Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Jeannie Howse and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
* * * * *
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has |
| been preserved. |
| |
| Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For |
| a complete list, please see the end of this document. |
| |
| This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction, |
| December 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any |
| evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication |
| was renewed. |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
* * * * *
[Illustration]
NO
GREAT MAGIC
by FRITZ LEIBER
ILLUSTRATED
BY NODEL
The troupers of the Big Time
lack no art to sway a crowd--
or to change all history!
I
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.
--Graves
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 AA."
"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 ricketty little mind_; and I hied
myself off to the costumery to settle my nerves.
The costumery, which occupies the back end of the dressing room, is
exactly the right place to settle the nerves and warm the fancies of
any child, including an unraveled adult who's saving what's left of
her sanity by pretending to be one. To begin with there are the
regular costumes for Shakespeare's plays, all jeweled and spangled
and brocaded, stage armor, great Roman togas with weights in the
borders to make them drape right, velvets of every color to rest your
cheek against and dream, and the fantastic costumes for the other
plays we favor; Ibsen's _Peer Gynt_, Shaw's _Back to Methuselah_ and
Hilliard's adaptation of Heinlein's _Children of Methuselah_, the
Capek brothers' _Insect People_, O'Neill's _The Fountain_, Flecker's
_Hassan_, _Camino Real_, _Children of the Moon_, _The Beggar's Opera_,
_Mary of Scotland_, _Berkeley Square_, _The Road to Rome_.
There are also the costumes for all the special and variety
performances we give of the plays: _Hamlet_ in modern dress, _Julius
Caesar_ set in a dictatorship of the 1920's, _The Taming of the Shrew_
in caveman furs and leopard skins, where Petruchio comes in riding a
dinosaur, _The Tempest_ set on another planet with a spaceship wreck
to start it off _Karrumph!_--which means a half dozen spacesuits,
featherweight but looking ever so practical, and the weirdest sort of
extraterrestrial-beast outfits for Ariel and Caliban and the other
monsters.
Oh, I tell you the stuff in the costumery ranges over such a sweep of
space and time that you sometimes get frightened you'll be whirled up
and spun off just anywhere, so that you have to clutch at something
very real to you to keep it from happening and to remind you where you
_really_ are--as I did now at the subway token on the thin gold chain
around my neck (Siddy's first gift to me that I can remember) and
chanted very softly to myself, like a charm or a prayer, closing my
eyes and squeezing the holes in the token: "Columbus Circle, Times
Square, Penn Station, Christopher Street...."
* * * * *
But you don't ever get _really_ frightened in the costumery. Not
exactly, though your goosehairs get wonderfully realistically tingled
and your tummy chilled from time to time--because you know it's all
make-believe, a lifesize doll world, a children's dress-up world. It
gets you thinking of far-off times and scenes as _pleasant_ places and
not as black hungry mouths that might gobble you up and keep you
forever. It's always safe, always _just in the theatre, just on the
stage_, no matter how far it seems to plunge and roam ... and the best
sort of therapy for a pot-holed mind like mine, with as many gray ruts
and curves and gaps as its cerebrum, that can't remember one single
thing before this last year in the dressing room and that can't ever
push its shaking body out of that same motherly fatherly room, except
to stand in the wings for a scene or two and watch the play until the
fear gets too great and the urge to take just one peek at _the
audience_ gets too strong ... and I remember what happened the two
times I _did_ peek, and I have to come scuttling back.
The costumery's good occupational therapy for me, too, as my pricked
and calloused fingertips testify. I think I must have stitched up or
darned half the costumes in it this last twelvemonth, though there are
so many of them that I swear the drawers have accordion pleats and the
racks extend into the fourth dimension--not to mention the boxes of
props and the shelves of scripts and prompt-copies and other books,
including a couple of encyclopedias and the many thick volumes of
Furness's _Variorum Shakespeare_, which as Sid had guessed I'd been
boning up on. Oh, and I've sponged and pressed enough costumes, too,
and even refitted them to newcomers like Martin, ripping up and
resewing seams, which can be a punishing job with heavy materials.
