Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [67]
The next trick, however, “A Poll at the Pole, or the Enchanted Election” entertained Brentford a little less. A gang of scene-shifters had positioned a voting booth and a ballot-box, two pieces of furniture that were virtually unknown in those latitudes, except between the pages, if not between the lines, of A Blast on the Barren Land. Using the curtain and the box as props for a magic trick struck Brentford as both a clever but also a somewhat malignant idea.
After volunteers from the audience had checked that the ballot was as empty as the booth, Stella, dressed in the same suffragette costume that Brentford had noticed during the Lenton recording riot, entered the booth, her legs showing below the drawn curtain. She exited a few seconds later holding a large card on which she had drawn a cross under a circle and, booed by some boors in the audience, she voted by casting that Venus symbol into the ballot box. Handyside called her back as she walked away to warn her that cheating was forbidden. Stella pleaded not guilty. But Handyside opened the ballot box and, tipping it to make it spill its contents, revealed hundreds of cascading Venus-sign votes. The audience roared with a kind of laughter Brentford did not like. He found he took it too seriously. Too personally.
A new ballot box was brought out and examined by a spectator, while a sulky Stella was sent back into the booth. Brentford was fairly certain that when Handyside clapped his hands, she would disappear from the booth and find herself in the box, which indeed eventually happened, with Handyside opening the lock and releasing the pirouetting girl to maximum applause.
But this was just the beginning of the trick. Next he requested that members of the audience write down their names and slip them into sealed envelopes being distributed by his assistants. Spectators then proceeded to line up across the stage and place the envelopes in a new ballot box that had been rolled out. A new character, introduced as Little Tommy Twaddle, had made his appearance on the other side of the stage: one of those typical ventriloquist’s dummies, with a big square wooden smile and bulging apple-red cheeks. Handyside sat on a chair, taking the dummy onto his lap. Every time an envelope was put inside the box, and a lever pulled down by Mr. Spencer to “make sure” it was hermetically closed, the dummy spoke the name aloud, to the amazement of the voter. This went on for a while without a single mistake being made by the dummy.
Eventually, Handyside left Little Tommy Twaddle on the chair and walked to the box, which he opened, releasing the money that had been escamoted from the previous trick. He showed that the box was now empty and put it back on the table. As he walked away, knocks were heard from inside the box. Handyside walked back to it, opened it and produced Little Tommy Twaddle, who jumped out of it like a jack-in-the-box. Even Brentford applauded that one.
The next trick, however, once again left Brentford with a bitter aftertaste, especially after what he had seen and heard that afternoon at the Blazing Building. It was called the “Greenland Wizard” and simulated or mocked an Eskimo shamanic séance. Spenser the Clumsy Conjuror tied Handyside on a sofa after having helped him out of his cutaway, vest, and tie, now folded on a nearby chair. As the lights went dim and Handyside concentrated, a tambourine at the head of the sofa started playing by itself, while the magician’s clothes slowly hovered and moved about like ghosts across the stage, as they were sometimes supposed to do in igloos during shamanic rituals. Brentford recalled that the first explorers had