The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (31 page)

“Explain yourself,
please!” said Verne sharply to the stone giant.

“Very well. Mister
Verne, you are famous where I come from . . .”
the
giant began.

“I am famous in a stone
quarry?” asked Jules Verne.

“Nice one, monsieur. It
is a pity that the humour in your novels is often lost in their translated
editions,”
the Cardiff Giant resumed calmly. “A
more
regrettable aspect of your novels is your penchant for unsavoury depictions of
Jewish villains. There is one you have not written yet, which . . .”

The giant vanished in
mid-sentence, replaced by the previous spectators and the double waxwork of the
Siamese brothers. “You spoke strangely, Jules. Are you well?” Paul Verne asked.

The bearded man, whose
distinctly Semitic features had repelled Jules Verne, now spoke again: “Erm,
you asked if I was Mister Barnum, sir. I have the honour to be his business
partner, and co-owner of this house of wonders. I am Isaac Van Amburgh, of the
famous menagerie.”

He again extended his
hand. Paul Verne clasped it, offering a half-hearted handshake. Jules merely
scowled.

“VERNE!” bellowed a
voice at the far end of the salon. Through the huzzabuzzing crowd pushed a
self-important figure: a stout Yankee, balding, careless in dress, his
waistcoat unbuttoned and his cravat undone. “How d’ye do, sir?” crowed this
newcomer, seizing Jules Verne’s hand and pumping it freely. “Barnum’s the name:
the one and only, warranted genuine.” At the edge of his vision, Verne saw
Isaac Van Amburgh discreetly slipping into the crowd. “Delighted to have you
here among our wonders, Mister Verne!” resumed Barnum, in a rapid American
accent which Paul Verne was obliged to translate for his less fluent brother. “Your
novels are among my favourite reading, and . . .”

“You have read my
nouvelles?”
Jules Verne interrupted.

“Well, ah, no,”
harrumphed Barnum. “You must pardon a humbug. My French is not of the best. But
here in New York, the
Weekly Magazine of Popular Literature
began to
serialize your
From the Earth to the Moon
this past January, and . . .”

“Did they, indeed?”
asked Paul Verne, who oversaw his brother’s business arrangements. “I do not
recall them troubling themselves with the trifling matter of copyright.”

Barnum attempted a deep
bow, and halfway succeeded.

“Plagiarism is the
sincerest form of flattery . . . and I speak from personal experience, having
been on both sides of such tributes. Ahem! May I escort your good sirs through
the halls of my Museum? There are thousands of exhibits here, so permit me to
show you the choicest of my astonishments.”

Escorted by Barnum, the
Verne brothers passed through the main salon. Between a waxwork effigy of a
Chinese mandarin and a replica of the Venus of Canova was a prominent signpost
reading “THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS”. With a chuckle, Barnum explained this: “My
museum, sirs, opens at ten sharp every day, except the Sabbath. By half-past
ten, the place is chock-full of suckers, staring at my exhibits and gawping fit
to kill, so’s you’d think their eyeballs would bust. Plenty more people .are
outside the box-office, waiting to get in .. . but there’s no room for ‘em, on
account the place is full!” Laughing, Barnum jerked his thumb towards the
doorway leading to the Egress. “Sooner or later, they go through that door to
find out what an Egress is . . . and find themselves in the alley, back of
Prince Street.” Barnum guffawed, and slapped his pinstriped knee. “They have to
pay to get back in again, and meantime they’ve made room for a fresh crop of
rubes!”

Barnum led his guests to
the Cosmorama room. This proved to contain a series of displays, each depicting
a lifelike
tableau
of some human drama of the present or the past. Jules
Verne gazed at something captioned “The Drunkard’s Family”. This depicted a
one-room hovel. At its centre stood a broken-backed chair in which a red-faced
man slumbered in soiled clothing. On the table before him, a half-empty bottle
lay sideways, its amber contents spilt on to the threadbare tablecloth. In the
far corner, a ragged woman covered her face with both hands, her posture
grief-stricken. Starving children beckoned piteously. Near the wife stood a
bare cot, with one more child dead within it. For one moment, Verne was shocked
that Barnum would exploit this anguished family by putting them on public
display. Then, with a greater shock, Verne realized that all of these figures
were nothing more than waxworks. Even the bright puddle of liquid on the
tablecloth was a
trompe l’oeil,
achieved with a polished piece of tinted
glass.

