Love took new forms, that was all. Forms like compassion.
X
COMPASSION? Did that then seem the proper balm wherewith to anoint his soul’s bruises? They struck, my wife, my brother, but knew not what they did. I will feel no anger, I will resent nothing. I stand above, blessing, forgiving, with lips untwisted in bitterness, brow all alabaster-smooth, a statue. He saw, in a shock that was the shock of involuntary blasphemy, whose that statue was. Compassion, pity: are they not much the same? What right have I to bestow pity? At the very gates of the Fleet, hearing the carousing noises of the better sort within (‘Farewell farewell, my blessing; too dear thou art for any man’s possessing’), the lute and treble voice of mockery among the busy-whiskered rats and the immemorial stench of urine and hopelessness, he knew he would be rejected of his lord. His lord was entering at last into his realm, grotesque bridegroom and father but a man at last, ready for the final treasonous gesture. He rejects his old friend, professes not to know him, his gay but harmless youth was a dream.
WS stood, pitying among the many cheering, on Cheapside towards the end of March. It was a brisk but sunny day, the smell of new green and the maaaaaaing of lambs borne in from the near countryside. All was forgiven by that capricious Queen: Essex was bound for Ireland, his commission signed a fortnight back. Thirteen hundred horse and sixteen thousand foot were under his command. He rode out of London with the cream of his officers, gracious, bowing, sun-king heading a riot of liveries, silken banners mad in the wind, the horses prancing, stumbling, recovering on the cobbles. The crowd roared and waved, children were lifted on to shoulders, caps were thrown in the air. WS stood silent. There was that lord whom he had once called friend, aloof on his chestnut, the shame of his imprisonment quite forgotten, a great captain bound for the quelling of the kerns. Steed after steed after steed, richly caparisoned, the harness jingling, an ancient dream of chivalric riding between the mean and bowing rows of shops. WS broke his silence to call: ‘God bless you, God save you’, but it was a feeble cry among the hoarse loud benisons of the London mob. ‘God help you,’ his heart murmured. A victorious general would return to claim his due — not bays, not laurels. Those nearest to him in loyalty would then be in most need of God’s help. The cavalcade went by in jaunty magnificence; a ragged party of well-wishers joined on behind the wagging cruppers of the rear. Ahead the cheers were still raised under the March sun.
Compassion, compassion. He roamed the streets, alone with his compassion. He dined in an ordinary and walked back to his lodgings, now in Silver Street. He sat at his table to work. Ironic, this play of the warlike Harry assuming the port of Mars. In the late afternoon there came an unexpected darkness, black clouds rolling over the March blue. Then lightning attacked, the punctual unison of kettledrummers grumbled all round the heavens, and balls of hail tinkled and crackled on the pavement. God help us all. He went to his window to look out. After so fair a day’s start. He saw a bedraggled march, wet faces, mouth wide in curses unheard under the downpour, cloaks and liveries drenched, the golden hair of his former lord and friend all rats’s tails. His pity welled up as he peopled the naked street with this image. But it was the pity one feels for the failed grand gesture, an unworthy pity. His quibbling brain meanwhile juggled with keywords — a March day’s march marred, Mars netted, howling like a child.
And now the reward for his compassion. She is coming again, my heart, coming to these very lodgings. But not in rain; let her not arrive begging for his all too easy pity. It was fine spring weather once more, that great ominous gesture of the heavens trundled off. There was a timid knock. He opened.
‘You?’ In a plain cloak, unattended, she stood, her eyes lowered. ‘It cannot be, how could you know, where did you, who told you where?’ They stood, paralysed WS and she demure, unsure of her welcome.
‘I did see dis man, I have forgot his name, he is de cloon in your——’
‘Kemp, you mean? Our clown, you would say?’ Then he shuffled out of his staring trance. ‘Enter, enter, you are heartily, come in, it is something untidy in here, see, I will clear these papers from this——’ She undid the strings of her cloak, the hood fell from her black curls. An intense agony thrust into his heart as he saw again that delicate brown of her skin, the flat nose, the thick lips whose every fold and contour his remembered kisses knew. It was the agony of knowing that it was departed, all, the insanity of former love (had, having, and in quest to have), leaving behind this deadly godlike sobriety of pity. But why pity? ‘You will have,’ he said, ‘a cup of wine, you have travelled far perhaps, how did you come?’
She sat in the straighter-backed of the two chairs. ‘From Clerkenwell only. Dis Kemp was in Clerkenwell yesternight. He was looking for black women, he said. He is a merry laughing man dat is full of jokes.’
‘You are not—— What are you doing in Clerkenwell?’
‘What can I do?’ She moved her delicate shoulders. Giving her wine, WS noted dispassionately the shaking of his hand. ‘I have no money. Our tuan is gone to de wars. He will dream at night only of his wife and his child. For dose he did love he has no more any time.’
