“SAKALL: Who sez it’s joint hallucination? Hoo, hoo! If it vas any kind of hallucination—I’m not saying it is, now—it vould be peyote. Or jimson veed, mebbe….

“This interesting conversation goes on for an hour and a half. There are no cuts. The Midget is active the whole time, reacting to the many subtle and now and then dazzling points presented. Occasionally the horses will shit in the dust. It is not clear if the Midget knows that his reality is being discussed. Another of this film’s artful ambiguities. Finally, Rathbone and Sakall agree that the only way to settle the argument is to kill the Midget, who gathers their intention and runs off screaming down the street. Sakall laughs so hard he falls off his horse into the horse trough, and we get a final closeup of Rathbone smiling, in his uncertain way. Fade up song:

When you’re out there feelin’ fine,

It’ll turn you into swine,

If you ever get a taste of Doper’s Greed!”

There is a brief epilogue to this, with Osbie trying to point out that of course the element of Greed must be worked somehow into the plot line, in order to justify the title, but the film runs out in the middle of an “uh…”.

Katje by now is in a bewildered state, but she knows a message when she sees it. Someone, a hidden friend at “The White Visitation”—perhaps Silvernail himself, who’s been less than fanatically loyal to Pointsman and his lot—has planted Osbie Feel’s screen test deliberately here, where they knew she’d find it. She rewinds and runs the film again. Osbie is looking straight into the camera: straight at her, none of your idle doper’s foolery here, he’s acting. There’s no mistake. It is a message, in code, which after not too long she busts as follows. Say that Basil Rathbone stands for young Osbie himself. S. Z. Sakall may be Mr. Pointsman, and the Midget sheriff the whole dark grandiose Scheme, wrapped in one small package, diminished, a clear target. Pointsman argues that it’s real, but Osbie knows better. Pointsman ends up in the stagnant trough, and the plot/Midget vanishes, frightened, into the dust. A prophecy. A kindness. She returns to her open cell, gathers a few belongings in a bag, and walks out of “The White Visitation,” past the unclipped topiary hedges, growing back into reality, past peacetime’s returned madmen sitting gently in the sun. Once, outside Scheveningen, she walked the dunes, past the waterworks, past the blocks of new flats replacing the torn-down slums, concrete still wet inside its shuttering, with the same hope of escape in her heart—moved, a vulnerable shadow, so long ago, toward her rendezvous with Pirate by the windmill called “The Angel.” Where is he now? Is he still living in Chelsea? Is he even alive?