At this moment a bell
rang, and a bellboy spoke with great ceremony: “Ladies and gentlemen, if you
please! Ten days ago our nation’s Secretary of State, Mr William H. Seward,
paid seven million of our tax dollars to Czar Alexander of Russia in order to
purchase a piece of real estate known as Alaska.” There was some murmuring
among the spectators present as the bellboy spoke again: “This afternoon, at
enormous expense, Mr Barnum and Mr Van Amburgh have brought to New York City,
for your inspection and approval, a
genuine fragment of Alaska!”

Cymbals clashed, and now
a dainty chambermaid entered the salon, bearing a blue velvet pillow. In the
centre of this pillow, slightly melted, was a large chunk of ice. The
spectators laughed at the humbug, and several of the men present made
discourteous remarks about Seward’s folly.

Barnum bowed to the Verne
brothers. “I must stage a few jests, as you see, so that my customers never
suspect that they are being educated.” The showman beckoned. “May I show you
something to astonish you?”

There were, indeed, so
many marvels in this place that it was clearly impossible to sample them all in
the brief time available, so the Verne brothers permitted Barnum to escort them
passed a cage containing the Happy Family — this proved to be animals of
several species, carnivores placidly co-habiting with herbivores — and then
onward into a wide hall, its ceiling bracketed in a double row of globed
gas-fittings. And here the exhibits were
alive,
“This is my hall of
Freaks and Prodigies,” explained Barnum.

Jules Verne felt a rush
of emotions — delight, and shock, and dismay — when he beheld the entertainment
that was offered here. The dismay was for himself, as he realized the thrill of
his initial delight. For each of the occupants of this room was some sort of
human anomaly, displayed as a curiosity to be stared at.

There were two dwarves —
one of either sex — alongside a Circassian girl, whose pale skin was utterly
milk-white. Her eyes, like red garnets, peered accusingly at Jules Verne while
she absently plaited her pale yellow hair. A nearby kiosk offered something
called the Leopard Child. Jules Verne peered within, and beheld a very young
child, nearly naked, of indeterminate sex. The child’s pale skin was stippled
and piebald with a grotesque pattern of dark brown spots, covering its entire
body and face. Verne shuddered.

His brother Paul had
seen the horror too. “Fear not, Jules. This man Barnum is legendary for his
humbugs. Perhaps the unfortunate child is one more fraud, garnished with paint.”

At the sound of women’s
voices nearby, engaged in pleasant conversation, Jules Verne hurried onward to
the next kiosk. Here a fashionably-dressed lady stood with her back to him. Her
long hair was stylishly arranged, her body gracefully proportioned, and she
spoke in a light gentle voice. The other woman, who appeared to be standing on
a chair, was conversing in a voice that was strangely deep yet clearly
feminine.

As Verne stepped closer,
he gasped. The deep-voiced woman was standing on the floor, yet she towered
above him. A giantess!

At that moment, the
other woman turned round and faced Verne. The lower half of her face was
resplendent with a chestnut-coloured beard! In one graceful hand she held a
tortoise-shell comb, in her other a mirror. As she posed, she admired her own
beard and combed it carefully.

A man in disguise, surely?
No; the corseted figure was quite female, and her face — its unbearded
portions, at least — satisfyingly feminine. In his experience as a playwright,
Jules Verne was aware of crepe beards that could be affixed with spirit-gum.
Perhaps this . . . ?

As if reading his
thoughts, the bearded woman raised her manicured fingers to her chin. She
pinched one of her own hairs, then suddenly plucked it. Jules Verne clearly saw
the skin distend for an instant as the hair was uprooted. Smiling prettily, the
bearded woman — now less bearded, by a single hair’s worth — rolled the hair
between finger and thumb, and extended it towards him. “Would you like a
souvenir, sir?”

The giantess guffawed. “Go
on and take it,” she boomed in her deep hearty voice. “Madame Hines doesn’t
give a hair off her chin to just anyone.”

