In a normal performance, all that can be seen on the stage is the committee of six standing self-consciously around the curtain that encloses the tank. They no more than the audience can see what I am doing. The orchestra plays a lively medley, partly to fill the time partly to mask any noises I cannot suppress while making my escape. But time goes by, and soon both the committee and the audience start to feel disquiet at how much time has elapsed.
The orchestra too becomes distracted, and the music peters out. An anti-climactic silence falls. Harry Cutter and Ellen Tremayne run anxiously on to the stage, as if in response to the emergency, and the audience makes a hubbub of concern. With the help of the committee Cutter and Ellen snatch away the concealing curtain, to reveal—
—The chair is still in the water! The ropes are still tied around it! But I am not there!
While the audience gasps in amazement I dramatically appear. It is usually from the wings, but if I have time I prefer to announce myself in the middle of the auditorium. I run to centre-stage, take my bow, and make sure that everyone notices that my clothes and hair are perfectly dry—
Tonight Borden was there to ruin it all, and, inadvertently perhaps, to save me from a watery end. Long before the illusion was due to finish, thankfully long before, and while the orchestra yet played, he left the position on the stage where Cutter had placed him, strode across to the curtains and snatched them aside!
My first awareness of this was that a shaft of bright light burst upon me. I looked up in vast and sudden hope, as the last air from my lungs bubbled up around my eyes! I felt then my prayers had been answered, that Cutter had interrupted the performance to save my life. Nothing else mattered in that second of bursting hope. What I saw, through the horrid distortions of swirling water and strengthened glass, was the jeering visage of my deadliest enemy! He leaned forward, pressing his face triumphantly against the tank.
I felt unconsciousness rising in me, believed myself to be on the point of death.
Then there is a gap. My next awareness was that I was lying on a hard wooden floor, in semi-darkness, freezing cold, with faces staring down at me. Music was playing close at hand, deafening me as the water drained in gulps from my ear passages. I could feel the floor moving up and down rhythmically. I was in the wings, on the floor of one of the rope alcoves next to the stage. When I raised my head I saw, unfocused and wandering in my sight, the brightly lit stage just a few feet away from me, where the chorus was treading the boards, while the coryphйe strutted to the bawdy tune from the orchestra pit. I groaned with relief, closed my eyes, and allowed my head to fall back to the floor. Cutter had dragged me to safety, somehow restored my breathing, brought the humiliating spectacle to an end.
Not long after I was carried to the green room, where my recovery properly began. For half an hour I felt as wretched as ever I have felt in my life, but I am in general strong and as soon as I was able to breathe without choking on the water in my lungs I began to recover quickly. It was still reasonably early in the evening, and I believed fervently (and still believe, as I write) that I had plenty of time to return to the stage and attempt my illusion again, before the show ended. I was not allowed to do this.
Instead, in a sad postmortem of the ruined performances I convened with Ellen, Cutter and Nugent in my dressing room. We arranged to meet in two days’ time at my workshop in London to improve the method of the escape, so that never again would my life be put in peril. At last my three stalwarts conducted me to the station, satisfied themselves of my mental and physical wellbeing, then returned to the hotel where we had all been planning to stay.
For myself, I seek only a swift return to London to see Julia and the children, as the incident, the brush with what felt like certain death, has made me hungry to be with them. This train will not arrive in Euston Station until just before dawn, but it makes it possible to see them sooner than would otherwise be possible.
By an irony, my failure to keep this diary has been caused by the domestic contentment to which I now hurry to return, and of which I could have written volumes or (as happened) nothing. For most of the past decade I have been not only successful in my career but unprecedentedly happy at home.
At the beginning of 1884, Julia at long last found herself with child again, and in due course safely delivered our son Edward. Two years later came the first of my daughters, Lydia, and last year, belatedly but to our delight, our baby Florence was born.
Against this background, the feud with Borden has taken on trivial proportions. True, we have played pranks on each other over the years. True, the spirit behind them has often been malicious. True, I have shown as much malice as he, and of this I am not in the least proud. It is no coincidence that none of these exploits made reopening the diary seem worthwhile.
Until tonight, though, Borden and I have not directly threatened each other's lives.
Once, years ago, Borden was directly responsible for the miscarriage of my first child. Although my instinct then was one of revenge, as the months went by my anger slowly died, and I satisfied myself instead with a number of retaliations on him designed only to embarrass him or to confound his illusion-making at just the moment he least enjoyed it.
In his turn, he has exacted a few moments of unexpected revenge on me, though none, I declare, as cleverly designed as my own have been on him.
What happened tonight has forced our feud to a new level. He tried to kill me; it is as plain as that. He is a magician; he knows how ropes must be tied to ensure a rapid and safe release.
Now I want revenge again. I hope and pray that time will quickly pass, soothe my feelings, bring sense and sanity and calmness to me, that I do not act as tonight I feel!
4th February 1892
Last night I saw an extraordinary thing. There is a scientist called Nikola Tesla visiting London, and the extravagant claims he makes were last week the talk of the town. Veritable miracles were being spoken of and several informed newspapers reported that in Tesla's hands lay the future of our world. The interviews he gave, and the articles that were written about his work, did not manage to explain why it should be so. It was widely said that his work must be seen demonstrated before its importance might be grasped.
So, swept along by curiosity, yesterday I and several hundred others clamoured at the doors of the Institution of Electrical Engineers to see the great man in action.
What I witnessed was a thrilling, alarming and mostly incomprehensible display of the powers of electricity. Mr Tesla (who spoke excellent American English, almost without hint of his European roots) is an associate of the inventor Thomas Edison. To modern-minded Londoners the use of electrical power for lighting is becoming a commonplace, but Tesla was able to show that it has many other uses.
I watched his sensational experiments uncritically, dazzled and impressed. Many of his effects are astonishing, and many more are deeply mysterious to a layman such as myself. When Tesla spoke, it was in the tones of an evangelist. More than his sparking, fizzing outbursts of lightning, his visionary words thrilled me beyond anything I had hitherto known. He is indeed a prophet of what the next century will hold for us. A worldwide net of electrical generating stations, power given over to the humble as well as the mighty, instantaneous transmission of energies and matter from one part of the world to the other, the air itself vibrating with the essence of the aether!
I grasped an important truth from Mr Tesla's presentation. His show (for it was nothing less than this) bore an odd resemblance to any good illusionist’s; the audience did not need to understand the means to enjoy the effects. In short, Mr Tesla described many scientific theories. While few in that audience understood more than the most basic concepts, every one of us was afforded a compelling glimpse into the future.