Yet that adventure did not seem so wonderful to Faithful as this other adventure of learning that carried them to other islands, less gaudy but to his eyes more beautiful, where the rosy flowers of the asphodel echoed the color of dawn-flushed, snow-covered mountain peaks, and pale marble pillars stood in their loveliness beside the wine-dark sea.
Oh, the wind and the oar,
When the great sail swells before,
With sheets astrain, like a horse on the rein;
And on, through the race and the roar,
She feels for the farther shore. . . .
Surely, thought Faithful, that ship of Euripides is the ship of the imagination, that can sail farther and faster than any ship built by man.
Ten score and ten there be
Rowers that row for thee,
And a wild hill air as though Pan were there
Shall sound on the Argive Sea,
Piping to set thee free.
The voice of Thomas Bodley, repeating the poem, seemed to Faithful to die away into the lapping of waves against the side of a ship. While he traveled in the ship of imagination the whole of the universe was his, the whole of time, past, present and to come. Those others, those Merchant Adventurers, were at the mercy of wind and tide, but he was set free by a wild tune piped from beyond death to sail over the horizon of the world into eternity. He was bound with no limits, borne with a wing of hope; he would climb even unto the stars.
5.
The lecture was over, Master Bodley was descending the steps, and Faithful was being trodden on. He was in the body once more and yelping with the pain of many feet upon his person. Giles rescued him with kindly patronage, shook him and dusted him down.
“The minute Bodley shuts his mouth you must leap to your feet,” Giles explained. “Otherwise you’ll be trampled to death. Catch hold of my books and come along. We’re going up to Bocardo to cheer up Walter Raleigh. Sidney’s just heard he’s in prison for debt again.”
“There’s no time,” grumbled Faithful. “We’ve a Latin lecture at Christ Church before dinner.” He grudged every moment stolen from the pursuit of learning to which his soul was vowed like the soul of Edmund Rich before him. And he did not even know Philip’s friend Walter Raleigh, an Oriel man of extravagant habits who probably deserved to be in prison, where, thought Faithful, he should be left uncomforted by the virtuous, quietly stewing in his own juice till better thoughts should dawn. “I tell you we’ve no time,” he growled.
“Shut your mouth,” said Giles, not unkindly. “There’s time if we run. Come on, I tell you, come on.”
Sighing, Faithful came on. He was only a servitor and he must do what he was told. Puffing and blowing he fought his way out of the seething horde of scholars that still filled the lecture room, back through the sunny quadrangle of the Schools and out into the High Street, where they turned to their right and raced uphill towards Carfax.
It was market day and the town was getting busy. In the pig market outside All Saints’ Church the pigs were already arriving and the four scholars charged through them, hitting out at the fat squeaking sides with their books and shouting out like English soldiers charging the enemy, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Hey! Hey! Cuckoo!” The pigs were quickly routed, skipping to right and left with all the nimbleness of which their bulk and inadequate legs were capable, and pursued by the curses of their drovers the four charged up past the Mitre Inn and round the corner into Cornmarket.
They did not linger here, for once you had left Carfax behind you, with its fine Church of Saint Martin to the left and the Tavern with the painted room to the right, Cornmarket became distinctly smelly; for not to mention the kennel running down its center there was a tannery in it, with the cordwainers, the workers in leather, conveniently near. They were, on the whole, good scholars, and they left the Lane of the Seven Deadly Sins, away on their left, severely alone, and ran on to the Cornmarket proper, at the North Gate of the city, where the country people sold their corn and hay on market days.
North Gate was a lively and attractive spot, in spite of the uncomfortable memories connected with the Bocardo lock-up built over the top of it. The houses drew close together here, each story jutting out a little further than the one below it, and up above them soared the eleventh century tower of Saint Michael’s Church, with its battlements cutting neat squares out of the blue sky and the cock on its weathervane arrogant beneath the sun; and gazing down rather contemptuously upon its lesser brethren who scuttled about over the cobbles below, hunting in the crannies for the grains of corn that the corn factors had let fall. There were always quantities of quadrupeds and birds about in Cornmarket; dogs, cats, cocks and hens. And, when night came down and the streets of the city were black and deserted, and the tower of Saint Michael’s was just a black shape that blotted out the stars, rats in their hundreds emerged from the cellars and yards of the old houses and danced up and down Cornmarket, from Carfax to North Gate and back again, frisking their tails in the light of the moon and gorging themselves fit to burst on the refuse in the kennel.
As it was market day the four boys had to fight hard to get through the crowd to North Gate. The stalls of the corn factors, placed down the center of the street, divided it into two narrow lanes and up and down them seethed a yelling, swearing, sweating, gesticulating crowd. Countrywomen in their wide hats, with voluminous colored petticoats beneath their great white aprons, baskets on their arms and dead fowls dangling from their wrists, bargained at the tops of their voices with the factors behind the stalls. Dirty, ragged little urchins charged everywhere, kicking up the rubbish in the kennel, banging into the stalls, falling over the squawking poultry and throwing stones at the yapping, snarling dogs. Sometimes a more respectable figure would pass: the physician in his long furred gown, making way for himself with vigorous blows of his long staff, apprentices dashing to and from the cordwainers, and now and then a horseman would ride under North Gate and plunge through the crowd, slashing his whip at the dogs as they scuffled and barked at his horse’s hoofs.