Jules Verne now gave his
full attention to the giantess. She was attractive of face and figure, except
for a thick dewlap in her throat indicating a goitre . . . might that be the
explanation for her prodigious size? Barely twenty years old, she seemed
gigantically girlish. The giant lady stood at least eight feet tall — the
upswept coiffure of her auburn hair added another few inches — and she must
have weighed nearly two hundred kilos, yet the upper half of her body was
elegantly proportioned. The regions below the giantess’s waist were
indeterminate, for she was dressed in an elaborate hoop skirt and crinoline
frame that extended to the floor, entirely concealing her nether portions. Such
a framework, Verne realized, could conceal nearly anything . . .

His brother had similar
thoughts. “Her upper half is large enough,” Paul Verne whispered near Jules’s
ear. “But beneath that cage of crinolines . . . who knows? She might be a woman
of normal height, on stilts. She might have no legs at all, and be propped on a
pillar.”

The giantess confronted
Jules Verne, and from her vast height she seemed to read his thoughts. With
gentle mockery in her smile, the immense woman now gathered the red satin folds
of her skirts, and lifted them. Raising her petticoats, the giantess revealed a
trim pair of feet: each was slightly larger than Jules Verne’s head, but the
feet of the giantess were perfectly shaped, and daintily shod in huge slippers
of black patent leather with crimson rosettes. As Verne watched, the giantess
flexed one foot, her toes tapping impatiently. Then she shifted her weight to
this foot, and tap-toed her other.

“You see, sir?” the
laughter of the giantess rumbled from somewhere overhead. “Please mark that my
shoes are not high-heeled to give me extra height. I came by my inches
honestly. I am entirely . . .”

The voice of the
giantess abruptly halted. Jules Verne looked up to her exalted altitude, and he
saw her face shift and alter. Her features slackened, the dewlap quivered at
her throat, as her blue eyes drooped and her mouth dangled open. Then she spoke
again, this time with entirely a different voice:

“Monsieur Jules Verne,
the young woman before you and above you is the giantess Anna Haining Swan of
Nova Scotia. Only twenty-one years old, her remarkable height of seven feet
eleven inches, and her proportionate weight, is the result of a thyroid tumour
which . .”

There was a click within
Verne’s mind. The giantess Swan shook her head as though to clear it, then she
resumed speaking in her previous voice: “. . . entirely genuine, sir, in my
height and my capacity. As well I sing, speak French and Latin, and . . .”

“Mister Verne!” The man
named Barnum had been attending to some business, yet now he came huffapuffing
back across the salon. “Or the pair of you Vernes, rather, for I have neglected
your brother.” Red-faced, Barnum mopped himself with a handkerchief, then
pocketed this and took out his watch. “Nearly half-past! And the
tableaux
vivants
begin promptly at 7.45.Would you do me the honour of viewing the
show from my personal box?”

The stage of Barnum’s
theatre was tiled with a parquet of alternating black and white squares.
Looking down upon this from his seat in the box, Jules Verne was reminded of a
vast chessboard . . . and he wondered what sort of dramas might soon unfold
upon it. For now, only the downstage edge of this chessboard was visible, the
remainder hidden behind a huge red velvet curtain.

The audience murmured
impatiently as they took their seats for the 7.45 performance, while Verne
contemplated today’s strange experiences. He had beheld things that did not
actually exist — this Cardiff giant, for example — and he had been accosted by
unaccountable voices. Was he going insane? Verne shook his head, preferring
other explanations.

The excitement of his
arrival in America, the astonishing wonders . . . yes, it was possible that his
legendary imagination was running away with him. The apparitions had done no
harm, at least. Not so far.

Verne took out his
opera-glasses and consulted the printed stagebill. The current entertainment at
Barnum & Van Amburgh’s Museum was something called “Streets of New York, in
five tableaux”. Verne was vaguely surprised to encounter this honest French
word in a Yankee stagebill, and he wondered if
tableaux
meant the same
thing on an American stage as on a French one. Now the gas-jets in the house
lights dimmed, and the calcium carbonate lamps in the footlights brightened.
The audience began an eager hush as the curtain went up.