The Children's Book

and fall in perfect arcs, according to the laws of physics. They have—unlike human actors—no need to charm, or to exact sympathy. Kleist goes so far as to say that the puppet and God are two points on a circle. The earliest shadow puppets were in fact gods, the presences of gods. “I found in Amsterdam some exemplars of the oriental shadow-figures, the Wayang Golek, whose movements were made by trained priests. Herr Stern and I have studied these marvellous beings, and introduced some refinements into his German figures.”

He bowed. His pale hair flipped over his face. He stepped behind the box.

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An illusion is a complicated thing, and an audience is a complicated creature. Both need to be brought from flyaway parts to a smooth, composite whole. The world inside the box, a world made of silk, satin, china mouldings, wires, hinges, painted backcloths, moving lights and musical notes, must come alive with its own laws of movement, its own rules of story. And the watchers, wide-eyed and greedy, distracted and supercilious, preoccupied, uncomfortable, tense, must become one, as a shoal of fishes with huge eyes and flickering fins becomes one, wheeling this way and that in response to messages of hunger, fear or delight. August’s flute was heard, and some were ready to listen and some were not. The curtains opened on a child’s bedroom. He sat against his pillows. His nurse, in comfortable grey, bustled about him, and her shadow loomed over him on the white wall.

She told the small Nathanael about the Sandman. “He steals the eyes of naughty little children,” she said, comfortably, “and feeds them to his own children, who live in a nest on the moon, and open their beaks like owlets.”

There was a heavy tap-tap of slow feet ascending the stairs. The backcloth showed the shadow of the turning of the banister, and the rising head and shoulders of the shadow of the old man, hook-nosed, hump-backed, claw- handed, stump, stump, his coat-skirts swinging.

The puppet-child pulled the blankets over his head, and the stage darkened.

In the next scene Nathanael’s father, the alchemist, and his horrible visitor, Dr. Copelius, bent over their secret work in a cauldron. The stage was full of shimmering firelight. Nathanael hid, and was discovered. Copelius waved his ebony stick. The father fell dead and crumpled into the flames. Smoke rose.

Happier scenes followed. The grown Nathanael, his friend Lothar, and Lothar’s sister Clara, met and embraced in a garden. Clara had spun-gold hair and a blue silk dress. The garden was full of roses and lilies and blue light. They danced to flute music.

Then Nathanael was in his study in Rome, surrounded by tiny books, a globe, an astrolabe, the articulated skeletons of tiny creatures which danced furiously together when the room was empty of humans. Snakes, rats, lizards, cats. They gave the pleasure that the miniature gives, the tiny perfect replica of something that arouses an inexplicable delight in the onlooker. Nathanael in this pleasant place was visited by the Copelius-puppet in disguise, wearing a cloak, a brimmed hat and an eye-shade, carrying a pedlar’s tray of glinting glass eyes and tiny tubes which were spyglasses. Nathanael bought a spyglass. When he looked into it, holding it to his eye in his white china fist, a circle of rosy light appeared, moving as he moved his head.

And then, on one side of the stage, there was a female figure in a window, in a rosy halo, and Nathanael at the opposite side, staring through his glass. She wore a plain white silky dress, which the light filled with pink flares and sanguine folds. She moved very little—she raised her little hand to her calm round mouth, to cover a yawn, she turned her head modestly down.

The ball scene, which followed, was a triumph. A musical box played, invisible. Couples whirled across the stage, gliding smoothly in a waltz, capering extravagantly in polka and hornpipe, curtseying and bowing. Nathanael danced with Olimpia. The puppetmaster, with extraordinary skill, created simultaneously the agitated movements of his hero, and the mechanical glide of his beloved. The male puppet rushed busily around the female, ushering, supporting, interrogating, bowing over her hand, trembling with emotion. She repeated her series of restricted gestures, the graceful inclination of the head, the raising of the elegant hand to the pink, round mouth.

The curtains closed, and reopened. Nathanael burst into the room where Olimpia’s princely father was quarrelling with Dr. Copelius. They menaced each other with ebony canes. Copelius leaped into the air like a furious frog. They laid hands on Olimpia, who lay still, draped over a satin chair. They grasped her, one by the neck, one by the feet. They tugged. Olimpia trembled, but did not struggle; the representation of her minimal movement was very fine. Suddenly and terribly she came apart in their hands, exploding all over the stage, her head flying upwards with floating hair, her trunk flying sideways, extruding a coil of metal wires. The prince and the doctor menaced each other with an arm and a leg. Hedda clapped her hands, and an infant anarchist began to cry and had to be comforted. Nathanael collapsed in despair.

Lothar and Clara reappeared, lifted him, restored him to life. They went walking on a church tower, against battlements. Nathanael had his arm around Clara’s blue waist. And then Nathanael’s shadow rose huge in the limelight as the blue sky darkened and began to menace him, independent of him, larger than life. He turned to face it, and began a gyratory, jerky dance of shadow-boxing, like a hanged man on the end of his strings. Lothar took hold of Clara and led her away from the maddened whirl. Nathanael’s movements became wilder, jerkier, less and less human, and his shadow clawed at him out of the backcloth. He leaped up, cycling his legs in emptiness, for a moment in flight and weightless, and then plunged over the parapet to his doom.

Everyone applauded. Tom felt winded, as though he had been in a fight, and lost. He looked furtively at Julian, Charles and Geraint, to see how they had responded to the play, and saw that they were all smiling and clapping enthusiastically, so he too clapped. Philip clapped. He had been interested above all by the china faces of the characters. How did you decide, when a character went through so much, and could have only one expression, what that expression should be? He could see how Dr. Copelius could do well with a mouth that both smiled and sneered, but Nathanael was exactly right, serious and not strong, delicately thin and not quite smiling. His mad dance at the end had showed more of the shadow than the solid face. That was clever. And the difference between the “real” puppet and Olimpia the puppet-automaton was wonderfully done. To glide with a caricature of the gliding all puppets did—that was something. He clapped.

Dorothy hadn’t liked Cinderella, and didn’t like this. Her head was full of the idea of spiders, and strings, and stings. She thought of the clever fingers controlling the story and its characters, and she thought, only half-consciously, of all such control as dangerous and to-be-resisted. She enjoyed the disintegration of Olimpia. She told herself she couldn’t see the point, but she could, and didn’t like it.

Griselda did like it. She felt a freedom in the otherworld inside the box, where things were livelier, more beautiful and more terrible than the mundane. Clara’s blue silk robe was magical in its tiny pleats where her own Miss Muffet dress was a monstrosity. Olimpia was an excellent parody of, and commentary on, the world of calling- cards and teacups. There were better things in the world than she was being offered. The puppetmaster knew that.

He came out, Anselm Stern, with August Steyning, from behind the velvet box that now concealed his creatures, and bowed to his audience, shyly, without meeting their eyes. Mrs. Betts brought more refreshments. Anselm Stern disappeared again. Griselda looked at Dorothy, who looked cross.