Word: spider
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...Crossed. With an unexpectedly loaded pistol, murder is done on the stage. The play halts. Policemen swarm in. The entire audience is under arrest and suspect. From this sanguine beginning the play proceeds through an ingenious labyrinth of surprises that would have been far more spine-chilling if The Spider (TIME, April 4) had not arrived first in Manhattan with much the same formula. A horde of unnamed actors are planted in the audience to be yanked from their seats, shoot from the balcony and participate generally in what looks like an impromptu actors' tong...
Therefore, last week the frail cobweb relations between the Black Spider at Rome and the Red Spider in Moscow were strained to the rupture point. Moscow news-organs screamed that a British-led bloc of nations was being lined up against Russia; and even neutrals considered the Italian signature a British diplomatic victory...
...pride of the synagogue, had led him to a mechanistic philosophy of life. He was not the first original thinker Jewry had disowned. Spinoza secluded himself and set up as an optometrist, a grinder of fine lenses. At his leisure he smoked a pipe of tobacco. His sport was spider-fighting. Hunting out two aggressive spiders, he would embattle them and watch with glee through a magnifying glass. Or, feeling more domestic, he would catch flies, throw them into the web of his first-string fighter and relish the savage banquet. Drawing was his polite accomplishment, an amateur skilled...
...Giorgio Mirelli, a boy-genius whom he has tutored, does not greatly perturb him. Nor even the strange daemon of the beautiful woman who caused the boy's suicide. Emotionless? Oh, no. But he has taught himself to control his emotions so that he can serve the spider and yet preserve something more important than emotions: his soul, if you like...
...Story.† Serafino Gubbio serves a black, knock-kneed spider. Daily he whets its appetite with coils of transparent membrane. Not knowing why, creatures come near and sacrifice their real selves to the spider. Serafino Gubbio helps the spider devour them. Not long afterwards, myriad people issue from dark places where, seeking pleasure, they have seen the ghosts made by the spider. Relieved to be out again, they say, "What terrible rot!" Serafino Gubbio is a cinematograph operator for a big company near Rome...