Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man’s embers
And a live flame will start.

I dipped through the filmy curtain into the boys’ half of the dressing room and there was Sid sitting at the star’s dressing table in his threadbare yellowed undershirt, the lucky one, not making up yet but staring sternly at himself in the bulb-framed mirror and experimentally working his features a little, as actors will, and kneading the stubble on his fat chin.

I said to him quietly, “Siddy, what are we putting on tonight? Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen or Shakespeare’s Macbeth? It says Macbeth on the callboard, but Miss Nefer’s getting ready for Elizabeth. She just had me go and fetch the red wig.”

He tried out a few eyebrow rears⁠—right, left, both together⁠—then turned to me, sucking in his big gut a little, as he always does when a gal heaves into hailing distance, and said, “Your pardon, sweetling, what sayest thou?”

Sid always uses that kook antique patter backstage, until I sometimes wonder whether I’m in Central Park, New York City, nineteen hundred and three quarters, or somewhere in Southwark, Merry England, fifteen hundred and same. The truth is that although he loves every last fat part in Shakespeare and will play the skinniest one with loyal and inspired affection, he thinks Willy S. penned Falstaff with nobody else in mind but Sidney J. Lessingham. (And no accent on the ham, please.)

I closed my eyes and counted to eight, then repeated my question.

He replied, “Why, the Bard’s tragical history of the bloody Scot, certes.” He waved his hand toward the portrait of Shakespeare that always sits beside his mirror on top of his reserve makeup box. At first that particular picture of the Bard looked too nancy to me⁠—a sort of peeping-tom schoolteacher⁠—but I’ve grown used to it over the months and even palsy-feeling.

He didn’t ask me why I hadn’t asked Miss Nefer my question. Everybody in the company knows she spends the hour before curtain-time getting into character, never parting her lips except for that purpose⁠—or to bite your head off if you try to make the most necessary conversation.

“Aye, ’tiz Macbeth tonight,” Sid confirmed, returning to his frowning-practice: left eyebrow up, right down, reverse, repeat, rest. “And I must play the ill-starred Thane of Glamis.”

I said, “That’s fine, Siddy, but where does it leave us with Miss Nefer? She’s already thinned her eyebrows and beaked out the top of her nose for Queen Liz, though that’s as far as she’s got. A beautiful job, the nose. Anybody else would think it was plastic surgery instead of putty. But it’s going to look kind of funny on the Thaness of Glamis.”

Sid hesitated a half second longer than he usually would⁠—I thought, his timing’s off tonight⁠—and then he harrumphed and said, “Why, Iris Nefer, decked out as Good Queen Bess, will speak a prologue to the play⁠—a prologue which I have myself but last week writ.” He owled his eyes. “ ’Tis an experiment in the new theater.”

I said, “Siddy, prologues were nothing new to Shakespeare. He had them on half his other plays. Besides, it doesn’t make sense to use Queen Elizabeth. She was dead by the time he whipped up Macbeth, which is all about witchcraft and directed at King James.”

He growled a little at me and demanded, “Prithee, how comes it your peewit-brain bears such a ballast of fusty book-knowledge, chit?”

I said softly, “Siddy, you don’t camp in a Shakespearean dressing room for a year, tete-a-teting with some of the wisest actors ever, without learning a little. Sure I’m a mental case, a poor little A & A existing on your sweet charity, and don’t think I don’t appreciate it, but⁠—”

“A-and-A, thou sayest?” he frowned. “Methinks the gladsome new forswearers of sack and ale call themselves A.A.”

“Agoraphobe and Amnesiac,” I told him. “But look, Siddy, I was going to sayest that I do know the plays. Having Queen Elizabeth speak a prologue to Macbeth is as much an anachronism as if you put her on the gantry of the British moonship, busting a bottle of champagne over its schnozzle.”

“Ha!” he cried as if he’d caught me out. “And saying there’s a new Elizabeth, wouldn’t that be the bravest advertisement ever for the Empire?⁠—perchance rechristening the pilot, copilot and astrogator Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh? And the ship The Golden Hind? Tilly fally, lady!”

He went on, “My prologue an anachronism, quotha! The groundlings will never mark it. Think’st thou wisdom came to mankind with the stenchful rocket and the sundered atomy? More, the Bard himself was topfull of anachronism. He put spectacles on King Lear, had clocks tolling the hour in Caesar’s Rome, buried that Roman ‘stead o’ burning him and gave Czechoslovakia a seacoast. Go to, doll.”

“Czechoslovakia, Siddy?”

“Bohemia, then, what skills it? Leave me now, sweet poppet. Go thy ways. I have matters of import to ponder. There’s more to running a repertory company than reading the footnotes to Furness.”

Martin had just slouched by calling the Half Hour and looking in his solemnity, sneakers, levis and dirty T-shirt more like an underage refugee from Skid Row than Sid’s newest recruit, assistant stage manager and hardest-worked juvenile⁠—though for once he’d remembered to shave. I was about to ask Sid who was going to play Lady Mack if Miss Nefer wasn’t, or, if she were going to double the roles, shouldn’t I help her with the change? She’s a slow dresser and the Elizabeth costumes are pretty realistically stayed. And she would have trouble getting off that nose, I was sure. But then I saw that Siddy was already slapping on the alboline to keep the grease paint from getting into his pores.

Greta, you ask too many questions, I told myself. You get everybody riled up and you rack your own poor rickety little mind; and I hied myself off to the costumery to settle my nerves.

The costumery, which occupies