Nothing Like the Sun

by Anthony Burgess

  'Go then, go! Threaten no longer but go!' That, to his surprise, was WS himself, crying at Kemp. 'We are sick of your jigs and botched extemporisings. I have been sick these seven years. An you will not do what is set down for you to do then you may go and well rid?'

  Kemp's fat jigged in his anger. 'Upstart,' he panted, unconsciously borrowing from an earlier and different vilification. 'It is I that they come to see. Words, words, all words with you, you are naught but a word-boy.' Richard Burbage stroked his beard, saying nothing. 'I warn thee, I will not be told what I will do, your crazy honorificibillibus or whatever it be. It was I,' cried Kemp, glaring around the rehearsing assembly, 'that taught ye all. Now it is all his words that we must bow down to.'

  'It is the new way, Willy,' said Heminges, speaking quietly. 'We cannot perpetuate the past, however the groundlings love you.'

  'There,' cried Kemp, 'thou hast the infection from this word-boy here. Perpetuabilitatibus.' Even in his wrath he must needs clown, popping the plosives with puffed cheeks. One or two of the prentices laughed.

  'We all have had to learn,' said WS loudly. 'We have to move, to make better. I cannot have my play made bottom-heavy with his leering bawdry.'

  'I will take you at your word,' shook shouting Kemp. 'It will be an ill day for you all, I promise. Such as Cavaliero Kemp are not ten a penny.' Robert Armin was standing modestly apart, trimming his nails with his teeth. 'It is this one that is the trouble,' Kemp cried, pointing at WS with a pudgy trembling finger. 'I made him, this fine gentleman. Not Without Mustard. He came whimpering to me and poor dead Tarleton for work. Now he is a fine man with a black doxy.'

  'That is not to the point.' WS blushed. Who had perpetrated that sneer at his family motto? 'The point is that if I am to make plays----'

  'I think,' said Dick Burbage to Kemp, 'that the time is come. You may sell your shares to myself or to my brother.' Kemp stared at him aghast, a comic Caesar. 'You have done well, you have had longer than any in the game.' Kemp visibly shrank. 'We must part, and there's an end on it, but we ought not to part enemies.'

  There were tears in Kemp's eyes, soon his voice was a whine; he had never had the gift of control. 'It is dying,' he cried, 'the good old way. It is being killed by upstarts. You,' and he came up to WS, his blubber cheeks wet, 'you.' He raised a feeble arm to strike. WS stepped back; he said:

  'Believe me, all this is not a question of friendship. It is a question rather of what is right for the stage.'

  'Puppy, do you not prate of what is right for the stage. I was on the stage before you were----' He stood there, dropping his arms to his sides. 'Ah, it is no matter.'

  'Let it be a good exit, Willy,' said Heminges. 'An exit, and then we can drink together and laugh.'

  'An exit, yes,' said Kemp. Then he recovered his loudness. 'Aye, an exit for good and all. A sort of desperate ingrates. I shall be glad to leave. God curse you,' he gibbered at WS, 'traitor.' He began to march off.

  'Forget not your trill-lillies,' said Armin softly. Kemp did not hear. 'For oh, for oh,' sang Armin in his sweet tenor, 'the hobby-horse is forgot.'

  TRAITOR, traitor. 'My head aches,' said WS. Her lodgings were in a little house on Swan Lane, within smell of the river and hearing of the watermen's cries.

  'Lie down,' she commanded. 'I will soak dis handkercher in cold water.' She busied herself at the ewer, a tiny brown housewife, while he watched her, feigning shut eyes, from her bed. The room had a spicy smell, sun-warmed, a pocket Indies. 'Now,' she said, and she laid the damp cool poultice on his brows. 'Make room,' she ordered, and she was there beside him.

  'A comfort,' he said. 'There is this world of men, and sometimes it smells heavily of the sweat of men's contention. It is good to be here.'

  'Lie quiet and say naught.' His doublet was off, his shirt open for the summer warmth; she smoothed his thin chest with her small hand, down, down to the belly then back again.

  'I would not ever have thought,' he said, feeling the aches of the day recede, 'that I could lie thus quietly. There was a time when I would seize you in my greed like a boy who can never have enough sweetmeats. I would want to cram you in my mouth.'

