“What!” I ejaculated; and dropping my cue, I ran off to his lodgings.
It was only too true. The big man was no more. He was, I was informed, sitting on the side of his bed singing “Love me and the world is mine,” when he suddenly gave a gasp and expired.
Knowing something from hearsay of the methods of German officialdom I expected trouble. Nor was I disappointed.
For four days I was kept running about from police station to police station, and from one official bureau to another. I answered about a million questions and filled up reams of official forms and papers. The police took possession of all the dead man’s effects, and but for the intervention of the American Embassy I should have been unable to recover a number of my “props” which he had in his room.
On the afternoon of the day he died they sent and took the body from his lodgings to the public mortuary. It was about the biggest job of the kind, I suppose, that they had ever undertaken. So heavy was he that he broke the police stretcher, and about a dozen of them had to carry the poor fellow bodily to the mortuary by grabbing hold of him here, there, and everywhere, the best way they could. At his funeral, too, about twelve men had to carry the specially made coffin in relays by means of hooks attached to the bottom. It was rather a gruesome “dead march.”
Towards evening of the day he died, tired out and dispirited, I sought the manager of the Winter Gardens, and told him of my loss. I expected sympathy, but I most certainly got none.
“Your giant has dropped down dead, has he?” remarked the manager. “That is a pity, because he is the best part of the show. You will of course now take very much less money to stop on? Is it not so?”
“Not much, I won’t!” I retorted hotly; for as a matter of fact the giant had very little to do with my show, which is essentially a one-man turn. He used to walk on at the end of my performance, in order to seat himself on a chair, which broke down under his weight. He then had to pretend to get angry and obstreperous, when the dwarf would march in and persuade him to go quietly after everyone else—including the stage hands—had failed. This always caused a lot of laughter, and constituted a good curtain, but that was about all. It had really nothing to do with my conjuring performance proper.
As a matter of fact, when I went on that night my show went just as well as it had done before, nor was there any falling-off afterwards. Nevertheless, at the end of my month’s engagement they stopped half my salary.
This was a serious matter for me, because I was due to appear on the Monday following at the Orpheum Fovarosi Theatre, Buda-Pesth, and what with the expenses connected with my giant’s funeral plus a run of ill luck at cards and racing, I didn’t have enough money left to pay the railway fares for myself, my company, and my wife and eldest daughter, who were accompanying me. Nor was there any time to get money from my bankers in England. The only thing I could manage, and that with a lot of difficulty, was to borrow just enough, at an exorbitant rate of interest, to pay the second-class fares, leaving us not even sufficient over with which to buy food on our long journey. I should add that I had engaged another giant in Berlin, but he insisted at the last moment on being paid £10 in advance before he would come to Buda-Pesth, and this put the finishing touch on my impecuniosity. My only consolation lay in the fact that the narrow wooden seats of the second-class car incommoded him far more than they did us people of normal size.