In a Dark Wood Wandering

by Hella S. Haasse

  From a written command from King Henry V of England to the knight Sir Robert Waterton, June, 1417:

  “…we charge you to convey immediately,under heavy guard, Charles, Duke of Orléans, at present a prisoner of war confined in the Tower of London, to Pontefract castle in York, where he will remain for an indefinite period …”

  The sand flows through the hourglass, a ruddy mist, forming at first a barely visible layer and then gradually a growing hill. Before one fully realizes it, the lower globe is completely filled; an hour has gone by, a long precious hour of a life which seems suddenly to consist of a terrifying number of such hours. He whose life it is sees the sand slipping away with comingled feelings of fear, regret, impatience and despair; he sees that the passage of time is at once pitilessly slow and unmercifully fast. In those glass spheres his hours are counted out, the precious wasted hours. The lost hours become days, the days flow into weeks, the weeks create months and before long the months have turned into a year.

  To one who thinks in that way the winds, clouds, rain, sunshine and moonlight can be only dismal portents. The gleam of stars comes and goes behind the window, a ray of the sun, a streak of moonlight creeps over the walls. The seasons change; he sees the leaves of the great trees wither and fall in the field outside the castle; he sees the trees standing for four long months like branched candelabra under the wintry sky; on a certain day in spring he sees a light green cloud hovering between the grey branches, and finally he sees, in the midst of summer, the heated air quivering about the full-crowned trees.

  All this the prisoner of Pontefract sees when he stands before his window. He can see over the outermost wall of the castle. Between the double row of battlements there is a passage where a sentry, wearing a storm hat and with the red cross of England on his breast, paces continually back and forth, back and forth.

  Many different men take their turn at guard duty there; the garrison at Pontefract is a large one. When the prisoner at his window begins to recognize the faces of individual sentries he realizes with bitterness that he has come full circle once more, that time has once more stolen a piece of his life away. Every six hours another watch … He has seen the same men repeatedly; he thinks, There goes the Redhead, there’s Black Beard—there’s Scarcheek, there’s More-Than-Six-Feet-Tall… How many hours, how many hours, in God’s name, how many hours must have passed before he could learn to recognize these people?

  He searches, as he looks out the window, for something that will not change, something that cannot measure time. No, the sky will not do: clouds float by, gleaming white, radiant in the summer—perhaps they are the same clouds which will sail later over Blois, perhaps throwing a swift shadow over Bonne’s upturned face. In the autumn the clouds are more shapeless: torn, scudding low over the land; occasionally they are too heavy with rain to reach the horizon; they break over Pontefract and cause the recluse in his tower chamber the further torment of listening for hours or days to the murmur of falling water, a sound which brings only a deceptive oblivion. He dreams with open eyes and thinks he is elsewhere—he hears someone laughing and someone sobbing; the sobs form a melody that he sang long ago—Madame, je suys plus joyeulx, Madame, I am overjoyed. He puts his hands over his ears so that he can no longer hear the sound of the rain, but he cannot banish that gentle, incessant tapping which becomes Bonne’s voice, bewitching him by night even more distinctly than by day.

  He would rather listen to the wails and ravings of the winter wind which seems never to leave Pontefract in peace, but which howls and bellows round the towers, by turns fierce and melancholy, always a fearful visitor. The prisoner lying sleepless under a fur coverlet feels a cold draught brush along his cheeks and forehead, despite the fire and the shelter of the bedcurtains; the candle flame flickers, the thin tapestries billow in and out, in and out. The mice rustle behind the walls, gnawing and nibbling on the wood, trying to reach the crumbs under the table. The man in the bed—a good warm bed—waits for day. He awaits the first shrill cockcrow, the slight drop in the wind, the odd droning sound which fills the darkness just before the break of dawn; he listens for the sounds in and out of Pontefract—the changing of the guard, the summons to work—a trumpet call, the rumble of footsteps on stair and gallery, the neighing of horses, the clatter of armor and weapons. He awaits the pealing of the church bells; the church spire is visible by day over the tops of the trees in the fields. When at last his servant enters with the morning drink and washing gear, opens the shutters before the windows and rakes up the fire, the prisoner sits up in bed with a sigh; the daily struggle begins anew.