Our tuan. It was a word of her language. ‘So,’ said WS slowly, ‘he gave you money. You were a paid paramour.’
‘I know not dat word. But, yes, he did give me money. I was living in dis place where he was born, Cowdray it is called. Den I did have my child. Den—— Oh, I will not talk of dese tings.’
‘Tell me of the child,’ said WS, his heart thudding. ‘Tell me who is the father of the child.’
She looked at him very steadily before replying. ‘De child, I tink, has two faders.’
‘Oh, that is not possible, that cannot be, that is all against the rule of nature——’
‘If it is not one it is de oder. I remember of de time well. I was not to be blamed. It is you or it is he.’
‘And,’ insisted WS, ‘where is—’ Then, ‘No. There is another question. Is the child a girl or a boy?’
‘A son,’ she said with some pride. ‘I had a son. A heavy son dat cried much. I said to him dat he must not cry, for he did have two faders.’
‘And what name did you give him?’
She shook her head many times. ‘Dat I will not say. I did give him my own fader’s name. And den I tought dat he must be bin someting, for dat is our custom. He must be bin and den his fader’s name, for bin does mean “de son of”. But it is you dat have de noble name, not he, our tuan dat is gone to de war.’
‘I? I am not noble. I am a gentleman, true, but not noble.’
‘You are a sheikh,’ she said simply. He stared at her. Then he asked:
‘Where is he — my son?’
‘He is wid good people, kind people. Dey are in Bristol, people dat are rich from slaves and are now sorry for dat. And when he is older he will go back, back to my country.’
WS’s head span. It was inconceivable. So his blood would, after all, flow to the East. It was his blood, it must be his blood. Suddenly she began to weep, soundlessly. Crystal tears flowed. Crystal. Angrily he shook away the formal image. This was the mother of his son, a woman, not a sonneteer’s ideal wraith. He gave her his spotted handkerchief, the one that had wiped away the tears of Harry’s laughter. ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.
‘I cannot go back. I can never go back. But my son must go back to my country.’
WS nodded. He saw that. ‘You must be with me now,’ he said. ‘We must be together. You were mine before you were ever his. You broke your bed-vow, but that is all over and forgiven.’
She wiped her eyes, sniffling. ‘And so it must go,’ she said. ‘An I were in my own country I would be de wife of a raja. But here I must be a mistress. And I grow old and am not wanted. In Clerkenwell I will not be wanted, not when you trow me away as he did trow me away. And yet cannot I go back, for de ships go not to my country. Some day dey will go, and den my son will go wid dem. But now——’ She wept again.
‘I have a wife,’
said WS unhappily. ‘A wife and daughters. It is not in Christian countries as in the paynim ones. I cannot put my wife away, even though she has committed adultery. Here there is no divorce. All I may do is——’ What was all he might do? He could give her money, pay the rent of her lodging, but, as for installing her here—— He caught for an instant an image of Green and his pocked mistress, sister of Cutting Ball, the shrieking bastard Fortunatus, crammed into the filthy room where, belching on Rhenish, cursing loudly for quiet, the poet had hurried at Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. No, the days when that might have been possible for WS were gone: a gentleman, keeping a black mistress in his lodgings, that would not do. ‘I will find some place for you,’ he said, ‘some quiet and decent place. And give you money.’
She nodded, sniffing away the last of her tears. Weeping had made her seem ugly, more in need of his compassion or pity, whatever it was. ‘Do dat. Give me money. Much money.’
‘As much as I can,’ said WS carefully. His palm itched, the cloven hoof of the business-man filled his shoe. ‘And,’ he added, ‘there is little I would ask in return. I am not the man I was.’ She stared at him.
IT WAS, indeed, a phase that was come on him again. A man’s natural desires, the voluptuous image after meat or before sleep or on dawn waking — all, all scared away on very conception by the memory of that afternoon in New Place: the girls packed carefully off to their grandmother that the act of adultery might deliberately and brazenly be performed. Or else the laugh of his late lord, friend, patron rang out all down the corridors of his brain, chilling the starting flesh into subsidence. His substitute for tumescence was there on Maiden Lane, south of the swanned river. It had been a bold Christmas venture, that march over the snow and glassy frost, under the tingling sky, trundling carts laden with the hacked limbs of the body of the old Theatre. The fait accompli, as the French called it (the Huguenot family had helped him with his French; he had needed a whole scene in French, delicately bawdy, for Henry V), and Giles Alleyn, back from the country after Christmas, unable to do anything but rage in impotence. Through the spring and early summer the timbers of the old were transformed into the new, the best playhouse ever: it was a raised fist at the times which Essex, even in absence, haunted with threats of order lost, the string untuned to discord. The censors were at work burning books, gagging the news from Ireland, forbidding whispered rumours of all going badly there, of the Queen’s declining health and her successor still unnamed. It was a time of ragged nerves and great and small dissensions.
‘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:
Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess Page 21