The Big Time Read Free Page A

get back to the cosmos pretty regularly.
    Gott sei Dank , so I’m better off than you Entertainers.”
    I didn’t say aloud that a Changing cosmos is worse than none, but I found myself sending a prayer to the Bonny Dew for my father’s repose, that the Change Winds would blow lightly across the lifeline of Anton A. Forzane, professor of physiology, born in Norway and buried in Chicago. Woodlawn Cemetery is a nice gray spot.
    “That’s all right, Erich,” I said. “We Entertainers Cot Mittens too.”
    He scowled around at me suspiciously, as if he were wondering whether I had all my
     
    buttons on.
    “Mittens?” he said. “What do you mean? I’m not wearing any. Are you trying to say something about Bruce’s gloves—which incidentally seem to annoy him for some reason. No, seriously, Greta, why do you Entertainers need mittens?”
    “Because we get cold feet sometimes. At least I do. Got Mittens, as I say.”
    A sickly light dawned in his Prussian puss. He muttered, “Got mittens … Gott mit uns … God with us,” and roared softly, “Greta, I don’t know how I put up with you the way you murder a great language for cheap laughs.”
    “You’ve got to take me as I am,” I told him, “mittens and all, thank the Bonny
    Dew—” and hastily explained, “That’s French—_le bon Dieu_—the good God—don’t hit me. I’m not going to tell you any more of my secrets.”
    He laughed feebly, like he was dying.
    “Cheer up,” I said. “I won’t be here forever, and there are worse places than the
    Place.”
    He nodded grudgingly, looking around. “You know what, Greta, if you’ll promise not to make some dreadful joke out of it: on operations, I pretend I’ll soon be going backstage to court the world-famous ballerina Greta Forzane.”
    He was right about the backstage part. The Place is a regular theater-in-the-round with the Void for an audience, the Void’s gray hardly disturbed by the screens masking
    Surgery (Ugh!), Refresher and Stores. Between the last two are the bar and kitchen and
    Beau’s piano. Between Surgery and the sector where the Door usually appears are the shelves and taborets of the Art Gallery. The control divan is stage center. Spaced around at a fair distance are six big low couches—one with its curtains now shooting up into the gray—and a few small tables. It is like a ballet set and the crazy costumes and characters that turn up don’t ruin the illusion. By no means. Diaghilev would have hired most of them for the Ballet Russe on first sight, without even asking them whether they could keep time to music.

2
    Last week in Babylon, Last night in Rome, —Hodgson
    A RIGHT-HAND GLOVE
    Beau had gone behind the bar and was talking quietly at Doc, but with his eyes elsewhere, looking very sallow and professional in his white, and I thought—Damballa!—I’m in the French Quarter. I couldn’t see the New Girl. Sid was at last getting to the New Boy after the fuss about Mark. He threw a sign and I started over with Erich in tow.
    “Welcome, sweet lad. Sidney Lessingham’s your host, and a fellow Englishman. Born in King’s Lynn, 1564, schooled at Cambridge, but London was the life and death of me, though I outlasted Bessie, Jimmie, Charlie, and Ollie almost. And what a life! By turns a clerk, a spy, a bawd—the two trades are hand in glove—a poet of no account, a beggar, and a peddler of resurrection tracts. Beau Lassiter, our throats are tinder!”
    At the word “poet,” the New Boy looked up, but ‘resentfully, as if he had been tricked into it.
    “And to spare your throat for drinking, sweet gallant, I’ll be so bold as to guess and answer one of your questions,” Sid rattled on. “Yes, I knew Will Shakespeare—we were of an age—and he was such a modest, mind-your-business rogue that we all wondered whether he really did write those plays. Your pardon, faith, but that scratch might be looked to.”
    Then I saw that the New Girl hadn’t lost her head, but