The boys were experienced in getting through a Cornmarket crowd. Nicolas went first, kicking and elbowing his way, and Philip, a person not much use at either battering or being battered, for he was delicate and blows always seemed to hurt him more than they hurt other people, came behind clinging round Giles’s waist. Faithful brought up the rear, with the books. Black looks, curses, mutterings and a kick or two came their way, and a rotten egg caught Nicolas neatly between the shoulders, for hatred between Town and Gown was still a real thing. The merchants and apprentices and ragtag and bobtail of the town had not forgotten that Oxford was once a great commercial city where Merchandise had reigned supreme. . . . And now it was almost wholly given over to these insolent young cockerels of scholars, with their malapert manners, boastful speech, and heads so swollen with divers useless Tongues and Arts and Philosophies that pity it was to behold the ruin of English manhood brought about by this same lamentable learning.
“Damn your eyes for a saucy, froward villain,” shouted an enraged factor as Nicolas, staggering from a well-aimed kick that had followed the rotten egg, barged into his stall.
“Damn yours, you insolent thief!” replied Nicolas hotly, and swung round with his fist raised.
“Oh, come on, do!” implored Giles impatiently. He was a pacifist, not from conscientious reasons nor from cowardice, but because he considered war a shocking waste of a man’s time.
“Thief? Who said thief?” roared the factor, a deeply religious and most respectable man. “Am I to be called thief by down-at-heel, out-at-elbow, rascally scholars who take the bread out of honest men’s mouths and turn this god-fearing town into a sink of wickedness with their evil ways? No!” bellowed the factor, “I’ll see ’em damned first!” and he got in a fine blow, straight from the shoulder. . . . An angry, muttering crowd came milling round Nicolas and things looked ugly.
“Get
back, you dirty, scandalous, bullying vagabonds!” shouted Faithful, dashing to the rescue. “It’s you, not us, who make this town a stinking dog-hole,” he added pleasantly, butting in amongst them. “You’ll be put in the stocks for this and serve you right, you scaly, blear-eyed devils.”
Faithful had a command of language, picked up in the less desirable streets of London, that always stood him in good stead. Shouted in his pleasant voice and issuing from his wide, good-humored mouth, it never failed to make things pleasant all round. The crowd, shouting with good-humored laughter, fell back, and Nicolas was delivered with nothing worse than a black eye and a bleeding nose and a shocking abrasion on the temple.
“Beasts!” muttered Nicolas. “Vermin!” and turning his head he squinted with his one remaining eye at the mess of egg down his back.
“Come, on!” urged his friends, “if we start again we shall be here all day,” and they propelled him vigorously towards North Gate.
It was a tunnel not wider than twelve feet at the two ends and some seventy feet long, and over it was the famous lock-up, Bocardo, where the drunk and disorderly, and those unable to pay their bills, were incarcerated for their good. The four halted beneath the small barred window over the tunnel and called in the honeyed tones of deep sympathy, “Raleigh? Raleigh? Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”
Instantly a face appeared at the window, the face of a gentleman in his middle ’teens with curly dark hair, bright blue eyes, a boldly hooked nose, a laughing, generously curving mouth and a resolute chin. It was a proud, arresting, challenging face and Faithful stared at it in fascination, his eyes popping in his head and his mouth ajar. . . . Wherever he went in this wonderful city he was continually confronted by towers and spires, gardens and books and bells, men and women and children who made his eyes pop and his mouth fall open.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” said Raleigh airily. “Fine day.”
Neither his voice nor his manner invited commiseration and his friends knew better than to offer it. “Just exactly how much do you owe this time?” asked Philip, coming briefly to the point.
“I’ve no head for figures,” said Raleigh arrogantly, and glared at them through the bars like a caged wild beast.
“Don’t be an ass,” Nicolas adjured him. “Throw the bag down.”
Raleigh flushed crimson and exhorted them angrily to mind their own business. It was the correct thing, of course, for prisoners in Bocardo to let down a bag out of the window that their friends might relieve their wants, but to a gentleman of Raleigh’s independent temper it was galling to the pride.
“Fool!” said Giles kindly. “Do you want to spend the whole summer term shut up there? You can pay us back later. Chuck out the bag.”
Raleigh continued to glare, struggling with himself, his anger directed not at his friends but at fate that had given to his superb ambition the totally inadequate support of a frail and slender fortune. He ground his teeth, maddened afresh by the permanent incompatibility of his income and his expenditure. Heaven knew he did his best to make the one support the other, for he did not exactly enjoy spending a large proportion of his days inside Bocardo, but there was a fine careless grandeur in his mode of living that was natural to him and refused to be curtailed. He was of the stuff of which poets and heroes are made, a stuff not easily fitted into the restricted mold of sobriety and solvency but created to spread itself abroad in beauty like a banner on the wind, possessed of a grandeur that is perhaps more appreciated by later centuries than by the contemporary one that foots the bill. . . . Though Raleigh himself did things in such style, with such a fine courtesy and so grand an air, that his friends were generally happy to give what assistance they could when his elegant garments and entertainments worked out at more than he had expected.