In a less sloppily organized company I'd be called wardrobe mistress,
I guess. Except that to anyone in show business that suggests a
crotchety old dame with lots of authority and scissors hanging around
her neck on a string. Although I got my crochets, all right, I'm not
that old. Kind of childish, in fact. As for authority, everybody
outranks me, even Martin.
Of course to somebody _outside_ show business, wardrobe mistress might
suggest a yummy gal who spends her time dressing up as Nell Gwyn or
Anitra or Mrs. Pinchwife or Cleopatra or even Eve (we got a legal
costume for it) and inspiring the boys. I've tried that once or twice.
But Siddy frowns on it, and if Miss Nefer ever caught me at it I think
she'd whang me.
And in a normaller company it would be the wardrobe room, too, but
costumery is my infantile name for it and the actors go along with my
little whims.
I don't mean to suggest our company is completely crackers. To get as
close to Broadway even as Central Park you got to have something. But
in spite of Sid's whip-cracking there is a comforting looseness about
its efficiency--people trade around the parts they play without fuss,
the bill may be changed a half hour before curtain without anybody
getting hysterics, nobody gets fired for eating garlic and breathing
it in the leading lady's face. In short, we're a team. Which is funny
when you come to think of it, as Sid and Miss Nefer and Bruce and
Maudie are British (Miss Nefer with a touch of Eurasian blood, I
romance); Martin and Beau and me are American (at least I _think_ I
am) while the rest come from just everywhere.
* * * * *
Besides my costumery work, I fetch things and run inside errands and
help the actresses dress and the actors too. The dressing room's very
coeducational in a halfway respectable way. And every once in a while
Martin and I police up the whole place, me skittering about with
dustcloth and wastebasket, he wielding the scrub-brush and mop with
such silent grim efficiency that it always makes me nervous to get
through and duck back into the costumery to collect myself.
Yes, the costumery's a great place to quiet your nerves or improve
your mind or even dream your life away. But this time I couldn't have
been there eight minutes when Miss Nefer's Elizabeth-angry voice came
skirling, "Girl! Girl! Greta, where is my ruff with silver trim?" I
laid my hands on it in a flash and loped it to her, because Old Queen
Liz was known to slap even her Maids of Honor around a bit now and
then and Miss Nefer is a bear on getting into character--a real Paul
Muni.
She was all made up now, I was happy to note, at least as far as her
face went--I hate to see that spooky eight-spoked faint tattoo on her
forehead (I've sometimes wondered if she got it acting in India or
Egypt maybe).
Yes, she was already all made up. This time she'd been going extra
heavy on the burrowing-into-character bit, I could tell right away,
even if it was only for a hacked-out anachronistic prologue. She
signed to me to help her dress without even looking at me, but as I
got busy I looked at _her_ eyes. They were so cold and sad and lonely
(maybe because they were so far away from her eyebrows and temples and
small tight mouth, and so shut away from each other by that ridge of
nose) that I got the creeps. Then she began to murmur and sigh, very
softly at first, then loudly enough so I got the sense of it.
"Cold, so cold," she said, still seeing things far away though her
hands were working smoothly with mine. "Even a gallop hardly fires my
blood. Never was such a Januarius, though there's no snow. Snow will
not come, or tears. Yet my brain burns with the thought of Mary's
death-warrant unsigned. There's my particular hell!--to doom,
perchance, all future queens, or leave a hole for the Spaniard and the
Pope to creep like old worms back into the sweet apple of England.
Philip's tall black crooked ships massing like sea-going fortresses
south-away--cragged castles set to march into the waves. Parma in the
Lowlands! And all the while my bright young idiot gentlemen spurting
out my treasure as if it were so much water, as if gold pieces were a
glut of summer posies. Oh, alackanight!"
And I thought, _Cry Iced!--that's sure going to be one tyrannosaur of
a prologue. And how you'll ever shift back to being Lady Mack beats
me. Greta, if this is what it takes to do just a bit part, you'd
better give up your secret ambition of playing walk-ons some day when
your nerves heal._
* * * * *
She was really getting to me, you see, with that characterization. It
was as if I'd managed to go out and take a walk and sat down in the
park outside and heard the President talking to himself about the
chances of war with Russia and realized he'd sat down on a bench with
its back to mine and only a bush between. You see, here we were, two
females undignifiedly twisted together, at the moment getting her into
that crazy crouch-deep bodice that's like a big icecream cone, and yet
here at the same time was Queen Elizabeth the First of England, three
hundred and umpty-ump years dead, coming back to life in a Central
Park dressing room. It shook me.