  Summer and winter he gazes at the horizon, the faint, undulating line between the clump of trees behind the ramparts of Pontefract; and the line, ascending here, descending there, remains the same despite the seasons; the profile of York is always the same to the man who stands alone by the window and finds a certain comfort in the sight of this dependable horizon. He comes to know the hazy northern sunlight, the piercing biting cold of winter whenever he sees the clods of dark earth lying in the fields; he discovers the secret of the summer dew which rises in the early morning and after sunset and hovers in long streaks low over the earth. He knows all the birds and their calls; from the way in which they wheel, climb and skim, he can tell whether a storm or gale is approaching, whether the day will bring rain, whether it will be an early winter, whether spring is approaching.

  He can see how, over the course of many weeks, the planets and the stars change their positions in the nocturnal sky; in September sparks rain across the blue-black abyss; in the winter the stars sparkle coldly as the icicles which festoon the outsides of his window. With autumn the winds bring him familiar smells: of rotting leaves and mushrooms, of morning mist, of leather trappings. Far away in the forest he hears the horns blowing, the excited barking of hounds and the pounding of hooves on the ground. The birch trees stand in the meadow bedecked in red and gold and drop leaf after leaf—the largesse of nature. The beauty of these trees torments the prisoner like no other image. He remembers a certain autumn-red forest outside the ramparts of Riom, a splendid spring in another kingdom—how long ago was it now, four, five years?—he remembers riding on horseback through rustling leaves in the still November sunlight; he remembers Bonne laughing, mounted on her horse Mirabel.

  On such days the young man, watching in the tower room of Pontefract, cannot remain standing by the window; he steps into the shadows and paces with his hands behind his back, as he is wont to do. Sometimes he sits motionless by the hearth, reading. The books are arranged carefully on a table beside him: Aristotle’s Politics, a Chronicle of Jerusalem Reconquered, a book on medicine, an edition of Boccaccio—these are the works which Maitre Cousinot had brought along for the prisoner during his last visit. Most of the time the young man can completely forget himself and his surroundings by losing himself in a book; his spirit skims lightly and easily through a world of wisdom and colorful fantasy. But this flight is not always an unmitigated release for him—a word, a wish, a thought can pull him back to the present—and that return is worse than no escape at all.

  He sets to work diligently, mindful of the advice given him by his friend Marshal Boucicaut; he is allowed once more to possess paper and writing materials and day in and day out he does the work of monks and clerks: he copies books, collects maxims, writes in his beautiful uniform script a small commentary on Cato’s Disticha. His chamber servant Chomery, Sir Robert Waterton and those among the guard who are nobly born and who are admitted to the presence of the prisoner, see him invariably occupied in this way through the long winter: a figure dressed in black, on his head a velvet cap with flaps, sitting erect at his table; the parchment sheet hangs over a sloping reading desk, Monseigneur’s right hand moves slowly, purposefully, forward over the lines marked in red. His eyes are fixed on his work and he is apparently absorbed in it; his pale lips are pressed firmly together; every now and then he knits his brows for a moment—the fixed staring wearies him.
When he is spoken to, he puts his pen carefully down and gives a courteous reply, but he never smiles. Robert Waterton himself, a man hardened by constant exposure to the open air, to hunting and war, assumes, not incorrectly, that the prisoner suffers from the lack of physical exercise. He permits him to take walks in the inner court, although there is no mention of this in King Henry’s warrant.

  But after a few days the captive declines the pleasure: he chooses to stand by his open window, rather than to proceed through a little section reserved for that purpose, enclosed on all sides by high walls, where he walks around like a horse on a treadmill, watched by a half-dozen armed soldiers.

  When a swift foaming stream flows into a stagnant pool, at first the water rushes forward; small waves fan out from the mainstream—but slowly the last ripples subside and the surface of the pool becomes a dark mirror. Thus the soul of the prisoner in Pontefract castle becomes immobile, like the stagnant pool. The current is stilled; whatever falls onto the surface floats for an instant and then sinks into darkness. There are only reflections there, fleeting images: clouds, treetops, a bird in flight, long grass stirred by a breeze.