“Come on,” said Philip. “Out with the bag. We want you out of Bocardo for our own sakes, you know.”
It was charmingly spoken, as only Philip could speak, and a flashing smile lit up the face at the window. He seized the leather bag on a string that lay beside him on the sill and shot it out of the window with such violence that it hit Faithful on the head and made him leap like an antelope.
“Got anything worth giving?” inquired Giles of the others, fumbling in his wallet.
Nicolas and Philip, the financiers of the party, nodded, and Philip produced one golden angel and Nicolas three. . . . The others whistled when they saw Nicolas’s three, for three angels was a fabulous sum. . . . But then Nicolas’s fine generosity to his friends always excited deep admiration in the breasts of everyone except his father.
Giles fished up a few groats, which was all he had, and Faithful hung his head and went scarlet to the roots of his hair, because he hadn’t got anything at all; and as he had taken a passionate liking to the handsome face behind the bars the impotence of his poverty was doubly hard to bear; on an impulse he took from his wallet the little bag of herbs that Joyeuce had given him to sniff as a protection against the plague, one of his most precious possessions, and put it in the bag with the coins. The moment he had done it he wished he hadn’t, of course, for only the greatest of the saints do not regret their good deeds as soon as done, but it was too late to change his mind for Walter Raleigh, purple in the face with mingled shame, rage and gratitude, was winding up the string and pulling the bag up to the window again.
“Is it enough?” asked the anxious donors, as he counted it out on the windowsill.
“No,” groaned the prisoner, then, remembering his manners and flashing his smile superbly upon the group below, “but you have my eternal gratitude, gentlemen. You have shortened my incarceration by one tenth.”
“I expect it won’t be long,” consoled Nicolas. “They’ll take up a collection at Oriel, like they did before.”
“They might,” growled the prisoner, “but they’re a stingy lot at Oriel these days. Getting me out of Bocardo is an activity that palls, they told me last time. And after drinking all my Canary wine at a sitting, too! The mean curs!” And he shook the bars angrily.
“Could I lend you anything to make the time pass?” asked Philip pitifully. “Books, or a lute?”
Suddenly all the rage died out of Raleigh’s face and a light broke over it, making it beautiful as a woman’s. “I have my charts,” he said softly.
Philip smiled with the tolerance of one artist towards the lunacy of another. “Sea charts of the land beyond the sunset?” he asked.
Raleigh nodded, looking out unseeingly over their heads. “I’ve made two more,” he murmured.
“He’s been taken with one of his crazy fits,” said Nicolas. “We might as well go home. . . . Good-by,” he added at the top of his voice. “Oriel being so stingy I suppose it will be weeks before we see you again?”
Raleigh awoke from his dream, recollected himself, and glared. “Don’t you be too sure,” he said truculently. “You may find yourselves in here with me before you know where you are.”
“We’re never drunk or disorderly,” boasted Giles. “Nor in debt.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” continued Raleigh, “if you were all in here by night. I thought this morning that you would be, for I had an Omen.”
“What Omen?” they asked.
“Four bugs in my bed,” said Raleigh, and disappeared from view.
Laughing, they fought their way back through the Cornmarket crowd.
“Why does he make charts of the land beyond the sunset?” panted the puzzled Faithful.
“He’s going to fit out a fleet of great ships and win an Empire for England in the west,” explained Philip.
“Surely that will cost a lot of money,” said Faithful, and he shook his head doubtfully, for he had formed a poor opinion of Master Raleigh’s financial capabilities.
“He’s going to manufacture the money,” said Nicolas. “He’s hard at work discovering a great Cordial or Elixir that will turn base metal into gold.”
“But is there such a thing?” asked the literal Faithful.
“Of course there isn’t!” said Giles scornfully. “Raleigh’s mad. His bonnet buzzes so loud with bees that you can’t hear yourself think when you’re with him.”
Faithful’s thoughts whirled excitedly as they ran on. . . . Charts of the land beyond the sunset. . . . He wished he could see them. Virtuous though he was he almost wished that he might be drunk and disorderly by night so as to be shut up in Bocardo and see those charts. For a full moment the Adventure of Commerce loomed larger in his mind than the Adventure of Learning. Under such a captain as Raleigh he could imagine himself setting sail for the sunset and finding in such an adventure satisfaction for the deepest longings of his soul. It needed a glimpse of Saint Mary’s Church, as they ran across Carfax, with the statue of Edmund Rich looking down upon the hurrying figures of the scholars who were his children, to restore his mind to its proper allegiance. The Adventure of learning also had its captains. . . . The Teachers on the steps. . . . He seemed to see them linked in an unbroken chain that stretched from that now almost legendary figure down to the present day, to Edmund Campion and Thomas Bodley, and on again to a future so remote that he could not even picture it. . . . One day, he thought, he would be one of them.
Towers in the Mist Page 14