R. E. (Robert Edward) Francillon’s short story “No Conjuror,” transcribed and edited by Arthur O’Dwyer (2025).
This story was published in the Bendigo (Victoria, Australia) Advertiser on Saturday, March 11, 1893.
[All Rights Reserved]
[Now first published]
Our New Series.
Short Stories by Well-Known Authors.
R. E. Francillon,
Author of “Bounce Bahawder,”
“King or Knave,”
“Romance of the Law,” Etc.
“I’m really enjoying myself, Jack!” said the fat man with gold spectacles who sat at the end of the first form, just in front of the tiny stage. “I do like a thing to be prime, from a joint of beef down to a minister. And that fellow there is prime! Don’t you feel jealous, eh?”
“I?” asked his next neighbor—a slim man in a furred cloak and with long black hair, intent upon the jewels which adorned his singularly white and taper fingers. “Why, of all the bunglers—of all the imbeciles——”
“Aha—that’s it, Jack! He’s the primest of prime duffers; he’s the regular prize duffer. I never saw such a duffer in all my days; I never dreamed there was such a duffer in this duffling world. Did you see how he muffed that last trick? Why, it couldn’t have taken a baby in arms.”
“It ought not to be allowed,” said the other, solemnly. “It is a degradation of art”—he spoke with a slight foreign manner—“when it shall be practised like there. I shall go away. I shall not sit upon needles and pins any more.”
“No; don’t go yet. It’s too—Holloa!”
A silver coin, which ought to have remained comfortably hidden in the performer’s palm, fell with a ring upon the stage, whence it rolled to the floor of the booth, to be pounced upon by a quick-eyed urchin, and held up in derisive triumph before it was pocketed. The poor conjuror, instead of being ready with a jest to turn the laugh, stammered something inaudibly, and bowed his head to the storm.
”Try back, Tommy!” someone cried from the back of the booth. “Dogged does it! Better luck next time.”
It was lucky the storm was of nothing worse than chaff; for the man of the stage was evidently not more of a hero than he was of a genius. He was a pale, lank, hungry-looking fellow, of no particular age, with dull black eyes, and dressed as a juggler in shabby tights which, in his case, could be called such only by courtesy. And, despite his calling, it was only too painfully evident that he was a shy man; and a juggler had better be even short-fingered than shy—especially before an audience of noisy lads and lasses fresh from the ready repartee of the cheap-jack, and from the brazen sublimity of the travelling doctor. For it was Horchester Mop, or Pleasure-fair, when the farm servants came from all the country round for their yearly hiring, and thought nothing too grand for them—not even the Horchester ale.
The theatre into which those who still had a copper or two to spare had found their way, attracted by such a promising because such awfully crackjaw announcement as “The marvellous magical mysteries of Signor Tommazoni, Prince of Prestidigitation and Lion of Legerdemain,” was a common booth of boards, which had come apparently nowhence last night, and would doubtless depart nowhither to-morrow. The two visitors who had strayed into such a stifling and beer-reeking place from out of the world of furred coats and gold-rimmed glasses, were true flies in amber among the nut-cracking audience of yokels in smock frocks and corduroys and their womankind. Perhaps it was having the faces of two such unaccustomed critics not more than a couple of yards from the three candles which did duty for foot-lights that made the performance so poor for even a booth at a fair.
Poor it was, beyond question. The tricks were of the stalest sort—every wandering mountebank’s commonest stock-in-trade; and yet few went without mishap, and none without a clumsiness that naturally grew worse and worse as the poor juggler plodded on.
There must have been cause for pity, somewhere. Whether it was through fault or misfortune, it could not be without sad reason that the hungry-looking creature in spangles was taking on such grossly false pretences the coppers of boors, who did not think it worth while even to punish him, save by derision.
The fat man chuckled at every misadventure; the slim man shuddered and sneered; the yokels chucked about their nut-shells and gaffawed.
There was cause for pity: how much—how much through fault, how much through misfortune—the poor juggler knew only too well. It was one of those moments when, whether it be before the Parliament of an Empire or in a booth at a fair, Genius bursts forth and asserts itself; and none knew better than Signor Tommazoni himself that he had no more genius than the gaping yokel who had just thrown the walnut which narrowly missed his nose. Not even so much; for had Signor Tommazoni thrown the nut, ten to one it would not have gone so near.
