Three

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED Brendan stayed on the cart and we placed over him boards and sack cloth to keep him from rats in the yards of the poor wayside inns where we stayed, sleeping sometimes on straw in the out-buildings of the yards, sometimes all together on pallets in the wretched rooms of hovels that claimed to be inns. Martin paid all scores from the common purse. He kept the money belt always on him and his dagger within reach. The purse was thin and there was the cost of Brendan’s burial to think of. None of the players had money left except for Tobias, who was thrifty; the others had spent their share of the division. In these days we passed through no place peopled enough to make a performance worthwhile, villages were reduced to hamlets by pillage and plague, houses stood empty and half-ruined, dust of rubble was thick in the streets. The snow held off but the weather was cold, keeping Brendan’s body from corruption.

During all this time Martin was tireless in teaching me. He spoke to me as we went along. All walked usually behind the cart, taking it in turn to lead the horse. He told me of the qualities a player needs, quick wits, easy movement, a ready tongue for parts that are not fully written. He showed me the thirty hand movements that all must learn and made me practice them, reproving me always for my clumsiness, the stiffness of my wrists and shoulders. Making these signs must be as natural and easy as any normal habitual motion of the limbs or the head. Over and over again he made me do them until my movements were fluent enough and the angle of the hands and position of the fingers as they should be. He was as relentless in this schooling as in all else. The slightest praise from him had to be earned doubly over. He was proud of his art and passionate in its defense—everything with him was passionate. His father before him had been a player and had brought him up to it.

No opportunity for my instruction was let pass. In the intervals of our traveling he would put me to practice, when we paused at midday to eat our scraps of cheese and rye bread and pig’s blood sausage and drink our thin ale, in the poor lodgings we found at night, and in spite of all weariness—Martin shed weariness in the eagerness of his teaching. He gave me the Play of Adam to con over, the pages tattered and the hand poor—I vowed to make a fair copy when time allowed it.

All of them helped me, each in his different way. And each, in doing so, revealed something of himself to me. Straw was a natural mime and very gifted in it. He could be man or woman, young or old, without the need for any speech. He had been traveling alone until seen by Martin at a fair and taken into the company. He was a strange excitable fellow, very changeable in his mood, with bouts of staring gloom. Once during these days he fell and writhed his body on the ground and Springer held him and wiped his mouth till he came to himself again. He did three times for me the mime of one who finds he has been robbed, showing me the importance of head movement and clear gesture and the frozen moment of the mime when all the meaning is expressed in stillness.

Springer gave his age as fifteen but he was not sure of it. He did women’s parts. He could sing high and his face was like rubber; he could pull it any way and twist his neck like a goose, so that you laughed to see it however many times it was done. He was sweet in nature and fearful and without malice. He and Straw were close and kept much together. He came from a family of jongleurs—his father had been an acrobat who had abandoned him when he was still a child. He showed me cartwheels and somersaults at the roadside as we went. He could arch his back like a hoop, with only heels and head touching the ground and from this position spring forward like a whip and come upright. This I could not hope to emulate but tumbling I practiced when I could. I am nimble and light of foot and achieved some skill in it, with Straw and Tobias holding a rope at the height I had to clear.

It did not seem to me that Stephen had such skill in playing as these two. He was not so concerned in it as they. But he was tall and deep-voiced and had a memory for his lines. He did parts requiring dignity and state, God the Father, King Herod in rage, the Archangel Michael. He had been an archer for some years, in the pay of the Sandville family, Earls of Nottingham—the same that owned this company of players. He had raided for them and fought for them first against Sir Richard Damory and after against the Earl of March. He was captured in a skirmish by the Earl of March’s men and they severed his right thumb at the first joint, disabling him for ever as a bowman and forcing him to change trade. This had been done at the lord’s behest; nevertheless Stephen was an admirer of the aristocracy and proud of his part in these bloody disorders. “I know men who had their eyes put out,” he said. “I was lucky.” He carried a bronze medallion of St. Sebastian, patron saint of archers, in a pouch at his belt. It was a great mark of friendship on his part when on the third day he showed this medallion to me, also his mutilated thumb.

