Among the Wonderful Read Online Free PDF Page B

but smaller, galleries and no annexes at all. The fourth floor had so many annexes, salons, and narrow connecting hallways that people always got lost; there were more directional signs on the fourth floor than anywhere else in the museum. The fifth floor had six larger galleries and that was all. As the two men reached the second floor, they observed whole families congregated around the hot- and cold-drink concessionaires. Children rested on benches, and couples strolled and loitered among the exhibits.
    Even Guillaudeu understood that Barnum had improved the museum’s general atmosphere. Shortly after his arrival, the new owner had instructed workers to remove the faded velvet draperies that Scudder had hung across the building’s high windows. True, the curtains had protected specimens and other objects from damage by the sun, but they had also created a funereal gloom that could not have been good for business. The windows had been scrubbed; a few had even been opened. Apart from an occasional house sparrow flitting into the building and smashing itself against a glass cabinet, Guillaudeu could find no fault with the sunlit galleries.
    But despite the steeply angled light that accentuated his specimens and the cheerful atmosphere, the museum’s visitors unsettled Guillaudeu severely. They always had, even before Barnum’s advent. Too often the crowd surged up with no warning, bumping into him, crowding him, and emitting a disconcerting roar. But just as he would begin to panic, to feel himself drowning, it faded away in the hiss of a retreating skirt, leaving him feeling foolish.
    “Barnum calls this one an Egyptian priest,” Guillaudeu said. They were approaching a waist-high vitrine in Gallery Two. The figure inside the cabinet lay on a bed of crumbling wood. “By the name of Pa-Ib.”
    “Oh, good! A mummy.” Mr. Archer leaned over the case. “Although he looks more like a heap of dried apples.”
    “They claim he’s a two-thousand-year-old priest. In my opinion, without the accoutrements that would have accompanied him to the grave, it’s difficult to say what kind of man he was.”
    “If only he could sit up and talk, eh?” Mr. Archer tapped his cane lightly against the glass. “Wake up, sir!”
    “Or if only we could count the number of nightmares he’s caused.”
    Mr. Archer turned. “What?”
    “Among the children.” Guillaudeu pointed to one little boy staring at the mummy as if he’d been hypnotized.
    “I’m surprised Barnum doesn’t have Joice Heth in here,” Mr. Archer said. “That would seem an appropriate finale to his first enterprise in the show business, wouldn’t you agree? Displaying her mummified remains to the paying public?”
    Guillaudeu cringed. “Advertising Joice Heth as one hundred and sixty-six years old was an act of the crudest deception.”
    “That’s the least of it, Mr. Guillaudeu. Deception was quite the least of it, let me assure you,” said Mr. Archer. “Barnum made enemies during the Joice Heth debacle that will last him a lifetime! Half the staff at the
Herald
, including Bennett himself, and even some at the
Sun
are set on seeing Barnum a broken and — what’s worse — a
broke
man. But I must concede that his allies in the business are also strong.”
    “And what is your opinion of Mr. Barnum?”
    “My opinion? I hardly see the relevance of that. You might as well ask me my opinion of the wind.”
    Mr. Archer passed two carpenters building a tall wooden booth of some kind and stopped next to the stone blocks imported from the Giant’s Causeway. He bent down to look into a case of fossils.
    “Ah,” said Guillaudeu. “This one is part of Scudder’s original collection.
Homo diluvii testis
. Man who witnessed the flood.”
    “Preserved in stone?”
    “Just his imprint. The bones are long gone.”
    “But look.” Mr. Archer squatted in front of the case. “His skull is far too small. Where are his hands, his arms? The way the stone’s grain