Word: toadding
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...expected in a Greene novel, love persists among God's grotesques. A leper with ghastly mutilations mates with another who crawls like a wounded toad to her rendezvous. Says one of the White Fathers: "Sometimes I think God was not entirely serious when he gave man the sexual instinct," but the offspring is baptized. Querry, however, is beyond love and beyond all sacrament, his only surviving faith a certain "regard for the truth." And so he is doomed, not only by Corruption, in the person of Parkinson, but by Innocence, personified in Marie Rycker, the child wife...
Ballad of a Soldier (Mosfilm; Kingsley-Frankel). A Russian soldier scuttles like a desperate bug across an open field. Like a big grey toad, a German tank relentlessly pursues him. Bullets frisk about his heels. He dodges, drops his gun, falls, runs on, gasps, reels with exhaustion. The screen reels, tilts crazily, tilts further . . . Suddenly the image is upside down, the world is upside down. Yet still across a sky of mud the soldier flees, and still the tank pursues...
...sunk in nature and the other lost in light. The dark sister hates the fair sister, and one morning, when the two girls ride together through the forest to bring candles to the village church, the dark sister secretly opens the fair sister's bread and slips a toad inside. Then, in the depths of the forest, she turns back and lets her sister go on alone...
Soon the fair sister meets three hungry goatherds. When she offers to share her bread with them, the toad jumps out. "The herdsmen three," the ballad continues, "took her to wife/ And then from her they took her life./ Her body in the mire they lay/ And with her garments went away." That night the murderers take shelter at a farmhouse, unaware that the farm belongs to the father (Max von Sydow) of their victim. When they offer to sell him the girl's garments, he slaughters them like the animals they are. Then he rushes through the forest...
...theaters, tents and schoolrooms of every land, wherever the sun sets and curtains rise, Falstaff struts with his gorbellied wit, Bottom bumbles through the woods, and wide-eyed Ophelia trembles before Hamlet's abuse. Malvolio preens like a toad in yellow stockings. Hotspur wells blood. In soliloquy and song, in bantering bawdry and scalp-tingling rhetoric, in the kingliest English and in tender or rough translation, they speak to man from mankind's heart. Never in the nearly 400 years since their creator was born have Shakespeare's characters spoken to so many, or meant so much...