, and talking all sorts of
gibberish because he thinks he is alone. One evening this man found he
was not alone. He found a very beautiful child was watching him.
PATRICIA. A child?
CONJURER. Yes. That was his first impression. He is an intimate
friend of mine. I have known him all my life. He tells me he has since
discovered she is not a child. She does not fulfil the definition.
PATRICIA. What is the definition of a child?
CONJURER. Somebody you can play with.
PATRICIA. [Abruptly.] Why did you wear that