All at once Signor Tommazoni’s nose, which was rather longer than they wore noses in those parts, took the fancy of the audience, and proved an irresistible temptation to the owners of walnuts.
”It’s all up, now,” he thought to himself desperately, as he dodged his head to avoid the missiles. “They won’t stop at nuts; they’ll have the booth down. . . . . If I could”—a well aimed crack over the eyebrow—“If I could only gain five minutes to get clear away! I have it: I’ll do what one-eyed Boswell did when he dodged the constable. Ay—he set them all staring for something that was to happen when he came back; and for aught I know they’re staring and waiting still.”
So, with his feeble cunning, as feeble as his conjuring, he planned a plan; as if he could hope to emulate a one-eyed Boswell in craft any more than a Houdin in sleight of hand.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said he, with his hand on his heart, and letting the walnuts fly as they listed—in husky voice indeed, but with irreproachable accent—“Ladies and gentlemen, every prestidigitateur knows that there are times when the Deuce plays himself with the tricks; and of those times this is one. If you will kindly condescend to keep your nuts in your pockets for five seconds by your gold repeating chronometers, I will show you something you have never seen before, and which I defy the very Deuce himself to spoil. . . . . Thank you! that was an uncommon fine nut, but uncommon hard!” His struggle to be smart and spirited was pitiable to see. “I’ll ask this gentleman in the front stalls to step on the stage and hold it between his finger and thumb. I’ll retire for one minute to perform certain incantations, and when I come back—when I come back, I say—I’ll crack that nut, and if you’re not surprised by what comes out, why all I can say is, I shall be! May I ask you, my lord, if your lordship will be so kind?”
The gentleman in the fur cloak seemed unwilling enough to stand up before such a sea of grins with a walnut between his finger and thumb.
But “go up, Jack!” cried his fat friend, slapping him between the shoulders; and there was such a chorus of “Ay, go up Jack!” that he was fain to obey. There he stood like a sign-post, with outstretched arm, holding out the nut so that all the booth could see.
“Now let no lady nor gentleman take their eyes off that walnut,” said Signor Tommazoni, nervously; for he felt he must escape now or never. . . . . Horror! It flashed into his mind that his only coat, on which he relied to cover his tights and spangles, and his hat, were in the front of the house; that the coat was keeping the treasurer from catching cold, and that the hat was serving for the treasury.
He was a mouse with but one hole; and that moment of dismay closed it for him.
“Time’s up, Tommy! Blaze away!” called upon him to make his final and crushing failure. Well—he might as well go through some sort of a form.
“Throw the nut among the company, my lord, when I say three,” he panted with a ghastly effort at a smile. “Hocus pocus—hey presto—one; two; three!”
The man in the cloak spun the nut into the air—all eyes watched it falling—when lo, when in mid air, it burst, and out of it flew a full grown pigeon, which circled thrice round the booth and then settled on the hand of the thrower still out-stretched in amaze.
A full sized live pigeon out of a common walnut bought in the fair and chosen at hazard! It took the audience a breathless moment to realise what an impossible thing had been done. But not one there was so utterly amazed as the conjuror, who stood the most open-mouthed of them all.
“Jack,” whispered the fat man to his friend, in a changed and serious voice, “did you ever see or hear of that trick before? It wasn’t one of your own?”
“Bah—a wretched trumpery,” said the other with a scowl. “No grace—no finish.”
“Ah. But do you know how it was done?”
“No, nor care.”
“Do you mean to say that you, Professor Demidoff, let yourself be made the accomplice of a mountebank at a fair without seeing through any trick in his whole box? He couldn’t have changed nuts without your knowing it, eh?”
“Absurd.”
“He couldn’t have palmed off a property nut for a real one on you?”
“Bah!”
“Then all I can say is that that fellow there is a genius, and the way he led up to a trick like that by pretending to be a duffer is the cleverest thing I ever saw.”
“And I say it was an ugly trick!” said the other. “A trick which no professor of self-respect will let himself perform. I shall go. I like not these vulgar places. I go.”
