Morality Play Page 15

  They came to the barrier to salute and Sir Roger's fantastically wrought helm gave him a good ten inches of height more than the other. I have a divining soul, as I have said. As they took their places in the lists I had a premonition of harm and this grew stronger.

  The signal was given and they urged their horses forward and brought their lances to the level. How it happened exactly I did not see. The older knight's lance was deflected, but not fully; it slid across the other's shield and rose towards his head. At the last moment, with great address, Sir Roger raised his shield to send the lance-point clear beyond him. Had he been wearing a helm of more customary make, this might have succeeded. But the point of the lance, blunted by its coronet, must have hooked in the filigree of the crest and sprung the pins that hinged his visor, so that he received a raking blow along the crown of his head and pitched heavily sideways from his horse to the ground, where he lay without moving.

  First to reach him was the squire. Then several followed and among them they bore him away from the lists. There was blood on the snow, where he had fallen.

  One further contest there was, then the Lord stood to announce the end of the day's jousting. The afternoon was well advanced, the dark not far away. The knights rode off, with their squires making haste behind them. The Lord crossed the yard and passed inside the castle, followed by his attendants and then the noble guests. Servants came out to take down the cloths of red and gold that draped the pavilions. The daylight ebbed into the snow and there was nothing left now but the bare rails of the lists and barriers, the empty stands and the darkening stain of blood.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was not until late that ne called for us. We had been brought food again, black puddings and bread and some thin beer. The candles had been lit and we were stretched out on the straw.

  The steward came for us with two armed men in attendance. We were not taken to the great hall, as we had been expecting, but through a series of passages narrow and dimly lit and so into the private apartments that lay beyond the hall. In passing I glanced down a dark passageway leading off from our own and at the moment I did so a door opened some way along it, there was a stream of light and a figure stepped out into this light. It was a woman, a religious, thickly veiled so that it was not possible to see anything of her face. She was carrying cloths, or perhaps towels, white, draped over the sleeves of her habit. I saw her for moments only, then the door was closed and the light went and she passed farther along the passage and disappeared into the dimness there. But in those moments, while the door opened and closed and the light came and went and the nun shuffled away into the darkness, there was a stench of decay so strong that I almost choked on it, not the smell of death but of disease, of poisoned tissue and corrupted blood, the rot of the living body. It was a breath I knew, as all who have lived through these times of plague must know and fear it. When that breath is in your nostrils you know it for the smell of the world.

  It clamoured after us like a creature cheated and grew fainter and died away. We passed through an arched doorway and came into an antechamber, a room with length and breadth enough for the movements of a play but not for holding many people to watch. There was a closet adjoining this with the door set open, and here we found our costumes and masks in a heap on the floor.

  In the chamber itself there was a single high-backed chair, with padded rests for the arms, no other furnishing or object of any kind. We stood waiting there under the eye of the steward, while the two guards stood just inside the door with their halberds grounded. It was now that Martin, who had been all that day speechless and dull of eye, seemed to shake himself awake. Whether it was thoughts of the play that roused him so I do not know; playing was the sap of life to him and might have seemed a prospect of relief from the affliction of his love. Perhaps it was simply that he found this yoke of silence too heavy on his neck. Whatever the reason, he raised his head now and looked the steward in the eye. 'You are the one who came to see the lad buried,' he said. 'You paid the priest. Tell us, friend, why the haste?' He paused, still looking closely at the man. Then he said in a voice quickened with contempt, 'Or do you not ask yourself even so much?'

  At once, with the words, we were under his direction still; even now, as fear grew among us, we were driven to follow him back into the play. Belligerent Stephen raised his head and looked at the steward. Straw uttered his sobbing laugh.

  The steward's face had slackened with surprise at being spoken to thus by a man under guard, and moreover a player. 'Vagabond scum,' he said. 'Whipped from parish to parish. Do you dare to take that tone with me? I will have your life for it.'

  Springer clapped his hands and made his crowing laugh. 'Was it you that hanged the Monk?' he said.

  'What was his crime?' Tobias said.

  We were back in the play again and we fell to questioning him, as if he were in it too, in a part, and so obliged to answer. We were on the edge of despair now, and this took the leash from our tongues. We had been keeping hope alive by clinging to a sense of what is customary. Players are brought sometimes to play in the halls of castles and great houses - this company had after all been sent to do so in Durham. At supper, when the people of the house and their guests are in jovial mood, players and minstrels are often in demand. But when we came into that bare room, with its single waiting chair like a throne of judgement, our poor hope lost all stuffing and collapsed, and we could not keep from knowing the danger we were in.

  The steward's hand was on the hilt of his dagger but we knew he would not draw it. In his way he was as helpless as we were. How he would have behaved towards us I do not know. At that moment the door opened, the two soldiers drew themselves up with a crash of their halberd shafts on the stone and the Lord Richard de Guise entered the room.

  He had changed his mantle of earlier for a quilted robe of dark red colour and he wore a low cap of the same stuff with a black tassel at the side. On his left wrist there sat a hooded falcon. 'Set the men outside the door, Henry,' he said. 'See that they stay within hearing of a shout. Then come back and stand behind my chair.'

