THE USE OF THE WAND
Closely connected with the subject of patter is the use of the wand, which in my own opinion cannot be too sedulously cultivated. To the cases in which the wand itself forms the prominent item of the trick, I devoted a special chapter in “Later Magic.” To these therefore I need not further refer. More important, however, is the part played by the wand from the point of view of general utility.
In the first place, it is the only remnant of the traditional outfit of the magician. Time was, when the regulation costume of the wizard was a sugarloaf hat, and a robe embroidered with highly coloured mystic symbols. Such a robe is still worn as part of their make-up, by Chung Ling Soo and a few other Orientals, but the orthodox costume of the latter-day wizard is ordinary evening dress. The wand alone remains; the symbol and the professed instrument of his mystic powers, and from its traditional connection with magic, there is a special prestige attached to it.
For these reasons alone it would be desirable to retain the use of the wand, but apart from them, its practical uses are many and various. One of the first difficulties of the novice, as he comes forward to introduce himself to his audience, is to know what to do with his hands. He can hardly advance with hand on heart, within his vest, à la Pecksniff. Held open, with arms hanging down by the sides, the hands look too stiff, and to advance with them in his pockets would hardly be good form. By coming forward wand in hand, he avoids these difficulties. The hand holding it automatically assumes an easy and natural position, and he ceases to think about the other. With the wand held in the right hand across the body, its free end resting on the palm of the opposite hand, he is in an ideal attitude for delivering his introductory patter. Later on, by holding the wand in the hand, he effectually disguises the fact that he has some object, a card, a coin, or a watch concealed therein. If he has occasion to call attention directly to any object, the wand forms the most natural pointer. If he finds it necessary, for some reason connected with the trick in hand, to make a turn or half-turn away from the spectators, the fact that he has left his wand upon the table affords him the needful opportunity.
Lastly, if the wand is habitually used as the professed instrument of a desired transposition or transformation, a certain portion of an average audience gradually becomes impressed with the idea that there really must be some occult connection between the touch of the wand and the effect produced. There is much virtue in what may be called a magical atmosphere, and after the wizard has proved his magical power by performing two or three apparent impossibilities, the mind of the spectator (though in his calmer moments, he knows, or should know, better), is led to adopt in a greater or less degree the solution “forced” upon him by the conjurer. Habitual use of the wand, with apparent seriousness, goes far to create the desired atmosphere.
A good effect may be produced by “electrifying” the wand now and then, by rubbing it with a handkerchief. The main uses of electricity are so widely known, and so little understood by the million, that they are quite ready to give it credit for still more marvellous possibilities.
My friend Mr. Holt Schooling, mentioned in connection with The Secret of the Pyramids, finds an additional use for the wand. He uses, not one only, but half a dozen, of different appearance, each credited with some special magical virtue. At the outset of his show these are arranged horizontally, one above another on pins projecting from a small sloping blackboard. For each fresh trick the wand professedly appropriate to it is brought into action, the one last used being at the same time replaced on the stand. The spectators do not suspect that behind each top corner of the board is a small servante, enabling the performer, under cover of the change of wands, to change a pack of cards, or to effect some other substitution necessary for the purpose of his next item.
Verbum sap, by all means cultivate the use of the wand, and for the sake of effect, let it be of an elegant and distinctive character. An office-ruler or a piece of cane would serve many of its mechanical purposes, but would lack the prestige attached to what is, professedly, the genuine article.
One of the most striking proofs of the extensive use and appreciation of the wand by modern magicians is furnished by the remarkable collection of such implements got together by Dr. Saram R. Ellison, of New York.
Dr. Ellison[20] is an eminent and popular physician, whose ruling passion is wanting to know things, particularly things that other people don’t know. Such being his temperament, it goes almost without saying that at an early period of his career he became a Freemason. Having been duly initiated into the mysteries of the ordinary lodge, and learnt all it had to teach him, he still yearned for “more light,” and accordingly worked his way up step by step through intervening degrees in masonry till he reached what is known as the thirty-third degree, an order even more exclusive than that of the Garter, and claiming to possess secrets as to which the ordinary “blue” mason, even though he be a Past Grand Everything, knows no more than the veriest outsider.