“Talk of a woman’s jealousy—why it’s nowhere,” thought the fat man, as he made his way into the hut behind the booth which served for green-room, dressing-room, property-room, and refreshment-room; and likely enough for sleeping-room as well. The litter was indescribable, the light was dim, and the stifling air was full of frowsy odors. Its only occupant was a small figure wrapped in a green great coat with an occasional brass button, counting coppers out of an old felt hat into a tambourine. As the visitor stumbled over a pewter pot, the little figure started up and faced round fiercely.
“Get out of this!” cried the shrill voice of a very small girl standing well in front of her treasure. “You walk your chalks this minute, or as sure as my name’s Patty I’ll call the police and have you jugged as sure as you stand there.”
“It’s all right,” said the visitor, rubbing his knee, which he had knocked against a small table with its three feet in the air, and looking into the little brown face, half smothered in black elf locks, from which flashed an angry pair of big black eyes, “I’m not after the treasury, my dear. I want to speak to Signor Tommazoni—that’s all.”
“Business or pleasure?” asked Patty, after looking the intruder through and through. “ ’Cos if it’s pleasure, I’m not going to let him out to-night; and ’cos if it’s business, you’ll please apply to me.”
“My dear, you give me a strong impression that—in my own interest—I’d best apply to Signor Tommazoni. Don’t be afraid——”
“Don’t mind the child, sir,” said the Signor himself, suddenly appearing from somewhere. “She’s much too saucy; but”—he tapped his forehead, in the way used to signify want of wits—“and that’s not her fault, poor little thing. I hope you and your friend were pleased?”
“We were delighted. Business pretty brisk, eh? No? Ah, I’m sorry to hear that; but it’s the way with us all. Is this concern your own?”
Signor Tommazoni—who had the air of being in a dream—shook his head and sighed.
“It’s been a bad spec, governor. The man that had this booth and things before me swore there was a fortune in it; I gave him five pounds for the concern that I’d saved——”
“That I’d saved, Uncle Tom,” said Patty sharply.
“And the end of it is,” said the Signor, not heeding her, “that the five pound’s gone and nothing else has come.”
“Just like a man!” said the child. “You’re all alike. You all think yourselves so clever in the things you’re stupidest in. Uncle Tom’s a first-class conjuror; but when he makes a bargain without my advice—you see!”
“Nothing of the sort. The man that ran this concern did make a fortune, for he told me so himself. He had a gold watch and stood drinks all round! But luck was against me from the start. For the last month we’ve been eating and drinking the apparatus, bit by bit, till there’s nothing left to do a decent trick with—and if you were in the same line, I’d let you have the whole concern as it stands for three half-crowns.”
“Four,” struck in Patty, promptly.
“No need to haggle,” said the visitor, waving his hand, as if half-crowns were trifles. “I am in the same line. I suppose you’ve heard of Piper’s Theatre of Varieties. I’m Piper.”
“Bless my soul!” exclaimed the Signor, far more awed than if the other had said, “I’m the Prince of Wales.”
“You come to me at the King’s Head to-morrow morning at ten sharp, and I’ll engage you at a salary. Done. Good night.”
“Oh, Uncle Tom!” cried the girl, throwing her arms round the conjuror’s neck. “Hurrah!”
“There!” said Signor Tommazoni. “Didn’t I tell you so. Didn’t I say there was a fortune in this show—didn’t I say so from the beginning? As if you could know anything about investing and that sort of a thing—a bit of a child like you! Ah—genius is a wonderful thing; it’s safe to be found out in time. It’s thrown away among the yokels; but a man like Piper—he knows! And I wasn’t at my best, either——”
“It was that pigeon trick that fetched ’em, Uncle Tom. However was it done?”
“Pigeon trick? There wasn’t any pigeon trick. One would think you were daft, Patty. How much have you got in that hat?”
“Eighty-one browns; six-and-nine.”
“Then a man with a place at Piper’s can afford some beer!”