  'And now not.' His eyes shut, he could still tell that she was smiling. 'Well, I must make you as you were.'

  'I like well of this friendly calm, the two of us lying together content like this.'

  'I like well too of de oder way.' She bared her breast and laid his head there, still stroking. 'It is what man and woman is for.' Idly his tongue caressed her nipple. She shuddered. 'You must not play like dat if you do not mean----' And then she showed him what, failing of the power of the other, final act, he might do to give her pleasure and release. About his unwilling hand she climbed her ladder to its topmost rung then leaped to her death through air that was all silken cushions. She lay panting for a time. He said:

  'You will think little of me. I will learn again soon, fear not. There are things that the soul will do to the body.' Sweat lay on her forehead; he wiped it gently off with the handkerchief that had fallen from his own brow to the pillow. Soon she opened her eyes and smiled.

  'Aye,' she said, 'dou wilt learn again soon.'

  But it was not till high summer that he learned again. On a July day he stood with the Burbages, Heminges and the rest on Maiden Lane. Street the master builder made a secret masonic sign; the workers folded their aprons. Consummatum est. For some reason WS could not get those words out of his head. He thought of them not as Christ's words but as Faustus's -- the signing of the bill with blood. He foresaw that here his best blood must flow. 'It is,' said Fletcher, 'a brave erection.'

  'They have promised our flag by noon tomorrow,' said Dick Burbage. 'Hercules and his globe.' A brave name for a brave erection. The Globe. Totus mundus agit histrionem. And a brave motto. The whole world, no, all the world acts a play, is a stage ... He must work something out. And now----

  'Now we must drink,' said Dick Burbage. The prentices, grinning, uncovered their baskets. Cups, flagons. 'We will drink at every entrance, at every point and corner. We will make it smell of wine, not paint and size and wood-shavings. We will baptise it.'

  'Ego te baptizo,' said John Wilson, 'in nomine Kyddi et Marlovii et Shakespearii.' WS blushed.

  'Amen amen to that fair prayer say I.' Dick, followed by his brother, led them to the entrance. Before going in they downed a dedicatory cup of harsh ferrous wine, sun-warm. It was like drinking blood. Then they swigged another as they looked about them -- the tiered galleries, the jutting apron, the canopy, the study not yet curtained, the tarrass. They mounted the stage, posturing, strutting, waving their spilling cups. They remembered old lines, ancient business, missed cues. They remembered Kemp and, for a moment, were abashed. Armin tried to shin up one of the stage-posts. Chanting a growling war-song they marched from the left stage-door to the right, ran like mad down the steps, across the gloomy echoing cellarage unseen, up the steps that led to the left entrance, then resumed the stately tramping on-stage, an endless belt of an army, each man altering his shape and stance to make himself a new soldier at each entrance, but none ever letting go of his cup. Condell moaned like a ghost deep below the stage. Dick Burbage squeaked Juliet, swaying on the balustraded tarrass. They tested the strength of the boards with thudding high la voltas, they performed a mincing but stork-legged pavane. Watermen and beggars looked in, mouths open at the free show, drawn by the song, laughter, shouting. Overhead the clouds lumbered over the July blue and there was a brief afternoon shower, but, under their canopy, the Lord Chamberlain's Men did not feel it. When the sun came out again the flagons were empty and the playhouse had been well-anointed with bloody iron-smelling wine, either straight from the flagon or, in more intimate libations, from the body's wine-vessels. They began to totter home, those that could, arms round each other in players' brotherliness. Two bodies lay, dead out, on the apron. Armin, sober, thinking his own thoughts, sat on the stage, swinging his legs over its edge, and sang a melancholy song:

&nb
sp; Farewell, farewell, my blessing;

  Too dear thou art

  For any man's possessing.

  And so we part.

  But WS by that time, high-flown but yet capable, was on his way to Swan Lane.

  'DRUNKEN,' she said. 'Dou hast drunken much wine.' She twitched her splayed nose at him, her arms folded. WS had near-fallen into her chamber and now lay, booted, on her bed. He groaned.

  'Little for most,' he said. 'Much for me. I have no stomach for it.' He closed his eyes. 'Ugggggh.'

  'Dou had best sleep awhile den.'

  'Today it is finished. Our new playhouse. Cause for vinous joy. All were drunk but I less than most.' He giggled sillily. 'A brave erection.'

