“In an extremely sophisticated way, which would take several hours to explain, I do.”

“Yes. Well, when the Devil is walking beside you, as he was walking beside me at that fair, it doesn’t take a lot of argument to make him seem real.”

“I won’t insult you by saying you’re a simple man, but you’re certainly a man of strong feeling, and your feelings take concrete shapes. What did the Devil do to you that you withheld when you were talking downstairs?”

“The whole nub of the story. When Willard gave me that quarter in the tent, we were standing behind the crowd, which was gaping at Andro who was showing his big right bicep while twitching his sumptuous left breast. Nobody was looking. Willard had slipped his hand down the back of my pants and gently stroked my left buttock. Gave it a meaning squeeze. I remember very well how warm his hand felt.”

“Yes?”

“I smiled up into his face.”

“Yes?”

“Is that all you have to say? Don’t you see what I’m getting at? I had never had any knowledge of sex, had never known a sexual caress before, even of the kind parents quite innocently give their children. But at this first sexual approach I yielded. I cosied up to Willard. How could I, without any true understanding of what I was doing, respond in such a way to such a strange act?”

“You were mad to learn his magic. It doesn’t seem very strange to me.”

“But it made me an accomplice in what followed.”

“You think that? And you still blame yourself?”

“What did I know of such things? I can only think it was the Devil prompting me, and pushing me on to what looked then, and for years after, like my own destruction.”

“The Devil isn’t a popular figure nowadays. The people who take him seriously are few.”

“I know. How he must laugh. I don’t suppose God laughs at the people who think He doesn’t exist. He’s above jokes. But the Devil isn’t. That’s one of his most endearing qualities. But I still remember that smile. I had never smiled like that before. It was a smile of complicity. Now where would such a child as I was learn such a smile as that?”

“From that other old joker, Nature, do you suppose?”

“I don’t take much stock in Nature … Thanks for coming in. Good-night, decent man.”

“Magnus, are you becoming sentimental in your old age?”

“I’m fully ten years younger than you, you sour Scot. Good-night, kind man.”

I went to my room, and to my bed, but it was a long time before I slept. I lay awake, thinking about the Devil. Many people would have considered my bedroom at Sorgenfrei a first-class place for such reflection, because so many people associate the Devil with a high standard of old-fashioned luxury. Mine was a handsome room in a corner tower, with an area of floor as big as that of a modest modern North American house. Sorgenfrei was an early-nineteenth-century construction, built by a forebear of Liesl’s who seemed to have something in common, at least in his architectural taste, with the mad King of Bavaria; it was a powerfully romantic Gothic Revival house, built and furnished with Teutonic thoroughness. Everything was heavy, everything was the best of its kind, everything was carved, and polished, and gilded, and painted to the highest possible degree, and everything would drive a modern interior decorator out of his tasteful mind. But it suited me splendidly.