The Man Who Was Magic Read Free Page B

shout that she was doing it on purpose.
    Often he would lose his temper and tweak her nose and she would be driven to retaliate by pulling his hair. Whereupon he would slap her, receive a kick in return and then there would be a tremendous uproar. Her father and mother would be furious and a punishment would follow. But somehow the punishment always seemed to fall upon Jane, sent to her room without supper, or no one speaking to her for a day, while Peter was let off lightly because of having been so provoked by that stupid bad-tempered girl.
    There had been a quarrel that very morning and it so happened that the night before at a meeting of the Council, who were also to be the panel of Judges at the trials for the Guild, Malvolio had been particularly troublesome and sarcastic. The Great Robert had got out of bed on the wrong foot in a black mood and more than usually impatient with his daughter. While he, Mrs. Robert and their son Peter mingled with the gay holiday makers in the Town Square, before the last elimination of candidates, Jane was shut up in a back room that looked out at ground level upon a narrow, cobbled alley.
    She was miserable and lonely but she was not feeling sorry for herself. That wasn’t Jane. She was lonely because there was nobody there, and unhappy because she was beginning to believe not only what her parents told her, but that she would never be a magician. Clumsy, stupid, ugly people certainly could not expect to go on the stage and be charming, handsome and clever.
    Now that she was locked in a room all by herself, with no one watching her, she had taken out the little red rubber balls and half shell which she had secretly borrowed from Peter’s room. She began to practice the multiplying balls routine that she had watched him do in which first one appeared between the fingers of his outstretched hand, then a second, a third and a fourth, seemingly coming from nowhere. The trick, of course, was that the half shell looked like one of the balls but really wasn’t.
    But she couldn’t make it work properly. Nothing seemed to go right that day and she kept dropping one or two which rolled under the chest or behind the sofa in a most uncooperative manner, until finally she just sat down in the middle of the floor and shed tears of exasperation. Not only was she awkward, ugly and all the other things they said about her, but she couldn’t even learn to do a simple bit of nimble fingerwork which her brother did almost like second nature.
    The truth was that her spirit was near to being broken and she was very close to giving up, which wasn’t like Jane either.
    Nor did she know that close by, in fact just around the corner and about to step into view of her window, was a stranger whose coming was to bring about the most extraordinary change in her life.

IV

    A DAM F INDS AN A SSISTANT
    “E xcuse me,” said Adam and saw that her face was tear-stained and that there were two tiny pools on the floor on either side of her. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said, “I hadn’t noticed that you were crying, or I shouldn’t have disturbed you. Are you in trouble? Is there anything I can do?”
    Jane was so surprised at the sight of the stranger framed in the window (she had not seen Mopsy yet, since he was out of sight below the sill) that she stopped weeping and reflected on what to reply. “Well, not really,” she said finally. “Except I’ve been locked in and made to stay at home all day because I’ve been naughty.”
    “I see,” said Adam, “and were you?”
    “I think so,” Jane replied, “I suppose I must have been, to make Daddy so cross. But it started when I was trying to help Peter—Peter’s my older brother—and he said I was only fit to assist a pig. And when I said that’s exactly what I was doing, he pinched me when nobody was looking. So of course I had to scratch him and then they were looking, and then . . .”
    “Quite,” said Adam, and Jane had the curious sensation