She looked so much the part, you see--even without the red wig yet,
just powdered pale makeup going back to a quarter of an inch from her
own short dark bang combed and netted back tight. The age too. Miss
Nefer can't be a day over forty--well, forty-two at most--but now she
looked and talked and felt to my hands dressing her, well, at least a
dozen years older. I guess when Miss Nefer gets into character she
does it with each molecule.
That age point fascinated me so much that I risked asking her a
question. Probably I was figuring that she couldn't do me much damage
because of the positions we happened to be in at the moment. You see,
I'd started to lace her up and to do it right I had my knee against
the tail of her spine.
"How old, I mean how young might your majesty be?" I asked her,
innocently wonderingly like some dumb serving wench.
For a wonder she didn't somehow swing around and clout me, but only
settled into character a little more deeply.
"Fifty-four winters," she replied dismally. "'Tiz Januarius of Our
Lord's year One Thousand and Five Hundred and Eighty and Seven. I sit
cold in Greenwich, staring at the table where Mary's death warrant
waits only my sign manual. If I send her to the block, I open the
doors to future, less official regicides. But if I doom her not,
Philip's armada will come inching up the Channel in a season, puffing
smoke and shot, and my English Catholics, thinking only of Mary
Regina, will rise and i' the end the Spaniard will have all. All
history would alter. That must not be, even if I'm damned for it! And
yet ... and yet...."
A bright blue fly came buzzing along (the dressing room has _some_
insect life) and slowly circled her head rather close, but she didn't
even flicker her eyelids.
"I sit cold in Greenwich, going mad. Each afternoon I ride, praying
for some mischance, some prodigy, to wash from my mind away the bloody
question for some little space. It skills not what: a fire, a tree
a-failing, Davison or e'en Eyes Leicester tumbled with his horse, an
assassin's ball clipping the cold twigs by my ear, a maid crying
rape, a wild boar charging with dipping tusks, news of the Spaniard at
Thames' mouth or, more happily, a band of strolling actors setting
forth some new comedy to charm the fancy or some great unheard-of
tragedy to tear the heart--though that were somewhat much to hope for
at this season and place, even if Southwark be close by."
* * * * *
The lacing was done. I stood back from her, and really she looked so
much like Elizabeth painted by Gheeraerts or on the Great Seal of
Ireland or something--though the ash-colored plush dress trimmed in
silver and the little silver-edge ruff and the black-silver
tinsel-cloth cloak lined with white plush hanging behind her looked
most like a winter riding costume--and her face was such a pale frozen
mask of Elizabeth's inward tortures, that I told myself, _Oh, I got to
talk to Siddy again, he's made some big mistake, the lardy old
lackwit. Miss Nefer just can't be figuring on playing in Macbeth
tonight._
As a matter of fact I was nerving myself to ask _her_ all about it
direct, though it was going to take some real nerve and maybe be
risking broken bones or at least a flayed cheek to break the ice of
that characterization, when who should come by calling the Fifteen
Minutes but Martin. He looked so downright goofy that it took my mind
off Nefer-in-character for all of eight seconds.
His levied bottom half still looked like _The Lower Depths_. Martin is
Village Stanislavsky rather than Ye Olde English Stage Traditions. But
above that ... well, all it really amounted to was that he was
stripped to the waist and had shaved off the small high tuft of chest
hair and was wearing a black wig that hung down in front of his
shoulders in two big braids heavy with silver hoops and pins. But just
the same those simple things, along with his tarpaper-solarium tan and
habitual poker expression, made him look so like an American Indian
that I thought, _Hey Zeus!--he's all set to play Hiawatha, or if he'd
just cover up that straight-line chest, a frowny Pocahontas._ And I
quick ran through what plays with Indian parts we do and could only
come up with _The Fountain_.
I mutely goggled my question at him, wiggling my hands like guppy
fins, but he brushed me off with a solemn mysterious smile and backed
through the curtain. I thought, _nobody can explain this but Siddy_,
and I followed Martin.