Margaret was with us for his sake. They quarreled, though less in these days, I was told, as they had not money enough to get drunk on. She had played the whore in her time and made no great secret of it. She was harsh-tongued and gentle-handed. She had no part in the playing and very little in the counsels we took among us. She earned her place by washing and mending for all and cooking when there was something for the pot. This last often depended on the sixth man, Tobias, who played Mankind and doubled the small parts and did attendant demons. He also could play the drum and the bagpipes. He took always a practical view of things and was listened to on account of this. He was our handyman, seeing to the horse, keeping the cart in repair as best he could, making wire snares for rabbits and bringing down a quail or a partridge sometimes with his sling. He was patiently trying to teach the dog to flush out game birds but so far without any success, the brute was full of goodwill but brainless. Tobias taught me how to fall without doing hurt to myself. He never spoke about the past.

The Devil’s Fool, which part I had taken over from Brendan, should by tradition be a juggler too, but this I could not hope to learn in the time. What I could do I did, and practiced hard to improve whenever there was opportunity, so as not to be a cause of disappointment to them, and in particular to Martin, who had been the most concerned in taking me and besides I was drawn to him. There was a tenderness of feeling in him. And he was constant, though with a constancy yoked always to his own will and purposes. I treasured his rare words of praise and uttered them again to myself as I walked with the cart or had my turn, the road being level, to ride for a while with Brendan, and sometimes also in the night when I lay awake. I set my heart on succeeding as a player.

I learned from them that Robert Sandville, their patron lord, was away in France fighting for the King. They belonged to him and were bound to perform when required in the hall of his castle and at those times they received wages. But of late this had been rarely. Most of the year they were obliged to travel. They had Sandville’s warrant but he gave them no money while they were outside his lands. Now, with her lord away, the lady had sent them as a Christmas gift to perform for her cousin in Durham, Sir William Percy. They were hoping for generous treatment there. “If we live so long,” Stephen said darkly. We were footsore, progress was slow in the hilly country north of York.

Then once again Brendan decided our destiny. He had begun to smell foul the day before. Traveling on the cart with him one noticed it more, the jolting of the cart moved his body under its covering of red cloth and with these stirrings of movement the smell of his dissolution came dank and unmistakable on the chill air. It grew stronger by the hour and we had no oil or essence we could use to cloak it. There was a fear that before we could reach Durham his corruption would be shed on to the costumes and curtain pieces that were needed for the play. Martin called a meeting to discuss the matter and we sat there at the edge of the road. It was raw weather with a thickening of mist in the air and our spirits were low.

“It is bad luck to be bearing the stink of death,” Straw said. He looked gloomily at the heap below which Brendan lay. “It will ruin our play,” he said. He was easily downcast and had a great fear of failing, more than the others.

“It will not be easy to wash out,” Margaret said. “Some of the costumes cannot be washed by any means. How would you wash the suit of Antichrist, that is made of horse’s hair?”

“It stinks enough already without help from Brendan,” Springer said. It was this garment that he had been wearing as a shawl against the cold. “It stinks of vomit,” he said. And he got up and walked away from us in an ill-humor very uncommon with him.

“Before ever we get there,” Tobias said, “before ever we get to Durham it will be a cause of offense in the places where we stay.”

“If you had listened to me,” Stephen said, “we would not be facing such a difficult thing. It is not too late even now. We need take him no farther. Let us leave Brendan here to leak into the ground, as he will do soon or late for all our pains.”

“The question of what to do with Brendan was settled when we talked before,” Martin said. “That he has now begun to stink can make no difference. We must have him buried sooner, that is all.”

This was said with Martin’s customary firmness but it solved nothing, and we were sitting there in silence when Springer returned. “There is a town,” he said. “Down there below us, not so very far.” And he gestured across to the other side of the road.

We looked where he pointed but saw nothing. “It is on the other side,” he said. In a body we went across. We followed Springer up a short slope of rising ground, grassland, cropped close by sheep. From the crest of this, looking westward, we saw a broad valley, well wooded, with a straight river flowing through it and on the far side of this the roofs of a town, wreathed in woodsmoke, with the tower and keep of a castle on a height beyond, the lower part veiled in mist but we saw the battlements and pennants flying. And it seemed to me that some errant light touched these roofs and also the turrets of the castle, like the light that had come when they sang over Brendan. There was a reflection, perhaps of armor, from somewhere high on the walls. We gazed for a time without speaking, at the shine of water through the bare willows, the shrouded houses beyond. And as we looked there came a sound of bells, very faint, like shudders in the air.