  He looked at us now for the first time, while the steward moved to obey. 'So,' he said, 'you are the players of whom I have heard.' He moved his eyes over us slowly. They were pale blue and heavy-lidded, opening to a starkness and fullness of regard difficult to meet. He wore no jewellery or ornament of any kind about him. The cap fitted close at the temples and gave to the long, thin-lipped face a look of bareness and severity. 'We shall find out your mettle now,' he said.

  When he was seated in his chair with the steward in position behind him he moved a hand at us. 'I believe they have put your scraps there in the room behind,' he said. 'You may begin.'

  Martin stepped forward from among us and made a bow. 'My Lord, we are greatly honoured, and we will try to please,' he said. 'With your indulgence, we had in mind to give you the Play of Our Lord's Nativity, as befitting the season.'

  The long face remained impassive. There was a brief silence, then the voice came, slow and deliberate as ever. 'I have not had you brought here to see you make a mock of my religion. It is the play of the dead boy I wish to see. Henry, what was the boy's name?'

  'Thomas Wells, my Lord.'

  'Good, yes, that was it. I wish to see the Play of Thomas Wells.'

  We had expected no less, but I felt my heart sink. Martin surprised us now and gave us back our spirit. He made the Italian reverence, which players use for the exaggerated courtesy of plotters and false servants, body inclined low, right hand sweeping from left to right in a shallow curve. 'As my Lord wishes,' he said. One by one we followed him in the reverence, mine executed but poorly, as it is more difficult than might appear and I had never practised it. Then Martin led us to the room behind, where our things were, and we dressed for the parts. We could not find anywhere the black murder-purse that Tobias had made, so had to be content with the smaller one in which Martin kept the common stock. There was no time for talk among us except for
a hasty agreement to do all as before until the departure of Avaritia and then to have a Messenger arrive with news of the Monk's death, and to make this death the proof of his guilt and the symbol of God's justice, without inquiring further into the authors of it; in other words, to end the play where prudence should have made us end it the day before.

  In this lay our only hope, and that a slender one. Of saving the girl we no longer thought. What none of us knew was that Martin had decided she could not be saved and so thought no longer of saving himself.

  We followed our plan, keeping to the story we had agreed on, playing in the stark silence of that room with only the Lord and his steward for watchers. I think no parts were ever played before in such a silence as that, before such an audience. I longed for the clamour of the inn-yard and market square again, the laughter and shouts of the people and the movements of feeling that pass through them. Our steps fell hollowly in that bare room, we moved back and forth as if in some slow dance of the newly dead, with the Lord of the Damned on his spectral throne there, hawk on wrist, his Minion behind him prompt to do his bidding. Even our voices seemed unreal to us at first, the very accents of our quaking souls. But with the setting forth of Thomas Wells we grew absorbed in the parts, we began to play for ourselves. The mystery of the boy's death was still fresh to us. This was the third time of playing and we were more perfect in our parts now, at least in the first half, up to the appearance of Truth, played again by Stephen. There had been no time for him to paint his face and Pieta had the white mask, so he was obliged to don a thick mask made of pressed paper and glue and painted silver. From behind this screen his voice came slightly muffled but sonorous still. And he played well, better than I had ever seen him, moving with great dignity and state, making his rhymes without hesitation:

  'Truth is here for all to see

  On God's part I come to thee ...'

  In a play with no written words much will depend on impulse and suggestion. Perhaps it was Stephen, by the boldness of his playing, who set Martin on his course that night, made him betray us and put us in mortal terror. At the point immediately before Avaritia was due to quit the place, Truth spoke directly to the people, as all the Figures do when they announce their properties. In this case, however, the people were only these two motionless watchers. Undeterred, Stephen uttered the same lines which had come straying into his mind when, drunken and distracted, he had played the part the day before. But now he uttered them with extraordinary force and conviction, accompanying the words with the sign of insistence, hand held out with fingers loosely curled, thumb and first finger touching, little finger extended:

  'Truth sets no store by gold or riches

  Nor by emperors, kings or princes ...'

  It was strange, and also moving, to hear Truth pronounce these lines with such passion because in his own person, as we all knew, Stephen set great store by emperors, kings and princes, and this immobile figure he was addressing was a rich and powerful lord, master of lives and land. Stephen had forgotten himself, he was Truth. And as I stood there, at the edge of the space, waiting for the moment to come forward with my sermon on God's justice, I felt a gathering of tears, even in the midst of the fear that moved like another player among us, to see this servile man rise above himself and boom so boldly behind his mask.

  But it was Martin, once again, who changed everything. Truth had asked his questions, Mankind and Thomas Wells had made their first replies. Concealed by the cloaks of Pieta and Avaritia, Straw had changed into the murder-mask. Still cloaked and masked as Avaritia, Martin moved forward into the centre of the space to speak his lines of farewell. He began as before:

  'What does Avarice in this place?

  The boy by caitiff hand was slain ...'