  'I have somewhat here dat you must drink,' she said, and she began ladling a brown silvershot gravy from a pipkin into a horn cup. 'You may drink it, it is not more wine.'

  'Nay, I cannot -- I will----'

  'You may drink it and den sleep. It will give you a better stomach.' She brought it over to him, holding his shoulders while he drank. It had a taste of somewhat fetid sweetness. 'Dere,' she said.

  He dived shortly after from a high tarrass into sleep. The dreams he had were enacted at some very deep level of his brain. There were not unhappy dreams, but their ingredients were unpleasant. He saw great crowds bearing down on him, familiar faces that he knew he had never seen before, mostly faces of the low, sweaty on the cheeks and jowls, bad-toothed, stinking of old garments that stank of rancid mutton stew and old brown earwax. The black pegged mouths roared at him, whether in anger or laughter or love he could not tell. But his own answering roar was a mirthful one, delivered from a high pillar to which he clung with lusty embracing arms and legs. He shouted words of occult meaning which he knew were also nonsense. At the same time, by some contorting miracle, he threw off various of his garments, of which he seemed to have many (a whole playhouse wardrobe), and hurled them at the crowd. In mid-air they changed to cuts of red flesh, inner organs, ribs, three necks (he smiled in his dream at the absurdity of it), and they were seized without thanks by filthy hands with ragged nails and then devoured with juicy munching.

  The scene changed to a great park in sad summer evening light, well-laid with young trees. An eternal silence covered all; he was aware of the roundness of the horizon, as though all this green were the green of the sea. The silence was, as it were, pinned to the tender heavens by the call of a solitary chaffinch. There sprouted from the ground at the tail of his darting eye statue after statue, each melting away as he looked full upon it; these were of ancients who, he swore in his dream, could never have existed: Totimandus, Efevrius, Blano, Follion, Dacles. A young boy in the costume of an earlier Tudor reign played hide-and-seek behind these statues; he did not move from statue to statue but, looking out brightly at WS, he was behind each one at the tail of the eye, vanishing with it at the dreamer's full gaze. And now, trotting between the trees in a silver light that seemed his own emanation, a young man in a feathered hat sat his chestnut proudly, his sad eyes ever before him. The dreamer wept.

  And then it was the Tower and the block and a head rolling. A head, WS noted, could not roll like a ball because of the ears. The masked executioner laughed at the hogshead measure of blood that spurted from the severance while the rich-robed witnesses smiled gravely in their beards. But the head too smiled from the dirty flags, even while a file of blood-eating insects marched towards it. 'Fall to,' a voice said, and WS picked up the head with one hand. It was feather-light and spongy and its taste was of delicate honey-cake. WS, to the assembly's murmured approval, was fain to gobble it all up.

  Then he was faced with the philosophical paradox of a globe being also a tower, but he saw in his dream the meaning of the riddle. From his own groin the new building steadily arose, a playhouse from a tangled garden, and he laughed in triumph. 'But this is not Maiden Lane,' he cried, and that seemed to be the best joke in all the world. So he climbed steadily out of sleep with easy breathing though a pounding heart to find himself cool in the July evening, washed by another shower as the drops on the window-pane attested, and that tall playhouse stood before him and everything was solved.

  She lay beside him stark naked, slim and straight, a wonder of gold. He was unlaced and unbuttoned but he must have this full nakedness too. He threw off his clothes like emblems of guilt and then, full of strength and readiness, clasped her in his arms. It was the best of plays, act melting into act and ending in death that promised resurrection. His seed spurted, it seemed, straight into her own cry of attainment. Tightly clasped, they billowed down together through miles of aromatic air to come to rest on swansdown. And the glory and, as it were, grace were proclaimed in the ease of renewal, so that the night was a counterpart triumph to the day.

  His youth, sought afresh with her before but pushed out by guilt, now knew its flower; his dream of plunging into the Indies was fulfilled, his appetites for strange fruits fed without disgust or guilt or the gnaw of responsibility. There were no bounds set to pleasure: every tiniest vein on wrist or breast or ankle, each finger-joint, each several black filament of her eyebrow, even a shed lash marooned on her cheek could rouse fire. His hard strength was incarnated in a familiar that yapped like a dog tugging then snapping his chain, he was else all trembling jelly. Treading the pavement, he could feel the earth beneath it; he would start and whinny at a fly. He entered her like some fabulous sphinx that, raging into a royal city, was suddenly awed by the gold surrounding it, made aware thus of the spark of divinity that begot it, then was driven to the expression of this godhead by a sort of quintessential beastliness.