When in this direction there were no more mysteries left for him to conquer, Dr. Ellison naturally turned his attention to Magic: and in accordance with his habitual determination to know all that there is to be known with regard to his hobby for the time being he began to collect books upon the subject. At first there were but few to collect, but the literature of magic has grown, and grown, and side by side with its advance Dr. Ellison’s collection has grown larger and larger till it numbers some hundreds of volumes. Harry Kellar, the dean of American magicians, and himself an enthusiastic collector, yearned to possess it, and offered the doctor for it the handsome sum of two thousand dollars, equivalent in English money to about four hundred pounds. But Dr. Ellison was not to be tempted. In order that the collection should be preserved intact, he donated it, some years ago, to the New York Public Library, also providing a fund for its upkeep and further development.
But Dr. Ellison’s interest in, and services to Magic did not end here. He has made a collection of models, entirely the work of his own hands, of the appliances for over sixty stage illusions. Some are of full size, others quite miniature affairs, but one and all exact to scale. Further, the doctor has a special affection for souvenirs of famous magicians, past and present, especially in the shape of wands, as being the most characteristic possession of the wizard. Accordingly, some years ago, he began to collect wands, and he now possesses more than eighty such, each a wand which has been habitually yielded by some more or less famous magician. By the courtesy of Dr. Ellison I am enabled to furnish particulars of some of them; as given in a very interesting pamphlet by Epes W. Sargent, a well-known American writer.
The catalogue commences with a wand formerly belonging to Professor Anderson, the once famous “Wizard of the North.” Here are found also the wands used by the two Herrmanns (Carl and Alexander), Buatier de Kolta, Lafayette, Martin Chapender, Carl Willmann and others who tread the stage no more. As regards the living, there is here a memento of nearly every English-speaking conjurer of note: besides many others of cosmopolitan celebrity.
The wand here exhibited is not always the conventional ebony and ivory affair, some of the specimens being indeed of a highly original character. For instance, the wand contributed by a Hindu magician consists of the leg bone of a sacred monkey from the temple of Hanuman, the monkey god, at Benares. The wands of Madame Adelaide Herrmann and Chung Ling Soo take the shape of fans. Horace Goldin’s is a cut-down whip-handle, and those of Clement de Lion and Imro Fox are portions of one-while walking-sticks, promoted to a nobler use. Mr. J. N. Maskelyne’s “wand” is an ordinary file, which, from the inventor point of view, he regards as the greatest of wonder-working appliances.
My own contribution may claim to be of exceptional interest, not merely as being in itself a curio, but as a memento of a very remarkable man, so remarkable, indeed, that a brief notice of his career may be interesting. It was presented to me by Professor Palmer, a gentleman who was not, like myself, a bogus professor, but the real thing, and withal an exceptionally eminent man. Skill in sleight-of-hand was the least of his accomplishments. He had a marvellous gift of tongue, there being scarcely a European or Oriental language with which he was not thoroughly familiar. He was born at Cambridge in 1840, and from his earliest years showed indications of his peculiar gift for acquiring languages. As a school-boy he made friends among the gipsies, and learned to speak their queer language so perfectly as to deceive even those to whom it was their native tongue. In later life it was a favourite joke of his to saunter, in company with his equally accomplished friend, Leland, into some gipsy encampment where they were not known, and after paying their footing by having their fortunes told, to ask some of the nomads gathered round the fire, to talk a little Rommany for their benefit. Gipsies are chary of speaking Rommany except among their own people, and the inquisitive strangers were frequently told that there was no such language; whereupon, one of them would turn to the other, and in purest Rommany quietly express an opinion that their temporary hosts were not thorough-bred gipsies, but of some inferior stock. This produced Rommany in plenty, and the visitors were energetically taken to task for that, being themselves gipsies, they should ape the dress and manners of the Gorgio. A friendly explanation made all end happily.