It is, I presume, unnecessary to explain that the name of Tommazoni was not inherited by the Prince of Prestidigitation from his father, any more than that he had not been born to his Italian prefix under Italian skies. Nor would it be entertaining to investigate his history; because for a vagabond to be interesting he must be a true vagabond by nature and not by accident, with the adventurous zest about him which, be he duke or dustman, makes him a vagabond in soul. Signor Tommazoni had only drifted helplessly into vagabondage; his heart was with the flesh-pots, though he had well nigh forgotten their flavor. He could do almost everything, and everything almost equally badly. Conjuring, fiddling, singing, ventriloquising, reciting, verse-making, whistling, tumbling—it would be hard to tell in which he was the most complete, though unconscious, imposter. Of course he prided himself on all his accomplishments; but none so much as on his worldly wisdom and his capacity for affairs. So complete was his self-belief on that score that there was but one act of his life of which he was ashamed on the ground of imprudence and feeble good nature. It was when, in a moment of weakness for which he could never manage to account to himself, he promised a poor lone gypsy woman whom he chanced to find dying by the way-side, that he would not let her little girl starve.
It was indeed a rash promise, for it was often more than he could manage to find enough for one mouth, not to speak of two. Nevertheless, trouble though she was to a wandering bachelor, Patty was useful to him in a way. He could always tell himself that if it was not for her he would have been another Piper. It must be somebody’s fault that he was not; and the notion that one’s failure can be one’s own fault is notoriously incompatible with common sanity. That she was a born simpleton was clear, for she had not a notion or an opinion that was not the exact opposite of his own.
“If I’d not been fool enough to make that stupid promise, I should be a second Professor Demidoff!” he used to say to himself twenty times a day.
Such had been his life till he found himself all of a sudden tumbled into a good engagement at Piper’s with liberal advances of salary for outfit and for support till the date fixed for his first appearance. That he had been engaged on his merits he never doubted for a moment; of something unaccountable having happened at an awkward crisis he had a hazy notion, but no clear recollection, and he was so accustomed from his infancy to the phenomena of mental muddle that he took it for the natural condition of the human mind. Something very clever had happened; but every conjuror knows that tricks do not perform themselves, and whatever he had done once on the inspiration of the moment, he would no doubt be able to do again.
So do people reason—as if the cleverest things we do are ever done by themselves; as if anybody really knew anything at all.
Signor Tommazoni’s first appearance was not to take place till after Professor Demidoff’s last, so that their attractions might be properly economised; so for that short space he had nothing to do, and he did it to perfection.
He was thus congenially occupied when one day—it was at Flaxbury, when the change of bill was to be made—he received, at his lodging, a visit from the Professor in person. It was a real honor. A call from the Lord Chancellor upon a briefless barrister would not have been a greater.
Nothing, however, could have been more affable than the great man; nor did he, who was popularly supposed to have drunk champagne with crowned heads, show himself in the least too proud for gin and water with a man who had been a common juggler at a fair. So far from showing any of the jealousy of which Mr. Piper had imagined the traces, he praised the Signor’s talent with effusion, and at last, having delicately led up to the point, observed:—
“But between true artists there are no secrets, my dear friend. It is only the charlatans who must make a mystery. How do you make a pigeon fly out of a walnut? Is it the same way as I?”
Dimly it dawned back upon Signor Tommazoni that this was what he had done when he had intended to do nothing. He must have done it; therefore it would be childish to say he did not know how. Yet he might have said it, had not Patty broke in:—
“If you’ll tell us your way, we’ll tell you ours.”
“You are sharp!” said the Professor. “But there is no harm to tell me. I never perform in England more. I go to Europe, Asia, Africa and America; and everywhere I say, “This is the grand trick of Signor Tommazoni, the grandest conjuror of the world, with the cleverest tricks, and the prettiest little girl.”
Signor Tommazoni scratched his head, and then shook it so feebly, that anybody would think it was obstinately. Patty shook hers scornfully, and went on sewing as if compliments were not worth having.
The Professor looked wrathful for a moment. But nothing could have been sweeter than the tone in which he said:—
“I want that trick, my dear friend. I will give ten pounds to know. No? Then twenty—that is handsome, eh?”
And so the bargain proceeded, till Professor Demidoff had offered no less a sum than five hundred pounds for the trick, while the big eyes of Patty, whose notions of finance had hitherto been bounded by pence, grew bigger still. But Signor Tommazoni was incomprehensibly obdurate. It was not that his artistic pride was proof against profit; it was that he for the first time clearly realised what the trick had been, and, at the same time, could not for the life of him remember doing it or how it was done. Yet, how, with any self-respect, could he give himself away by such an absurd confession?
“We will take it,” said Patty. “We will take five hundred pounds.”