There was a guidance in it, as there had been in my first coming upon them. What is accident to the ignorant the wise see as design. Springer had flung away from us in a petulance rare with him. He had followed an impulse to leave the road, climb the slope … The town was there, the castle was there, the bells were sounding. None of us so much as knew the name of the place. A gift of fortune then. But gifts can also be intended for our harm. I leave the judgment to those who read my words to the end, whether this gift of the town was for harm or good.

There and then we decided. We would turn aside to the town, see Brendan buried there, and perform the Play of Adam so as to replenish our purse. Martin kept count of the days and by his reckoning it was the Feast of St. Lazarus so there would be folk at leisure. And we would have time enough still to reach Durham for the day promised.

The town was some three miles distant on a road that descended by gentle degrees. When we drew near we stopped and came off the road in order to prepare for our entry into the town. We gave the horse oats and water and freed him from the shafts for a while so as to rest him for his hard labor now to come: he would have more than Brendan to draw through the streets of the town.

The costumes we dressed in did not belong together in one play but were chosen for spectacle only. In the middle of the cart a space was cleared and here stood tall Stephen as God the Father in a long white robe, with a gilt mask covering all his face and a triple crown on his head like the Pope’s, made of paper stiffened with glue and stained red. With him was Martin dressed as the Serpent before the Curse, still inhabiting Eden, with feathered wings and a smiling sun mask.

The rest of us walked alongside or behind; Springer in a Virgin’s gown, girdled at the waist, and a wig dyed yellow with saffron; Straw as a man of fashion in a white half mask, a surcoat with trailing sleeves and a pointed hood; Tobias as Mankind, barefaced, in plain tunic and cap. As for me, they gave me the horsehair suit of Antichrist to wear and a devil’s horned mask, and armed me with a wooden trident that I was to jab with as we went along, at the same time jibbering and hissing. It was my first role.

We put Brendan in the rear of the cart with our clothes heaped over him and the copper thunder tray laid on top. We hung the cart with the red curtains and put red rosettes behind the horse’s ears. Margaret led him, steady and slow so as not to overbalance God and the Serpent. She too was dressed in finery, in a frayed blue gown with slashed sleeves, her hair combed and pinned up. As we began to come into the town we made of our progress a drama of sound as well as sight, demons and angels contended with music. Springer played his reed pipe and the Serpent a viol while Mankind beat time on a drum and God marked the intervals with a tambourine. In order to drown these heavenly sounds I had been hung about with a cooking pan and an iron ladle, with which I made a great din, and Straw carried a stick with which he belabored the sheet of copper below which Brendan lay, making rolls of thunder. At intervals, when harmony and discord were in full conflict and the issue in doubt, God raised his right hand, palm outward and fingers slightly curled in the gesture of silencing, and with this the din of the demons instantly ceased.

Thus alternating between order and chaos, with the skinny horse lifting its head to the music and stepping lively as perhaps by habit it had learned to do, and the dog, which was tied to the cart behind, barking loudly in excitement, in such fashion we paraded through the streets of the town till we came to the market square and the inn alongside.

I for one was glad when we came there. The suit of hair was hot and close on my body, the mask was made of paper, pressed and glued together, it was thick and airless. I did not see well through the eyeholes and my sight was altogether closed off at the sides. I had to remember to jab with my trident and hiss while the music was heavenly, also to be ready with the pan and ladle when Straw sounded the signal on the tray, also to keep one eye on God so as to fall silent the instant he raised his hand. I was confused by the clashing sounds and by the faces of the spectators briefly glimpsed, some staring, some laughing, some openmouthed with a shouting that was not separate from the great noise we were making ourselves. It was now that it came to me—a lesson that was to be learned over again in the days that followed—that the player is always trapped in his own play but he must never allow the spectators to suspect this, they must always think that he is free. Thus the great art of the player is not in showing but concealing.

Adding to my disorder of mind was the sense that my mask and the ancient, mangy horsehair suit were redolent already of Brendan’s decay. It came to me that perhaps my mask and suit had lain next to him and I wondered if this same suspicion was in the minds of the others. His odor we were obliged to hide, as we had hidden his body. We brought Death into the town, so much is certain. Death rode with us on the cart, he was there in the midst of our panoply and fanfares while we wooed the staring folk for their custom. Certain too that Death waited for us there, for he can be here and there together at the same time. By God’s grace I came out from the town again, Death waits for me still. But time has done nothing to dim the memory of it, the clamor of our entry into the town, the close mask and evil-smelling suit of Antichrist. And the fear of dissolution.