  London, the defiled city, became a sweet bower for their lover's wandering, even in the August heat. The kites that hovered or, perched, picked at the flesh of traitors' skulls became good cleansing birds, bright of eye and feather, part of the bestiary of the myth that enthralled them as they made it. The torn and screaming bears and dogs and apes in the pits of Paris Garden were martyrs who rose at once into gold heraldic zoomorphs to support the scutcheon of their static and sempiternal love. The wretches that lolled in chains on the lapping edges of the Thames, third tide washed over, noseless, lipless, eye-eaten, joined the swinging hanged at Tyburn and the rotting in the jails to be made heroes of a classical hell that, turned into music by Vergil, was sweet and pretty schoolday innocence. But it was she who shook her head often in sadness, smiling beneath her diaphanous veil as they took the evening air in passion's convalescence, saying that autumn would soon be on them, that love's fire burned flesh and then itself -- out, gone for ever.

  'Dou must go on, dou wilt sail past mine island, dou hast work to do.'

  'This is my work and this our island.'

  And indeed they were, twined and knotted into each other, all insulated from the panic news of the Spaniards landing on the Isle of Wight, the women screaming through the streets that clanked with heavy chains, the city gates shut. The trained bands paraded, citizens in armour, free from their wives for a space, made free of the taverns. She kept indoors after one trembling encounter. 'She is an Hispaniola. See her black skin.' She had run, had sniffed at one of her bottles (dis is for a beating heart) and bloomed faintly in a transitory blue tinge about the lips. She locked both herself and him in her lodgings, both in her bedchamber. The Spaniards, it was said, were at Southampton. Scotland harried the border with forty thousand foot and two hundred screaming pipers; Ireland darted her head from the bogs, yelped and bit rabid; the friends of Spain stiffened her armies; France sneered and waited. But, on that narrow bed, right history was enacted and true reality revealed: it was holy, a sort of nobleness. The struggles and invasions were toward the setting up an honest short peace, not a cynical eternal one; the engaging armies carried the same banner.

  And then the alarms of the City proved without base: the thirty thousand tramped home from Mile End, the gates were opened up. But there had been a demonstration of the easy gathering together of an army, that at least. But in defence of Spain
only? Ireland, for its lack of news, seemed blanketed in summer snow, no campaigning weather. But who knew when he might not return, insolent in victory to claim what he believed his due? There would, however, be an unpaid rabble behind him, beguiled with talk of pillage, feet rotting from the eternal Irish damp, pox-stricken.

  WS was aware of a qualifying of the euphoria of that spring that had so speedily caught up with summer. It could not, he thought, be expected to go on for ever. He had belike over-taxed his powers, he was no longer a young man, he had drunk overmuch (without wine Venus takes cold) to prick the renewal of appetite. He stood naked one morning in his own chambers and curiously surveyed his body. It was, on one level of viewing, as ever -- thin, white, with a gentleman's lack of muscle; on another level it was a temple glorified by her. Standing thus, surveying, he felt a response appropriate, through this last month's associations, to his nakedness. He desired her then so much that he would willingly have thrown off the easy lust as a thing of no great value, unworthy of her, as one might rinse a cup clean with the first wine from the bottle: he would have projected her image on to his chamber wall and fought out the night's gathering of seed against one of her garments (he had begged a piece of her underlinen, a stocking, a shoe). And then he noticed a minute spot, drab red, of the size of a small coin, matted into a manner of a plaque, sharply defined on the tight-stretched skin. He had, a day or so before, seen but a lentil-sized mark there, pink. Puzzled but not alarmed, he gently drew back the hood from the bishop-head and found that the sore (and yet it was not a sore; there was no pain) flicked over like a coin with the movement. Well, this was strain, no doubt, or her passionate nails, or his own importunate harsh frotting. The body smiled on love's misuse of it; what complaints it ever made were gentle good-humoured murmurs. But he would not, even with so paltry a blemish, dare to approach that golden tabernacle in any finality of hunger ...