Palmer made his first start in life as a clerk in the City of London, where in his spare time he made himself master of French and Italian. A little later he took up the study of Persian, Arabic and Hindustani, and speedily conquered them. In 1867, after taking his degree at the University of Cambridge, he was elected a Fellow by his College, an honour conferred on him in recognition of his mastery of the Oriental languages. During the years 1868-1870 he was employed on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund, to make a survey of Mount Sinai, in the course of which he became upon friendly and indeed almost brotherly terms with many of the wild Arab tribes, among whom he was known as the Sheikh Abdullah. As in England he had been made free of the gipsy tent, so in Palestine he could drop in upon many a Bedouin encampment, and be sure of a hearty welcome. His skill in sleight-of-hand, which he had in the first instance taken up merely as a pastime, proved to be of immense service to him in his desert wanderings; adding not only to his popularity but frequently gaining for him the prestige of a genuine magician, and thereby increasing his influence.
In 1871 he was appointed to the professorship of Oriental languages at Cambridge, his official title being the Lord High Almoner’s Reader of Arabic. In 1882, in anticipation of the Arabi trouble in Egypt, he was entrusted by the then Government with the difficult and dangerous task of winning over the Sinaitic tribes, and preventing the threatened destruction of the Suez Canal.
His first trip, extending from Gaza to Suez, was carried out successfully, but on penetrating farther into the desert, he and his two companions, Captain Gill, R.E., and Lieutenant Charrington, R.N., fell into the hands of a tribe to whom Palmer was unknown, and were barbarously put to death. Happily, their bodies were recovered, and received from the nation the posthumous honour of burial in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The wand presented to me by Professor Palmer is a curiosity in many ways. It is made of acacia wood (the “shittim” wood of the Old Testament) brought by Palmer himself from Mount Lebanon. Around it, in spiral form, is inscribed an invocation from the Koran, in Arabic characters. The writing of the inscription is a genuine work of art, having been executed as a special favour to Palmer, by Hassoun, an eminent professional “scribe.”
I am reluctantly bound to admit that the Palmer wand, in my hands, did not exhibit any special magical virtues, and when I ceased myself to use it, it seemed to me that it could not find a worthier home than in Dr. Ellison’s fine collection.
Reverting for a moment to the subject of patter, I will conclude by quoting, for the amusement rather than the instruction of the reader, an oration which (with variations) now and then formed my introductory boniment, and might on occasion still serve, in default of better.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, and members of the Royal Family, if any happen to be present, I am about to exhibit for your amusement, a few experiments in Unnatural Philosophy, otherwise Magic.
“Magic in the olden times was a very different thing, as I daresay you know, from what it is at present. In those days every respectable wizard kept a familiar spirit: a sort of magical man of all work. He cleaned the boots and knives, and when his master gave a show, it was the familiar who worked all his miracles for him. The magician only did the talking, and pocketed the takings. But the familiar did much bigger things than that. If his master’s next-door neighbour made himself disagreeable, the familiar would hoist him up and drop him in the water-butt, or into the Red Sea, according to order. If the magician wanted a week at the seaside, he had no need to pay railway fare. The familiar would just pick him up, house and all, and land him gently in the middle of the mixed bathing. The only drawback was that, sooner or later, a time came when there was no performance, because the magician had been carried off by his familiar on a pitchfork.
“As the French say, nous avons changé tout cela. Familiars are as extinct as the dodo. Perhaps it’s as well, but it makes it very much harder to be a magician. In the first place you must know all about astrology, anthropology, Egyptology and all the other ologies. You must be well posted in mathematics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and numismatics. You must know all about clairvoyance, palmistry and thought reading, sympathy and antipathy, magnetism, mesmerism, wireless telegraphy, X rays and all the other kinds of rays. Of course you must be well up in Greek and Latin, and a little Hebrew, not to mention a few other things which I forget for the moment, but I won’t stop to think of them now. When you have studied these little matters fourteen hours a day for nine or ten years, you will be as ‘chock-full of science’ as old Sol Gills himself, and you will be able to do all sorts of wonderful things, some of which I hope to show you this evening.
“Before I begin, there is just one little matter I should like to mention. You hear people talk about the quickness of the hand deceiving the eye. I don’t know whether the quickness of the hand ever does deceive the eye, but I want you to understand that you must not expect anything of that sort from me. I am naturally slow. I was born twenty minutes after I was expected, and I have been getting slower and slower ever since.
