The Daredevils

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Two boys squatted together on either side of an open limelight box. They were adjusting the mixture of gases entering it, with an intensity of care — both nodding silently as if at the idea of it — that was preternatural. The block of lime began to glow, and the light grew brighter and brighter until it seemed it could become no brighter, not in this world, and still it grew.

But then the older boy’s sense of care appeared to slacken while the other boy’s intensified — perhaps in compensation. Both boys felt this change with a shiver.

The older boy went down the main aisle and climbed up on the small stage, across which the curtain, depicting a tranquil northern lake, was drawn. He was wearing a false auburn beard that was much too big for his face, a monocle, a cream-colored suit that was his size and which in fact he owned, and a bowler hat that was also comically big, forcing him to tip it stylishly to one side to keep it from interfering with the all-important monocle. Because the side flaps of the limelight box had not been clapped in place, light was not focused on him but filled the entire theater. He saw the other boy, who was closest to the source, in a heavenly, deathly light that disturbed — even perhaps, in the strict medical sense of the term, shocked him: hellish and heavenly and dead and alive and perfect. It was one kind of light but another as well, a light that was even stronger, even stranger: he thought it must be a kind of hallucination or a kind of madness. He did not feel well. And yet he was able to make a bizarre distinction and say that neither did he feel unwell.

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