If I Were You (Stories from the Golden Age) Read online

  Little Tom was still so astonished that he stumbled going to the door. Somehow he got into his poncho and fumbled up the aisle. After a little he found he still gripped the paper in his minute hand and put it away. He was upset to such an extent that he went down the train, not remembering to get off and seek his own car.

  And so it was that he opened the door to Hermann Schmidt’s private car and was halfway down it before he realized where he was. And then it was too late!

  Hermann Schmidt, as ringmaster and tacit governor of Johnson’s Super Shows, was known to have the temper of a Prussian drill sergeant and, as a near giant, could afford to give it vent. He was sitting at a writing table, checking piles of currency into a capacious tin box. So pleasant did the task appear that not until the door—held for a time by the hydraulic shock absorber—closed did he realize that his sanctum sanctorum had been invaded.

  Schmidt whirled like a bull suddenly stabbed from behind and came half to his feet, gripping the chair as though about to hurl it. But he looked in vain for a moment, for he instinctively searched a level about two feet over Little Tom’s head, where a normal man’s face would have been. And then he saw Little Tom who, in this crisis, was paralyzed by the ringmaster’s terrible wrath, which seemed all out of proportion to so small a crime.

  With a hair-singeing oath in German, Schmidt expressed both relief and rage. He lunged forward and grabbed Little Tom by the front of his poncho, lifting him bodily three feet off the floor as he might a sawdust doll.

  “So! You are spying!”

  And Little Tom was shaken so violently that he could not have answered even if Schmidt’s grip and the resulting strain on the poncho were not choking him. Little Tom, even in this instant of terror, could not comprehend why Schmidt should be so mad.

  “You think this is a runway! You come in! Maybe you think you own the show? Maybe you just bought it! Maybe Mrs. Johnson just to you gave it! A lesson you need, you tenth of a human being!”

  And as though he was putting out a cat, he rushed to the vestibule, Little Tom dangling high, and with a final, ferocious shake, lifted him over the edge and let him fall the eight feet down into the mud.

  Little Tom was stunned. He could hear Schmidt’s voice, far away, bidding him to let himself be taught so to walk around the next time he came to this car.

  Dimly he saw Schmidt up on the car platform, much as a drowning sailor might have seen the Colossus of Rhodes. Little Tom dazedly pried himself out of the mud. His shoulder was full of lightning and he could barely support even his meager weight upon his twisted ankle. In him a rage was kindled, to run along like a dot of fire eating the length of a fuse. A fuse which was to burn for weeks ere it reached the dynamite.

  If I have to be a midget another minute,” cried Little Tom Little, “I’ll—I’ll use a stretcher on myself!”

  And indeed he sounded very desperate, sitting there on his stage in the heat of the newly deserted tent. Somewhere at hand the circus band was oompahing in preparation for the entrance of Gordon—“the wuruld’s gr-r-r-atest wil’ animal trainah who performs the suicidal feat of putting through their paces ta-wenty feerocious tigahs from Bengal and ta-wenty man-eating lions, all at one and the same time. Ladees and gennulmun—”

  Little Tom Little winced as the faraway spiel reached him. How he hated cats!

  Maizie was putting away their paraphernalia and looking sad. Only an inch taller than Little Tom Little, she felt that his recriminations against his own lot somehow damned hers. And then, too, he was handsome and he had wit, and tiny though he was, there existed no better showman in the gypsy camp than himself.

  “I’m sick of it!” said Little Tom with even greater emphasis.

  “But why?” said Maizie, shutting down the lid of the small trunk and making things ready for the next act. “You’re a genius, Tommy. Of all the sideshows, yours and mine draws best. You know how to keep them—”

  “Keep them!” shouted Tommy, leaping up to all his thirty inches of height. “Who wants to keep them? Who wants to stand up here day after day with them packed up against this stage, rubbering and giggling and sweating and saying, ‘Ain’t he cute, Joe?’ ‘Ain’t she the dearest thing, Martha?’ Why do they like us? I’ll tell you why. Because we’re freaks! It isn’t because we’re good. It isn’t because I give them a show. I’m a freak, see? A freak!”