“To-night, I intend to do everything even more slowly than usual: so that you will only have to watch me closely to see exactly how it is all done. Then, when you go home, if you do as I do, and say as I say, without making any mistakes, no doubt you will be able to produce the same results. If not, there must be ‘something wrong with the works.’”
[20] Since this was written Dr. Ellison has passed into the mysterious beyond.
A FEW WRINKLES[21]
Every conjurer who has in him, as all conjurers should have, the creative instinct of the artist, and aims therefore at putting something of himself into his work, must of necessity be to some small extent an amateur mechanic. The hints which follow are addressed to the reader in that capacity. I have no pretension to teach him how to do things in the way of construction, but merely to make the doing of them easier. Though relating to matters in themselves small, the “tips” which follow may safely be said to come within the scope of Captain Cuttle’s celebrated counsel, “when found make a note of.” It often happens that the amateur mechanic has to take considerable trouble and pains in procuring some special requirement, while there is already on sale, at small cost, just the thing he wants, if he only knew what to ask for, and where to get it. The paragraphs which follow will, in some at any rate of such cases, supply the needful information.
1. For woodwork on a small scale, an old cigar box will often be found suitable material. Where such a box is not available or not suitable for the particular work in hand, what is called “three-ply” may supply the need. This consists of three layers of thin wood glued together under pressure, with the grain of the intermediate layer running crossway to that of the other two, the tendency to warp being thereby greatly reduced. Drawing-boards are, for this reason, now usually made of wood so combined, and a drawing-board makes for many purposes a good enough extempore work-bench. For a finer class of work, the amateur mechanic, if he is willing to take the trouble, may make his own three-ply. For this purpose he should procure a supply of what is called “knife-cut” veneer, i.e., thin sheets of walnut, mahogany, satin,—or other hard wood, and glue them together with the white glue to be presently described. Veneer merchants form a distinct trade, and are comparatively few in number, but the resident in London can obtain veneer and thin woods of all descriptions from Messrs. McEwan & Son, 282 Old Street, E. C. In country districts the shops which hold agencies for “Hobbies” materials also sell planed-up woods of various kinds, ranging like veneer from one-sixteenth to half an inch in thickness.
2. As a handy substitute for glue, most people are acquainted with the virtues of Seccotine, in its way a most useful preparation. But there are many purposes for which Seccotine is too aggressively viscous, while ordinary paste is not adhesive enough. In such cases I can strongly recommend Pastoid, a composition midway between glue and paste. For all purposes for which paste (in small quantity) is ordinarily used, Pastoid may be substituted with advantage. I myself came across it accidentally two or three years ago, “since when,” like the gentleman in the soap advertisement, “I have used no other.” The maker is Henry Roberts, Middlesborough, but it should be obtainable of any up-to-date stationer or fancy dealer. It is supplied in glass jars, at sixpence and a shilling.
3. Where an actual glue, of fine quality, is needed, procure sheet gelatine, to be had of any grocer. Cut into small pieces and melt in an ordinary gluepot using water enough to make the resulting solution about as thick as ordinary gum water. It should be used as near boiling point as possible, and the joined surfaces left to dry under the heaviest pressure available. A joint made with this glue is practically invisible.[22]
4. For dividing up thin stuff (wood or cardboard), into rectangular slabs, the handiest tool is the “cutting gauge.” This is practically identical with the better known “marking gauge,” save that the “marker” is replaced by a little spade-pointed cutter. This tool is only available for cutting wood up to say eight inches in width, but to the amateur attempting small work only, it will be found invaluable.
5. For staining wood or cardboard a deep dead black I have found nothing better than the “Record Jet Stain,” manufactured by the Record Polish Company, Eccles, Manchester. It is normally designed for staining leather only, the makers not having apparently realised its usefulness in other directions. It is to be had of any dealer in leather goods, in twopenny and sixpenny bottles. In many cases I have found it best to rub it in with a pad, rather than to apply it with a brush, but this will of course depend largely on the nature of the article to be treated.
