“Well, would you be content to film the execution on a grey day? Wouldn’t you want a shot of the sun rising behind Whitehall as the sun of English monarchy was setting on the scaffold?”

Lind looked at me sadly. “How you scholars underestimate us artists,” he said, with wintry Scandinavian melancholy. “You think we are children, always beguiled by toys and vulgarities. When have you ever known me to stoop to a sunrise?”

“Besides, you don’t understand what we could do with all those wonderful pearly greys,” said Kinghovn.

“You will never persuade me to believe that truth is no more than what some artist, however gifted he may be, thinks is truth,” I said. “Give me a document, every time.”

“I suppose somebody has to write the document?” said Lind. “Has he no feeling? Of course he has. But because he is not used to giving full weight to his feelings, he is all the more likely to be deluded into thinking that what he puts into his document is objective truth.”

Ingestree broke in. “Eisengrim is coming back from tarting himself up for the next few shots,” he said. “And so far as his story is concerned, we might as well make up our minds that all we are going to get is his feeling. As a literary man, I am just pleased that he has some feelings. So few autobiographers have any feeling except a resolute self-protectiveness.”

“Feeling! Truth! Balls! Let’s get a few hundred good feet in the can before our star decides he is tired,” said Kinghovn. And that is what we did.

A good day’s filming put Magnus in an expansive mood. Ingestree’s flattery about the quality of his acting had also had its effect on him, and that night he gave us a gallery of impersonations.

“Charlie had his way, and I was soon on the show. Charlie was right; Abdullah pulled them in because people cannot resist automata. There is something in humanity that is repelled and entranced by a machine that seems to have more than human powers. People love to frighten themselves. Look at the fuss nowadays about computers; however deft they may be they can’t do anything that a man isn’t doing, through them; but you hear people giving themselves delicious shivers about a computer-dominated world. I’ve often thought of working up an illusion, using a computer, but it would be prohibitively expensive, and I can do anything the public would find amusing better and cheaper with clockwork and bits of string. But if I invented a computer-illusion I would take care to dress the computer up to look like a living creature of some sort—a Moon Man or Venusian—because the public cannot resist clever dollies. Abdullah was a clever dolly of a simple kind, and the Rubes couldn’t get enough of him.

“That was where Gus had to use her showman’s discretion. Charlie and Willard would have put Abdullah in a separate tent to milk him for twenty shows a day, but Gus knew that would exhaust his appeal. Used sparingly, Abdullah was good for years, and Gus took the long view. It appeared, too, that I was an improvement on the dwarf, who had become unreliable through some personal defect—booze, I would guess—and was apt to make a mess of the illusion, or give way to a fit of temperament and deal a low card when he should have dealt a high one. Willard had had no luck with Abdullah; he had bought the thing, and hired the dwarf, but the dwarf was so unreliable it was risky to put the automaton on the show, and then the dwarf had disappeared. It had been months since Abdullah was in commission, and so far as the show was concerned it was a new attraction.