“No!” exclaimed Signor Tommazoni, with most uncharacteristic energy, making the tumblers clatter and hurting his fist by the blow he gave the table. “I’ve had enough of your interference, Patty. I’ve got a good thing now—no thanks to you; and I’m going to keep it—so there. Much obliged for your company, Professor; but love nor money don’t get that trick out of me!”
But from that hour all the pleasure had died out of doing nothing. From unearthly hours of the morning, to still more unearthly hours of night, he sought and studied how to make a live pigeon seem to fly out of an apparently unbroken walnut in mid air till the price of nuts went up in Flaxbury; and every day he found himself farther and farther from the solution of a problem which never solved itself, save in some impossible manner in some feverish dream. In spite of his contempt for Patty’s intellect, he had never yet been cross with her; but now he seemed to treat her as if she was answerable for every failure—as if she were some fairy changeling, who made everything go wrong.
It made her very miserable; for if she was stupid, she was not the less affectionate, and she spent the whole of her time, when she was not marketing or mending, in wondering how she could bring back the times when she did not mind a snubbing at the expense of nothing more important than her brains.
She did not like Professor Demidoff; but he had seemly taken an immense liking to her—indeed he became quite loverlike in his attentions, and in his way of meeting her by accident when she went about her domestic errands. But, though he began his conversations with some high-flown nonsense or other, he invariably turned the talk upon him whom she called Uncle Tom. He took the line of her indignant champion against Uncle Tom’s tyrannical temper; he tried to rouse her into self-assertion; and at last one day, having prefaced the proposal with a brooch and a pair of earrings, he suggested that she should make common cause with him, as her only true friend, and that by spying, and coaxing, and any other treacherous means she could find with his help, Uncle Tom’s trick should become their own. He appealed to her curiosity; her interest; her vanity; her sense of wrong——
She threw the brooch and earrings in a handful into his face, turned her back, and stalked away with what would have been tragic dignity had she not been so small.
“Very well, Spitfire!” he growled after her. “If I am not to do that trumpery trick, neither shall he! He shall be No Conjuror, I tell you—No Conjuror, no more than you!”
Of course the man was devoured with jealousy and envy of a rival who was likely to throw him into the shade. But Patty, though she saw through the motive of his insult, began to be dismally afraid that the “No Conjuror” was a true bill. Could she do nothing to help Uncle Tom for old kindness’ sake? It was not likely; but she could try.
As the time drew near for the first appearance of Signor Tommazoni, Court Magician to the Grand Lama of Thibet, in his great Columbian Mystery, the agony of the Court Magician himself once more drew every day, then every hour, then every minute, nearer to despair. The trick had excited considerable public interest, for nobody was better skilled than Mr. Piper in those arts which are of more importance to a showman than the quality of his show, and he had made so big a hit with Signor Demidoff as to render it imperative that he should make a bigger with Signor Tommazoni.
Brilliant thought! He was really getting ill—why should he not be very ill, so ill, that the performance would have to be postponed? Alas for his brilliant thought!
“Very well,” said Mr. Piper, beaming at him through his gold spectacles. “Of course I don’t expect a man to perform when he can’t; but I do expect him to return me the advances I made him on the distinct understanding that he will!”
And those advances had been spent; and more besides.
And so brilliant evasion after brilliant evasion had to be dismissed by the man who dared not declare himself to be an imposter, until the day came, and the miserable farce would have to be played to the wretched end.
It was a very different audience from that of Horchester Mop; for there were country people as well as the best town-people in the stalls; and people with titles, and people with sharp and experienced eyes, and people who would be able to compare the new man with all the most famous conjurors who have mystified the world.
Signor Tommazoni was to make his début with his great trick, which was to be led up to by a carefully graduated programme of minor performances.
A little before the interesting minute, Professor Demidoff, fur-cloaked as usual, took his seat in the front row of the stalls, with such a look of triumph on his pale face that those who sat near took it for generous sympathy with the anticipated success of a rival.
It was an interesting departure from conventionalities, and an additional mystification, that Signor Tommazoni did not appear during the preparations for the trick, which he could thus have no appearance of controlling. A small girl, to whom long black hair and big black eyes gave a decidedly elfish look, carried a large bag of filberts round the hall—the nut-throwing, for obvious reasons, was not feasible here—and requested all who would to pick out a nut at random, asking each to see that it was whole and unbroken, and giving the empty bag to the nearest child before she went back to the stage.