  The outburst subsided and he sank back into the small chair. Some of the other attractions glanced toward him from their remote platforms. Maizie patted his shoulder consolingly.

  “Tommy, it’s better to be the best midget star in the world than a failure as a big person.”

  “It’s not! I’d rather dig ditches, if I could stand up and look my fellow man in the eye instead of examining his shins!”

  “But, Tommy, that’s senseless! No matter how hard you wish it, it will never come true. You’re a midget and a very handsome one, and you’re an artist—”

  “How do I know I’m an artist? No matter how I work my act, I’ll never know that. I’m ‘cute’ and ‘darling’ and— Ugh!”

  “Tommy, if you want to leave the show—”

  “No! Who’s talking about leaving the show? I know this business. And not all the Schmidts in the world can drive me away!”

  “Has he done something to you lately?” said Maizie.

  “Him? It’s not what he does, it’s what he doesn’t do. There he is, the ringmaster! And do you think he’ll ever notice a midget? I’ve tried to ask him for a spot in the big top, and time after time he’s almost walked me down. If I were a big person—” He clenched his small fists bitterly. “He thinks he is a showman. Why, for all the brass in his voice, I could make a fool out of him in ten minutes in his own ring! Someday . . . someday I’m going to look up the Boss and I’m going to say, ‘Mrs. Johnson, I want to be your ringmaster—’”

  “So that’s it again!” said Maizie. “Tommy, you know that will never be.”

  “Why not?” said Tommy darkly. “The ringmaster runs the show, and I’m tired of being a freak. You wait, Maizie! One of these days I’ll be the ringmaster!”

  “Tommy—”

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “Tommy, you haven’t been reading those books again, have you?”

  “What books?”

  “Tommy, don’t be that way with me. When the Professor left you his trunks, he didn’t like you any better than he ever had.”

  “What of that? Can’t a man repent on his deathbed?”

  “Yes, Tommy—but did he?”

  “Look, let’s not go into that.”

  “He hated you, Tommy. When you used to mimic his mitt reading, I could see him watching. He didn’t think it was funny. It may be all right with anyone else in the show for you to take off their routine, but it never was with the Professor.”

  “Aw, you’ve been dreaming again! He did leave me his trunks, didn’t he?”

  “There’s such a thing as vengeance after death, Tommy.”

  “Sure, but I haven’t met his ghost yet.”

  “Not his ghost, Tommy. It’s those books!”

  Late that night Maizie lay wide awake and apparently sound asleep in the dark of the stateroom berth, fearfully watching Tommy, the king of midget showmen—who did not want his crown—sitting gnomelike at the dressing table, surrounded by a litter of cracked and weighty tomes whose parchment pages were like mummies’ skin in the gloom. The book he was studying was so unwieldy that he had propped it with greasepaint cans to save his arms.

  Maizie wanted badly to weep, to cry out, to plead with him and tell him how much he meant to her, but she lay like some perfect doll, put away and forgotten by a careless child.

  She had been with him for five years on the sawdust trail, and each day she found something new about him. The world pushed so heavily against him, and his tiny body was so frail and his spirit so great that she would have given her very heart to have been a big person and able to defend him.

  To th
e world of superlative polysyllables and sawdust, Little Tom Little was known for an ace. As a half-pint Punchinello who dared to deride them all, he had gained much fame. None of them knew that the dapper, vest-pocket edition longed for anything but to keep his name properly on the posters. Had they known, they probably would have laughed at him about it. And they would have howled over his ambition to be a ringmaster. But only Maizie knew. Only Maizie had seen him in a deserted tent cracking a long whip around his tiny black boots and putting imaginary rosinbacks through their paces. And Maizie—all was not well with Tommy and so nothing was well with her.

  A big cat was howling his displeasure somewhere along the train and Maizie saw Little Tom Little fidget uneasily. How he had hated the big fellows since that break in Kansas City when the lion had almost killed him! And seeing him wince at the sound, Maizie felt willing to go and gag the animal, if it would give Tommy a little rest.

