The Little Friend

Not everyone seemed to know the Lord’s Prayer. Some penguins sang Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do; others, flippers over hearts, recited the Pledge of Allegiance when over the stage—head first, lowered by the ankles from a corkscrewing chain—appeared the strait-jacketed, manacled form of a man in evening dress. A hush fell over the audience as—twisting, thrashing, red in the face—he wriggled free of the strait-jacket and shouldered it over his head. With his teeth, he set to work on the manacles; in a moment or two they clattered to the planks and then—nimbly doubling up and freeing his feet—he swung from the chain suspended ten feet above the ground and landed, arm high, with a gymnast’s flourish, doffing a top hat which appeared from nowhere. A battery of pink doves flapped out and began to dip around the theatre, to the audience’s delight.

“I am afraid that conventional methods will not work here, gentlemen,” said this newcomer to the startled explorers, rolling up the sleeves of his evening coat and pausing, for an instant, to smile brilliantly for the explosive flash of the camera. “I nearly perished twice while attempting this very feat—once in the Cirkus Beketow in Copenhagen and once in the Apollo Theatre in Nuremberg.” From thin air, he produced a jeweled blowtorch, which shot a blue flame three feet long, and then produced a pistol which he fired into the air with a loud crack and a puff of smoke. “Assistants, please!”

Five Chinamen in scarlet robes and skullcaps, long black queues down their backs, ran out with fireaxes and hacksaws.

Houdini tossed the pistol into the audience—which, to the delight of the penguins, transformed into a thrashing salmon in mid-air before it landed amongst them—and grabbed from Captain Scott the pickaxe. With his left hand, he brandished it high in the air, while the blowtorch burned in his right. “May I remind the audience,” he shouted, “that the subject in question has been deprived of life-sustaining oxygen for four thousand six hundred sixty-five days, twelve hours, twenty-seven minutes, and thirty-nine seconds, and that a recovery attempt of this magnitude has never before been attempted on the North American stage.” He threw the pickaxe back to Captain Scott and, reaching up to stroke the orange cat perched on his shoulder, tossed his head at the penguin conductor. “Maestro, if you please.”

The Chinamen—under the cheerful direction of Bowers, who was stripped to the singlet and working shoulder-to-shoulder among them—hacked rhythmically at the block in time with the music. Houdini was making spectacular headway with the blowtorch. A great puddle spread across the stage: the penguin musicians, with great pleasure, shimmied happily beneath the icy water dripping into the orchestra pit. Captain Scott, to stage left, was doing his best to restrain the sled dog, Osman—who had gone berserk upon spotting Houdini’s cat—and was shouting angrily into the wings for Meares to come assist him.

The mysterious figure in the bubbled block of ice was now only about six inches from the blowtorch and the Chinamen’s hacksaws.

“Courage,” roared a polar bear from the gallery.

Another bear leaped to his feet. He held, in his enormous baseball mitt of a paw, a struggling dove, and he chomped its head off and spat it out in a bloody chunk.

Harriet wasn’t sure what was happening on stage, though it seemed very important. Sick with impatience, she craned up on tiptoe but the penguins—jibbing and chattering, standing on one another’s shoulders—were taller than she. Several of them wobbled from their seats, and began to totter toward the stage at a forward list, ducking and wobbling, bills tipped to the ceiling, their wall-eyes loony with concern. As she shoved through their ranks, she was pushed hard from behind, and got an oily mouthful of penguin feathers as she stumbled forward.

Suddenly there was a triumphant shout from Houdini. “Ladies and Gentlemen!” he cried. “We’ve got him!”

The crowd swarmed the stage. Harriet, in the confusion, glimpsed the white explosions of Ponting’s old-fashioned camera, a gang of bobbies rushing in, with handcuffs and billy clubs and service revolvers.

“This way, officers!” said Houdini, stepping forward with an elegant sweep of his arm.

Smoothly, unexpectedly, all heads swung round to Harriet. An awful silence had fallen, unbroken but for the tick tick tick of the melted ice dripping into the orchestra pit. Everyone was watching her: Captain Scott, startled little Bowers, Houdini with black brows lowered over his basilisk gaze. The penguins, in unblinking left profile, leaned forward all at once, each fixing her with a yellow, fishy eye.

Somebody was trying to hand her something. It’s up to you, my dear.…

Harriet sat bolt upright on the sofa downstairs.

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