  But instead of taking leave of Avaritia by disrobing and unmasking, as he had done the day before, remaining there in his own person to question Truth and bring us to a close that might leave some hope of pardon, he made once again that exaggerated reverence, right hand sweeping low. Then he backed away, still bowing to the seated figure, and without any sign to us he disappeared into the room behind.

  This departure of Avaritia took us completely by surprise and for some moments we did not know how to go on. Then Mankind found his wits again and asked the question that should have come from Martin:

  'How came the child there,

  Truth, can you expound?

  How came this fifth one to be found?'

  Stephen had learned from his mistakes of yesterday and he was ready now with his answer.

  'When Truth pronounces,

  let no man contradict,'

  he said.

  'He was taken and laid there because of the purse.'

  'The one who killed me wanted the Weaver to be blamed,' Thomas Wells said in his piping voice. 'It was the Monk.'

  Now was the moment for Tobias to retire, make a quick change into the short cape and feathered hat of the Messenger and come back with the news of the Monk's hanging. He was already moving towards the changing-place when he was brought up short by the reappearance of Martin, still in his red cloak but now in the truly fearsome mask of Superbia, also red except for the curving lines of the mouth and the terrible ridges of the brows, which are painted black.

  He signed to Tobias to continue and make speed, then came forward among us and raised his arms at his sides, to the height of his shoulders, with his palms held outwards, in the gesture that the Figures make when they present themselves. For some moments he held this posture without speaking, his mask turned towards the seated Lord and the steward behind him. He was giving Tobias time to change. None of us moved. I was standing close to Straw and I could hear the alarmed rustle of his breath through the mouthpiece of the murder-mask. Then Martin began his lines of self-description:

  'I am Pride as all can see.

  So I have my rightful sway

  What care I for clerk or lay?'

  Now the Messenger came bustling forward in his feathered hat. 'Sirs,' he said, 'I come with news. The Monk is dead, he is hanged.'

  Eagerly - because this at least we had been prepared for - we tried to fill the space with movement and question, and in this eagerness sometimes two spoke at once and our movements were hasty and clumsy, we obstructed with our bodies the view of those watching. Faults of timing and address, Martin would have called them. We no longer had any notion of where the play was tending, we were drowning in it, we had to snatch words from the air, as drowning people snatch at breath.

  Superbia was stalking slowly across the space, stretching up his neck and making the gestures of kingship and triumphal progress, moving among us like a hideous stranger. Straw made a last effort now to save us and the play, to keep to what we had agreed and bring the story to an ending. He had removed the murder-mask and his face was pallid and staring below the garish wig. But he kept to his part, knowing as we all knew that only as players, creatures too low for the Lord's anger, might we still get off with no more than a whipping. So Straw took care with his mincing steps and the movements of his shoulders, and he did it well. He paid no attention to Superbia, still pacing and gesturing behind him. In the centre of the space, facing the two who were watching, he made his mime of dumbness, gesturing towards himself with palms turned inwards to indicate his affliction, swaying his head for pity. In these moments he was pleading for us all. Then he straightened himself and raised his head and spoke in rhyme to make an ending:

  'Justice has restored my tongue.

  They hanged the Monk that knew his wrong.

  Though I am in prison pent

  Justice shows me innocent...'

  He would then have bowed, I think, and we would all have followed, but Martin gave us no time. He came forward now, moving up through the midst of us, hissing as he did so - not the snake-hiss but that harsher sound that is made with the teeth closed firmly together. Then he turned to us, right hand raised in the gesture of restraint. His back was towards the watchers.

 
; 'Pride makes the end, not Justice,' he said. 'Think you that Pride will suffer an end to be made without him, when he is the master-player of all?' As he spoke, under cover of his body, he made to us the sign of supplication.

  We fell back behind him in a half-circle, obeying still, though lost in confusion, that great rule of players that he who is speaking must not be obscured. We were lost, he had scattered our wits and taken our pans away, but we were trapped still in the play, as we were also in that grim room, because in our own persons there was no place for us but the shadow of the gallows-tree. It was illusion within illusion, but against all reason we held to it. While Straw was the dumb woman and Springer was Thomas Wells and I was Good Counsel we could not be hauled off and hanged.

  Superbia turned now towards the watchers but in such a way that I swallowed on vomit and felt the prickle of sweat in that glacial room. He turned very slowly, taking short steps, head lowered, like some monstrous beast disturbed in repose and turning at last to threaten the disturber. This it was, the threat to the Lord, that gave such a blow to my heart, gave me that foretaste, like a lurch of sickness, of what he was intending.

  He was upright again now and facing them. Again he began that stretching of the neck and slow scanning from side to side. He made gestures like a swimmer, thrusting impediment aside. 'The master-player of all,' he said again. 'He stands here and he sits there.'

  I was standing level with him and I could see the mask in side view and the movement in his throat as he paused. The torch set in the wall behind me flared brighter for these moments and the flame played over the hideous brows and beak of the mask and the shoulders of his cloak. The Lord moved his arm a little, the first movement I had seen him make, and the hawk tilted briefly for balance on the wrist of the leather glove. 'I am called by many names,' Martin said.