  What would he dig from those volumes? The danger of a cat was as nothing to the knowledge he so eagerly gulped.

  Everyone had known the Professor as a misfit, and more than one had breathed a sigh of relief when he had passed into what he had described as a glowing land of happiness. But wherever he had gone, he had left evil memories behind him. He had been a vulture of bad omen, a cadaver without a coffin, a man whose eyes gleamed at the tidings of misfortune. He had lived on bad luck, had purveyed ominous forebodings to cringing clients, and his lot had not been easy. He had been far more than a sideshow mitt reader. And when Tommy, impartial as always, had taken to giving a mimic mitt act to take off the Professor, Maizie had known that someday Tommy would pay for humbling a vicious pride. Tommy’s act had been funny. But now—

  Why had the Professor left those books, his entire library, to Tommy?

  The big cat roared more loudly and Tommy impatiently leaped up to wrestle the window down. Reaching thus across Maizie, he saw that she did not sleep.

  “Anything wrong?” said Tommy.

  She saw how abstracted he was. “Nothing.”

  “You feel all right, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Certainly!”

  Tommy kissed her thoughtlessly and went back to his book. She saw how animated he was, how his small body could scarcely contain the enthusiasm he built up within it.

  And when he turned, his face flushed, and cried, “Maizie! I’ve got it!” it was all she could do to repress a sob of despair. As gaily as she could, she answered, “What is it, Tommy?”

  “The solution! I said today I was never again going to be a midget. Well! I’m not! Tomorrow . . . tomorrow I shall be ringmaster of this show!”

  Her alarm was real, but she masked it. “How . . . how do you mean, Tommy?”

  “Why, it’s here. It’s all here! This is a treatise on the transmigration of the soul. You understand that, don’t you? When a fellow kicks off, he enters into another body, see? It’s a wonder I never found this before. It’s all marked and there was a slip of paper between the pages. Say, maybe the Professor wasn’t such a bad egg after all, huh? He said when he left me all these that he’d indicated one place specially, and this must be it.”

  “Oh, Tommy,” she whispered. “Are you sure it won’t mean—”

  But Tommy’s excited voice swept on and his thirty inches of height seemed to double themselves already. “It says if the transmigration of the soul can be effected after death, it is logical to conclude that it can be done in life. It says the only vital, thinking portion of man is his soul energy, and that it can be projected from one body to another. Maizie, think what this means!”

  She took heart, for he seemed to have nothing definite. But Tommy sent her faint hopes tumbling.

  “And here’s how it’s done! How simple! All you have to do is miss a few meals, say breakfast and lunch, and then begin your concentration upon the object into which you desire to transfer. Think of it, Maizie! To leave your body and become another person! To put behind you everything you have done wrong, and all the mistakes you have made, and begin all over in a different guise!”

  “What . . . what happens to the other person?”

  But he swept this away as well. “Why, naturally, whether he will or no, he is forced to occupy the body you have left—or else die.”

  “Tommy . . . this is dangerous!” But she could not say more, for the possibilities of this terrible idea were overwhelming.

  “And it’s so easy! It says here that man becomes everything he senses, even for the briefest of instants. If you look at a hero in a story, you are, for the duration of that story, the hero. You take on his mannerisms and his way of speech. But because he is just a hero of a story he cannot return that concentration. It says that all men, when talking to other men, are too watchful of the other’s words and actions and too conscious of self to achieve this feat. But if one refuses to be aware of the possible menace to self from the other ego, then it is simple to completely assimilate the other person and to project oneself into the other.

  “Think of it, Maizie! If I needed money!”

  “Tommy, Tommy, this is madness! It cannot possibly work!”

  “Look, Maizie. I have not eaten since noon, and it is now nearing midnight—”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Maizie, look at me.”

  “No!”

  “Maizie, do you love me?”

  “Oh, Tommy . . .”