6. An excellent polish for use after staining, or for other purposes, is made by dissolving white wax in turpentine, to the consistency of cream. Applied sparingly, with plenty of friction to follow, this produces a clean hard gloss, free from the stickiness which is sometimes left after the use of other polishes.
7. For enamelling small articles use Maurice’s Porceleine (the makers of which are Walter Carson & Sons, Grove Works, Battersea, S. W.) procurable at “oil and colour” men in tins from three-halfpence upwards.
8. For any article to be made of flat card or mill-board, without folding or bending, preference should be given to “Bristol” board, sold by artists’ colour-men. This is somewhat more expensive but is stiffer and harder and has a better surface than the commoner articles.
9. For joining wood to wood without glue where there is no great thickness to be penetrated, “needle-points,” procurable of any ironmonger, will be found useful. These are stout eyeless needles, of very brittle steel, about two inches in length. To use them, bore with a fine bradawl a hole partially through the wood, then drive in the needle-point by gentle tapping with a hammer, and when it has penetrated the desired depth snap off all that remains above the surface.
10. Also useful for many purposes are what are called by drapers “blanket” pins. These are of brass, and a card of such pins in three sizes, ranging from two to three inches in length and varying proportionately in thickness, may be bought for a penny. Pins a trifle shorter and thinner than the above are known as “laundry” pins. Apart from their normal uses, pins of these kinds are very useful for bending into hooks, or to cut up into short lengths of stiff straight wire for pivots or otherwise.
11. For all effects dependent upon a thread pull use, in place of ordinary thread, plaited silk fishing line. This is procurable of any sports’ outfitter or fishing tackle dealer, in twenty and forty yard lengths, and in half a dozen grades of thickness, the finest being not much thicker than a hair line. The breaking strain of this is much greater than that of ordinary thread, and it has the further advantage that being plaited instead of twisted it does not unroll or “kink” in use. Allcock, of Redditch, a name familiar to all anglers, is a noted maker of such line, but he has no monopoly of its manufacture. It is usually sold white, but may be easily dyed any desired colour.
For this last valuable “tip” I am again indebted to my often-quoted friend, Mr. Holt Schooling, who, as an enthusiastic angler, is an expert as to lines of all descriptions. The reader will find numerous instances of the practical use of such line in the earlier part of this book.
A good way of dyeing line is to thread a needle on to one end, and pass it by the aid of the needle through one corner, moistened with the appropriate dye, of a soft sponge, and then back again through the dry part of the sponge to clean off any excess of moisture. When dry, if necessary, repeat the process.
12. Square envelopes, for the purpose of forming “nests” or otherwise, are now and then needed by the conjurer, but envelopes precisely square (save the small variety known as “pence” envelopes) are not kept in “stock” by stationers in the ordinary way. When such are needed the readiest plan is to take an envelope of the long “bag” shape and shorten it to an exact square, closing the lower end as before. Envelopes of the above kind are procurable in many varieties of paper, and in widths ranging by various fractions of an inch from four inches upwards.
13. To make a line, thick or thin, run freely over a pulley-wheel or through an eyelet, use as a lubricant powdered talcum, otherwise known as French chalk. This is equally useful for minimising friction between wooden surfaces, or between wood and metal, say between a pulley-wheel and the pivot on which it turns. Where the slight extra cost is not an obstacle the use of ivory as the material of a pulley-wheel secures the perfection of easy running.
It is, I trust, hardly necessary to say that wherever I have mentioned an article to be had by purchase, my recommendation is based solely upon practical experience of its merits. I have no interest, direct or indirect, in any of the articles mentioned, and my knowledge of their manufacturers is derived solely from their respective labels.
[21] This book having been written primarily with a view to British readers, some of my recommendations will naturally be of no value to my American friends, but I have not thought it necessary to delete them. L. H.
[22] For the information contained in this paragraph, as also that relating to the use of Veneers I am indebted to Mr. Holt Schooling, who is an expert in such matters. My own essays in the direction of fancy cabinet-making have for the most part been limited to rough models to be reproduced in finished shape by more practised hands.