  The prisoner on occasion vividly relives moments of his childhood: he closes his eyes and suddenly the years slip away. He finds himself once again in the stately castles of Valois with their melodious names: Montargis, Montils, Asnieres, Beaumont, Crecy-en-Brie. He is a child, tip-toeing through the high-ceilinged rooms; the noon sun streams, filled with dancing particles of dust, through half-opened shutters. By this golden light he sees kings and heroes striding across the walls. Saints pray, fair women smile, playing the lute or releasing a falcon into the air. As the white unicorn moves through the forest, he looks askance at the child with a large lustrous eye. Beyond, in the flower-strewn meadow, are prancing beasts; deer, hounds, hare and, in the background, peacocks with wide-spread tails.

  Like one enchanted, the child steals through the silent rooms, inhaling the odors of old woodwork and dusty hangings. He comes to a chamber hung with green tapestries; embroidered on the heavy fabric are small angels in stiffly pleated golden garments, blowing on clarions and trumpets. He goes through a low door and stands staring in amazement: he is in a room where, on hangings of colored silk interwoven with gold thread, children bathe in the small translucent waves of a river.

  Finally, he stands for a long time before a tapestry depicting a lord and his lady seated at a chess board set with red and gold pieces. This picture always fascinates him, because the knight looks like his father: a narrow face, a courteous smile, and, in the eyes, the enigmatic expression, at once restless, mocking and appealing, which surprises the child anew each time he sees his father. For years, day after day, the small boy plays in these rooms amid the red and gold and green splendor of the tapestries; the walls of the chambers in his father’s castles are like so many pages of a gigantic storybook. Here the heroes of Antiquity, his own ancestral kings, the holy men and women of the legends, come to meet him. Large as life, they beckon to him to join them in their jewel-toned world, among flowers and leafy vines, or in the shadows of enchanted forests; they show him the vistas of their horizons, or the views from the windows of their palaces: a field of golden-yellow corn, a spring garden, hills blue against a dark sky. Between blooming hedgerows, Lady Venus holds court; she sits there on her throne, surrounded by her chancellors and chamberlains, the members of her council and her retinue; and all who wish to be her subjects are led to her by her son, the God of Love. The child has been told that this is an allegory; his tutor Maitre Garbet has quoted those lines from the Roman de la Rose which he considers suitable for childish ears.

  But soon the boy no longer needs explanations. The mysterious glowing colors of the tapestries, their harmony of line and form, awaken a response in his heart. The figures in the tapestries are his secret companions: the concepts of courtliness in his schoolbooks take on for him the physical appearance of these fair, slender, beautifully dressed ladies, these proud knights, these militant saints and humble martyrs.

  Long years of worry and warfare have not left time for thoughts like these; harsh reality has driven away the creatures of the imagination, whose essence is symbolic. But now they come to share the prisoner’s solitude; they glide into the silence of his aimless fleeting hours, carrying oblivion in the folds of their garments. They knock at the door of the prisoner, who dreams the day away over his books, absorbed in thought, who remains awake throughout the night—a colorful procession of allegorical figures: Grief, Affliction and Hope, Sorrow, Faith, Desire, Solace, Fortune, Memory and Melancholy, Love and—lastly—Death. The stages of his life appear before him: Childhood and Youth arrayed in the rich trappings of images from a turbulent past.

  One day, to amuse himself, the prisoner begins to write in the light, flowing style characteristic of him, a story in rhyme about his life. Words and images glide effortlessly from his pen; he does not need to exert himself; he needs only to describe what is being enacted in his imagination, an allegory in which he himself plays a role among symbols come alive. Love and Youth, ideal in feature and form, stride through his dream like royal figures embroidered in red, gold and green with tapering fingers and sweet mysterious smiles. He himself, the mere mortal, moves among Love’s subjects as he once walked among the courtiers in Saint-Pol, uncertain and shy, awkwardly polite, unable to express the admiration and longing which he feels—a stranger in the Court of Love.