  And then she felt a curious chill, a feeling as though she had risen several feet above herself and now hung suspended over her body in the air. But in a moment she was again in the bed.

  “It . . . it takes practice,” said Tommy, beads of sweat upon his brow. “Look at me, Maizie!”

  “Please! Tommy, for the love of the God that made us . . . !”

  And again she felt that chill, that feeling of lift. Terror struck at her lest she were blind and deaf.

  But in a moment she could begin to see a little and hear the big cat snarling far off. With a start she found herself gazing, not at the dressing table from the bed, but at the bed from the dressing table! The big book was heavy against her hand. The curtain of the bed moved, as though blown by a gentle breeze.

  She saw “Maizie” sit up in the berth!

  Dazedly she looked at herself, turned her attention to the body which she now inhabited, not believing the trousers with their tight belt or the tie and collar which choked her. She whirled to the mirror and recoiled at the image of Tommy!

  Tommy was shaken to the last spark of his consciousness. He was propped up on one elbow, staring in disbelief at the nightdress which he clutched. He came to himself and whipped a hand to his head. The long, golden curls—

  They stared at each other, then, silent and numb with awe. When minutes had passed, Tommy laughed shakily. “You see—it works.”

  “But . . . but Tommy . . . how are we going to get back?”

  But he was triumphant now and growing bolder. “Why should we?” he teased.

  “It’s . . . it’s horrible, Tommy!” And she was hard put to keep back her tears. “Undo this . . . this terrible spell! Please, Tommy!”

  The longing to be herself made her sight dim. There was a whirling motion about her and she went blind and feelingless, and then she was shivering, as herself, in the middle of the stateroom, looking at Tommy once more.

  Suddenly she threw herself at his feet, trying hard to find the words to tell him that this thing could bring nothing but unhappiness.

  Tommy hardly noticed her in his excitement. “These are the right words to think, then. These words written here! It’s true! These years of misery are done! No more do I have to step quickly from the path of the big people and look a man in his shins. Eye to eye, Maizie! And tomorrow”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“tomorrow I shall be ringmaster!”

  Hermann Schmidt arose and dressed with his usual extreme care. His boots had been polished into black mirrors; his stock had been starched into armor plate; his waistcoat had been brushed until it resembled newly sh
ed blood. He set his swallow-tailed coat to perfection upon his mighty shoulders and then, inventorying himself in the mirror, petted his gleaming top hat down upon his broad brow. He selected a crop from a rack, glanced at his watch, and sauntered down the cars to the special diner. As he went, everyone from razorback to high traps bowed low and, in return, Schmidt gave them lofty nods which held a certain amount of doubt, as though he was not quite sure they existed.

  Such was his show day routine. Mighty and domineering, a colossus of size and influence, it was small wonder that the fate of the show rested so certainly in his hands—for who, looking at such a figure of a man, could doubt his ability?

  He could not remember a time when he had not been a man of importance. As a boy, he had been his father’s son and his father had been a ringmaster in the old country. And why shouldn’t a man be important, if he knew the business from bale ring to stakes?

  He ended his individual spec at the snowy cloth of his breakfast table whereon was spread the local morning paper. He disdained such yokel print and sat looking through the car window at the less fortunate denizens of sawdust who trailed toward the crumb castle of the grounds dressed to kick ’em by ten o’clock. Far away, somebody tuned up a horse piano, and nearby a bull man sicced his rubber mules upon a mired wagon amid much trumpeting and shouting. It was altogether soothing, and Schmidt sighed comfortably.

  Fried potatoes and a small steak were placed under his nose by an obsequious man and Schmidt armed himself and prepared to attack.

  He became conscious of someone who had slid into the seat across the table. He knew who it was and repressed a shudder. Ruefully he stared at the silver service, which reflected a face in all manner of distortions. The face was ancient and seamed and sallow, and the eyes held an expression which made Schmidt wince; for, certain as he was of most things, he doubted whether he could keep on forever avoiding the necessity of fixing a date for their marriage.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Johnson,” he said with a low bow.