Two

IT IS THE WEAKNESS of my case that I can only seek pardon by revealing the pass I had come to. But this in turn was the result of my own folly and sin. And so I seek indulgence for a fault by revealing faults anterior to it. And there are further faults anterior to those. It is a series to which I see no end, it goes back to my mother’s womb.

First there was the shame, to cause distress to my Bishop, who had given me the tonsure, who had always treated me like a father, because this was not the first time I had left without permission but the third, and always in the May-time of the year at the stirring of the blood and this time the reason was different but the stirring was the same, I had been sent to act as secretary to Sir Robert de Brian, a noble knight and generous in his benefactions but not of discerning taste in letters and in short a very vile poet who set me to transcribing his voluminous verses and as fast as I copied them he would bring others. All this I endured. But then in addition he set me the task of transcribing Pilato’s long-winded version of Homer. It was the month of May, the birds were singing with full throats, the hawthorn was breaking into flower. I made up my pack and walked out of his house. It was December when I met the players, the flowers of spring were long withered. Misfortunes had come to me. I had lost the holy relic that I had kept for several years and bought from a clerk newly come from Rome, a piece of the sail of St. Peter’s boat. I lost it at dice. And then, that same morning that I met them, I had lost my good cloak, leaving it behind in my coward’s haste. I was chilled to the bone when I came upon them and hungry, and discouraged by these blows of fate. I wanted to be in community again, no longer alone. The community of the players offered shelter to me, though they were poor and half-starved themselves. This was my true reason. The badge of livery was only an argument I used for myself.

To make my transformation complete I had to wear Brendan’s stained and malodorous jerkin and tunic and he had to be dressed in my clerical habit, there being no alternative to this exchange except the outlandish scraps of costume on the cart. It was the woman who undressed Brendan and put my habit on him. The others would not do it, nor would they watch it done, though men for whom travesty was common enough. But I watched, and she was deft and tender with him and there was kindness in her face.

When it was finished Brendan lay in his priest’s garb, a man who in life had been impious and full of profane jest. And there stood I in the garb of a dead player. But now an argument sprang up among us. Martin was for taking the dead man with us on the cart. “Brendan died unshriven,” he said. “We must bury him in hallowed ground.”

“The horse is slow enough as it is,” Stephen said. “The roads are bad and there is snow coming. We have lost time already, with the broken wheel. We are sent to Durham for Christmas to play there before our lady’s cousin. We cannot fail in it and still keep favor. The first day of Christmas is eight days from this one. By my reckoning we are still five days’ journey from Durham. Shall we travel with a dead man for five days?”

“The priest will ask for money,” Straw said. He looked round at our faces with that strange, febrile eagerness of expression. As I was to learn, he never stayed long in one state of mind but was led always by some vein of fancy all his own, gloomy and exuberant by turns. “We can bury him in the forest,” he said. “Here in the dark wood. Brendan will sleep well here.”

“The dead sleep well enough anywhere,” Margaret said. She looked at me and there was provocation in her look but no malice. “Our priestling can say the words over him,” she said.

“Margaret has no voice in this,” Martin said. “She is not of the company.” He said these words directly to Stephen, whose woman she was, and I heard—and surely the others did also—the tremor in his voice of feeling barely held in check. His right hand was clenched and the knuckles had whitened. “You would leave him here?” he said. For me, who did not know him then, this passion was strangely sudden and strong, as if not only his plan for Brendan was being questioned but with it some cherished vision of the world.

No one answered at once, such was the fierceness in him. I think Stephen was making to answer but Martin spoke again, in a voice that had deepened. “He was like all of us,” he said. “While he lived he never sat at his own hearth or ate at his own table. Pot and jar he needs no longer, but he will have a home properly made in the earth for him, deep enough, and a roof over his head at last.”

“Brendan had his habits, he would not have denied it himself, and too much ale was one of them,” Tobias said. “But drunk or sober he played the Devil’s Fool better than anyone you ever saw.”

“To make his grave what would you use?” There was contempt now in Martin’s voice. “Adam’s spade and Eve’s rake that are made of wire and lath-wood? The ground is hard with the frosts of these last days. We will labor till dark to make a grave and it will not be deep enough to keep the crows from picking his eyes.”

“We have knives,” Stephen said.

He had meant for digging but there was now a terrible pause while Martin looked steadily at him and he returned the look. Then the boy Springer stepped forward before either man could say more. He was always a peacemaker, though the youngest, one of the blessed who will be known for the Children of God. “Brendan taught me to tumble and stilt and play the woman,” he said. “We will not leave him in a ditch, for our hope in Christ, good people all.” And to amuse us he gathered the trailing pieces of his shawl round his shoulders and made gestures of a woman who is vain of her long hair.

“Do you remember how he would caper round on those shanks of his?” Tobias said. “He would step short as if he could not help but fall.”

“He never fell save by intention,” Martin said. He had recovered from that passion of feeling, now that he felt the others turning to his will. And he spoke directly to me, including me in these memories of Brendan, and I was grateful, there was a sweetness in his nature that made him attentive to others when not disturbed in feeling or crossed. “He would wear the cap and bells with ass’s ears and a half mask,” he said. “Or sometimes a mask with four horns like a Jew’s.”

The one they called Straw laughed suddenly, a sobbing laugh, and struck his knees with open hands. “He would steal the Devil’s ale and spill it in his lap, being in such haste to drink it,” he said. “You would see him shuffle with his knees kept close and the ale dripping down while the Devil hunted high and low for his can.”

“You would just think he had pissed himself,” Springer said tenderly.

“Do you mind how he would comfort the Devil with his song?” Stephen said. It was to Martin that he spoke and I saw it was the way his pride had found of making peace. “He made his own songs,” he said. “He made the words himself. When the Devil was sad because Eve would not take the apple at first, Brendan sang a song of his own to lighten the Devil’s mood. ‘Were the World All Mine,’ that was the song.”

Springer took up his reed pipe and played the air and all joined in the song for a verse, singing together there and looking at one another’s faces as they sang, in the cold weather among the bare trees.

      “If the world belonged to me

      I would make a broad way

      From the hills to the sea

      For Fools to ride …”

Thus they mourned Brendan with his own song and were again in harmony one with another. I see them again now, their faces as they sang, that gleam of light touching the dead oak leaves, Straw’s white angel robe, the round copper tray in the back of the cart. But what chiefly lives in my mind is the strangeness of our nature, that men should come close to violent quarrel over the disposing of one poor husk of flesh in a time of plague and blood like ours, when every day is a feast day for Death, when we have seen the dead piled in the streets without distinction, rotting in carts, heaped together in common pits for graves. That is some years past but there is again an outbreak in the north here, a stronger strain, even winter does not halt it. The fields lie untilled, many die of famine, they fall and in haste they are shoveled away in obscure corners. Bands of brigands infest the countryside, peasants in flight from their dues of labor, soldiers returning from these endless wars with France, men who have known nothing but murder from earliest life. In parishes you will find less than half the folk left alive. And few will know clearly where those they love have been laid. Yet there was this care over one poor player.

Little more was said of him either then or later. They had sung his epitaph. Nor was there any further argument about taking him on the cart. Then and there he was lifted up. He was laid down among the masks and costumes with a coil of rope for his pillow, and covered with pieces of scarlet cloth that they carried to make a curtain at the back of the stage. After this we set off again on our way. And so I began my life as a player.