“Now,” she said in her shrill treble, “all of you have common nuts; but one of them shall be turned into a wonderful nut. Which shall it be?”
There was dead silence for a moment; and then somebody called out “The Mayor,” and “The Mayor” was voted by acclamation.
“Then,” said the girl, “please the Mayor of Flaxbury to throw his nut into the air as high as he can.”
The Mayor, an elderly solicitor, looked a little shamefaced as he stood up to do what the girl ordered; but he was a sensible man, and he shot up his nut, as if he had been a boy again and it a marble.
Before it turned, it burst, and out rained a shower of blossoms, from which not one pigeon, but three, flew to the girl and settled, one on her head and one on each shoulder. The people picked up the blossoms—they were real; and every nut that was cracked produced nothing but a common kernel.
But, even before the applause could come—
“This isn’t conjuring—it’s Magic! The man who has done it is—is fastened up in his room, under lock and key!”
And Professor Demidoff sprang up and staggered hurriedly from the hall.
And then the applause came.
Sure enough, the poor conjuror was found a prisoner at his lodgings, locked into his room and with the key removed from the door. The Professor, he explained to the bewildered Mr. Piper, had visited him just before the hour for his début and had parted from him in the friendliest manner, turning the key and carrying it off, no doubt in one of those absent-minded fits to which artists of all kinds are so prone. But—
“It’s all right, Uncle Tom!” whispered Patty, with her arms round the neck of her incapable guardian. “I knew you’d never find out that trick, so I found it out myself, and–hush! don’t speak—they think it’s you, all the time.”
“It isn’t right!” said Uncle Tom—at last out and boldly, like a man. “So you’ve puzzled out this thing, which I don’t believe I ever did, even when I did it? Mr. Piper,” he said, half-proudly, half-sadly, to his employer and to those who had relieved him from his imprisonment, “Mr. Piper and gentlemen—I’m a humbug—I’m an ass. It’s Patty there that’s the genius and I beg her pardon before the lot of you. I’m no conjuror, not I.”
Her hand was over his mouth.
“What’s conjuring?” she said. “Stuff and rubbish; anybody can conjure that’s got two eyes and ten fingers. But it’s not everybody that would have bothered himself all these years with a—Me!”
Signor Tommazoni has retired from the profession, and has taken to composing comic operas which he cannot get performed. But there is no occasion for him to make money. For this is the story of the début of Mademoiselle Columba, whose supreme skill in White Magic has made other persons than Professor Demidoff suspect an alliance with other spirits than those of Patience and Gratitude.
How she performs her great pigeon trick she has never divulged, and never will, not even to Uncle Tom, or rather especially not to Uncle Tom, for she is a good business woman, and he would tell the world. And he never even asks—he has entirely surrendered his mind to hers, and considers her the wisest as well as the cleverest of all man and woman kind.
But how did he perform the trick, that once, that once only, and without knowing how? It may be that he was inspired by the excitement of despair, as in a dream; it may have been—a hundred things. One can but choose one’s nut at random; it will probably be the wrong one. But the magic of Gratitude and Patience will turn its kernel into Doves and Flowers, we may be sure.
[The End.]
The second half of the story (from “It is, I presume, unnecessary to explain...,” without section markings) — forming a perfectly comprehensible story on its own — was syndicated as a stereotype in two different paper sizes, indicated below as (S) and (M).
Gen. Skobeloff was working in his tent one evening near the Danube, or near a pond, when a Turkish bomb dropped at the threshold of his tent. The general had just time to see the sentry outside stoop down and throw the shell into the water. Skobeloff approached the soldier and said:
“Do you know you have saved my life?”
“I have done my best, General,” was the reply.
“Very well. Which would you rather have: the St. George’s cross or 100 roubles?”
The sentinel hesitated a moment and then said:
“What is the value of the St. George’s cross, my General?”
“What do you mean? The cross itself is of no value; it may be worth five roubles, perhaps, but it is an honour to possess it.”
“Well, my General,” said the soldier, “if it is like that, give me 95 roubles and the Cross of St. George!”