The Big Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

she’d handled that lunatic.
    “Lilian Foster,” she explained. “I’m English also. Mr. Marchant, I’ve read _A Young
    Man’s Fancy_ I don’t know how many times.”
    “You have? It’s wretched stuff. From the Dark Ages—I mean my Cambridge days. In the trenches, I was working up some poems that were rather better.”
    “I won’t hear you say that. But I’d be terribly thrilled to hear the new ones. Oh, Mr.
    Marchant, it was so strange to hear you call it Passiondale.”
    “Why, if I may ask?”
    “Because that’s the way I pronounce it to myself. But I looked it up and it’s more like
    Pas-ken-DAIuh.”
    “Bless you! All the Tommies called it Passiondale, just as they called Ypres Wipers.”
    “How interesting. You know, Mr. Marchant, I’ll wager we were Recruited in the same operation, summer of 1917. I’d got to France as a Red Cross nurse, but they found out my age and were going to send me back.”
    “How old were you—are you? Same thing, I mean to say.”
    “Seventeen.”
    “Seventeen in ‘17,” Bruce murmured, his blue eyes glassy.
    It was real corny dialogue and I couldn’t resent the humorous leer Erich gave me as we listened to them, as if to say, “Ain’t it nice, Liebchen , Bruce has a silly little English schoolgirl to occupy him between operations?”
    Just the same, as I watched Lili in her dark bangs and pearl necklace and tight little gray dress that reached barely to her knees, and Bruce huildng over her tenderly in his snazzy hussar’s rig, I knew that I was seeing the start of something that hadn’t been part of me since
    Dave died fighting Franco years before I got on the Big Time, the sort of thing that almost made me wish there could be children in the Change World. I wondered why I’d never thought of trying to work things so that Dave got Resurrected and I told myself: no, it’s all changed, I’ve changed, better the Change Winds don’t disturb Dave or I know about it.
    “No, I didn’t die in 1917—I was merely Recruited then,” Lili was telling Bruce. “I
    lived all through the Twenties, as you can see from the way I dress. But let’s not talk about that, shall we? Oh, Mr. Marchant, do you think you can possibly remember any of those poems you started in the trenches? I can’t fancy them bettering your sonnet that concludes
     
    with, ‘The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep; Look at the stars, poor little ape, and sleep.’”
    That one almost made me whoop—what monkeys we are, I thought—though I’d be the first to admit that the best line to use on a poet is one of his own—in fact as many as possible.
    I decided I could safely forget our little Britons and devote myself to Erich or whatever needed me.

3
    Hell is the place for me. For to Hell go the fine churchmen, and the fine knights, killed in the tourney or in some grand war, the brave soldiers and the gallant gentlemen. With them will I go.
    There go also the fair gracious ladies who have lovers two or three beside their lord. There go the gold and the silver, sables and ermine. There go the harpers and the minstrels and the kings of the earth.
    —Aucassin
    NINE FOR A PARTY
    I exchanged my drink for a new one from another tray Beau was bringing around.
    The gray of the Void was beginning to look real pleasant, like warm thick mist with millions of tiny diamonds floating in it. Doc was sitting grandly at the bar with a steaming tumber of tea—a chaser, I guess, since he was Just putting down a shot glass. Sid was talking to Erich and laughing at the same time and I said to myself it begins to feel like a party, but something’s lacking.
    It wasn’t anything to do with the Major Maintainer; its telltale was glowing a steady red like a nice little home fire amid the tight cluster of dials that included all the controls except the lonely and frightening Introversion switch that was never touched. When Maud’s couch curtains winked out and there were she and the Roman sitting