  This new pastime has a strange effect on the prisoner. He has begun it out of boredom and a vague, melancholy nostalgia for the carefree childhood that vanished all too quickly. As he writes, the young man regrets the past and thinks bitterly of the reality of his youth; he knows the pleasures of courtly love only from hearsay; he was never allowed the time and freedom to mature gradually, in the green-gold April of life, into a man. He reads over his poem; it seems to him to be dull and artificial; the meaning behind the allegory is obscure. During the long hours of his sleepless nights he calls up, word for word, line for line, the ballads which he once composed for Bonne and which he intended his minstrels to sing at supper. He improves the rhyme and metaphor of these stanzas, once written all too hastily.

  When he grows tired of reading Aristotle, or when he is not in the mood to annotate Cato’s Disticha, he jots down these reconstructions. He cuts a large sheet of vellum into eight parts, creating a booklet in which he can write his ballads. Carefully, in red ink, he decorates the initial letter of each poem with vines and flowers; he has plenty of time for this monkish work.

  “Radiant and fresh, rich in Youth’s treasures, laughing eyes, red lips and sweet soft voice … These are the virtues which adorn my Lady…”

  But the words which he sets down so carefully on the page before him become his implacable enemies; they do not distract him, but force him to relive the feelings which inspired him the first time he wrote them. The desperate burning desire which tortured him in the first years of his solitude, and which he thought he had overcome, assails him again. Behind the lines Bonne’s intangible image lurks enticingly. The time which has passed since their last meeting, the distance and the silence between them, have transformed her. She is no longer the sweet friend, the young wife; she is now the beauty, the seductress incarnate. She has become beauty, love, youth itself, an infinitely distant star.

  The prisoner of Pontefract falls victim to the divinity which he himself has inadvertently evoked in light graceful words. Poetry is his only means of relief; there is no other. Song follows song, and all speak of his sense of loss, his yearning, his unquenchable grief and the hope of freedom which lives in him still. These ballads are substitutes for the letters which he is not allowed to write; he manages, within the limitations of poetic form, to express what he could not put into words even if he were permitted to write letters. What began as a diversion has become a need for him, a necessity. Just as wine never quenches thirst but continues to reawaken it, so each verse embodies in itself the germ of the next verse. When
he has completed the envoi, the first words of a new poem well up in him—a complaint, a hymn of praise, an expression of desire …

  He knows all too well that in the world outside Pontefract, waves are tossing in the wind while he himself sinks into stagnant waters. From time to time his servant picks up gossip which is circulating among Waterton’s men. So over the years the lonely young man in the tower chamber hears disquieting news, vague rumors which seem to echo frightful events taking place far away in France. The prisoner thinks these rumors seem very credible in every way: he knows the players and the stage; he does not go so far as to doubt even the strangest and wildest tales.

  Burgundy, who wishes at any cost to get control of the new Dauphin, has gone into the field with large armies, while the King of England conquers town after town in Normandy without opposition; secret negotiations are being carried on between Burgundy and the exiled Queen; she seems suddenly to have been taken off to the city of Troyes, which belongs to Burgundy. Proclamations are delivered: “Armagnac’s authority in Paris is unlawful; the true government is in Troyes. Queen Isabeau will rule France along with Burgundy in the name of the King who is too ill to hold the reins of government. All those who follow Armagnac are committing high treason.”

  So the Kingdom then has two governments.

  The prisoner of Pontefract hears with mounting concern how his father-in-law Armagnac struggles vainly against the rising tide of public hatred. A rebellion breaks out in Paris and the burghers themselves bring Burgundy’s troops inside the city. The first to attack Armagnac’s supporters are the butchers and their apprentices who had once been banished from the city and who are blinded by the lust for blood and vengeance.

  Is there any truth to the dreadful stories which the valet Chomery whispers in his master’s ear? The names of Simon Caboche and of Capeluche the executioner are heard once more; there is talk of a savage, starved mob ready to seek revenge for years of enforced wanderings. In the streets, in the houses, in the churches, there are piles of corpses; in the midsummer heat, burial pits could not be dug fast enough. The prisoner believes unreservedly that murder is being committed for the sake of murder. He does not doubt for an instant that the great lords and nobles of Burgundy’s army are the equal of the plundering rabble in cruelty and greed. In addition, he thinks it is more than likely that disease will break out from the rotten stench which must fill the city.