The lad started on his errand, but before he had gone many yards Wieland intervened, and called him back.
At this Ritchie, not unnaturally, was more furious than ever. Stamping his foot, he asked how dare Wieland countermand his order?
“Well,” answered the latter quite suavely, “I called the boy back in your own interest. If the policeman and fireman are sent into the maze to lug out the individual you think is inside there, the only result will be to make you the laughing-stock of everybody about the place.”
“Wait a minute, and I will show you,” he resumed. And going inside, Mr. Wieland presently returned with a big cage, in which was a red and green talking parrot.
Tableau!
After I got the “sack” from the Aquarium I started on my own, working a conjuring show at various empty shops in and round London. That is to say, I would bargain for the temporary tenancy of any likely-looking shop in a main thoroughfare that chanced to be vacant, and having secured it, I would then proceed to give a more or less continuous performance, charging a penny for admission.
My show consisted in a combination of conjuring and (alleged) hypnotism. With me as assistant I had a thin consumptive-looking youth, by name Freddie Andrews, whom I used to pretend to mesmerise, and he would then, on my commanding him to do so, drink paraffin oil with apparent gusto, eat with relish lighted candles and chunks of coal, and perform other similar antics.
This part of the show, I may state at once, was a fake. The upper part of the candle, which the lad ate, was carved out of an apple, and fitted with a wick made from an almond, and soaked in brandy to make it burn. The particular portion of the chunk of coal devoured by him was merely chocolate, deftly affixed to the genuine coal by myself at the moment of its being handed to him. While the paraffin oil was just plain water, poured into a bottle round the neck of which an oily paraffin rag was wrapped to make it smell when it was handed round amongst the audience for inspection.
Well, I was working a place on these lines in the Edgware Road one day towards the close of the year 1901, in the basement of a shop in which was a waxwork exhibition run by Mr. Louis Tussaud, when a man I knew slightly came to me in a great state of exhilaration and excitement. He had, he told me, secured a £35 a week contract for seven weeks for a conjuring and illusion turn at an entertainment called “Venice in Newcastle,” and which was to open at the Drill Hall there shortly before Christmas.
The bother of it was, he explained, that he knew nothing whatever of conjuring or illusions. He was under no illusion about that himself at all events. He had, he said, answered the advertisement in the Era newspaper at haphazard, setting forth his (purely imaginative) qualifications as an A1 wizard at great length, and very much to his surprise he had secured the contract. “Now,” he concluded, “what am I to do about it?”