Morality Play (11 page)

'A part very fitting,' Margaret said. Since her disclosure concerning Flint she had gained in the general consideration, and no one reproved her, not even Stephen though he glowered.

'He will also be the retainer who accompanies the Monk to the girl's house,' Martin said. 'Nicholas will be Good Counsel. He makes a sermon to the boy to persuade him to stay on the road.'

'You can put some Latin in it,' Straw said, and he turned his eyes upward and intoned in a nasal voice:
‘Hax, pax, max, Deus adimax.
What do you mean, stay on the road?' he said to Martin.

'The road is the way of life, turning aside for temptation is the way of death. We have done this before in Moralities. It is the only difference now that the death threatening the soul is also the death of the body. The woman tempts him with promises and he follows her.'

'Follows her?' Straw laughed uncertainly. 'But he didn't follow her. It was there on the road that he was found, poor soul.'

Martin looked at him in silence for a moment or two. 'No,' he said quietly, 'he must have gone with her, do you not see? It was not yet dark when they met together, there on the road. She had come down from the common, having seen the lad, or maybe for some other reason. There were people still about. The Benedictine had gone by shortly before. If it had been a blow, perhaps yes. But to kill the boy in such a manner, on the open road, while there was still light ... No, she took him away to her house and did the deed there.'

Straw shook his head. 'That way she risked to be seen with him,' he said.

'And afterwards?' Stephen said. 'She carried him back to the road in the dark of night?'

'She would know the ground,' Tobias said. 'All the same, it would be a heavy burden for a woman, and dangerous on the slope, she would not dare to show a light.'

'Well, it must have been done so,' Martin said. 'There is no other way to think about it. She took him away somewhere. And as we must make a scene of it, we shall say it was her house.'

This again was something only he among us could have said. In the silence that followed we all looked at him as he sat hunched forward with his arms hugging his knees. It was as if we expected something more, perhaps some word of regret. But the face he turned to us, with its long narrow eyes and the sharp bones at cheek and temple, expressed nothing but its own certainty and indifference. He did not know where the woman had taken the boy; but they were persons in a play now and what mattered more to him than the truth of the place was the truth of the playing. 'To bring him to the road again was a clever thing,' he said. 'It would seem some passer-by had done it. Many use the road and where many are suspected the true culprit may well escape.'

This was the version we decided upon and this is the way we thought to make our play. We practised late into the night, going over the movements and the words. We were weary when we turned from it, but for long I could not sleep. There were vermin in the straw and I was cold, though wearing the Fool's headpiece and wrapped in Eve's robe over my habit. Martin and Tobias had blankets, and Straw and Springer shared one and slept together under it. The rest of us made what shift we could with what we carried on the cart.

In the silence of the night the feeling of dread returned to me. I saw in my mind the woman with her burden, demons guiding her through the dark. These nights were starless, muffled in blackness by the snow-clouds. But she had found her way, demons had guided her. The same demons that now were guiding us.

CHAPTER NINE

I woke at first light in the bitter cold. The fire was out and I heard Stephen groaning in some uneasy dream. Then there was silence and I felt the hush and knew there was heavy snow lying. I went out to void my bladder in the yard and the dog came with me, whimpering and snuffling as if it expected something from this rising and emerging of mine. As I came back to the barn I heard a cock-crow and in the distance the barking of dogs. Two serving-men in leather aprons came out into the yard with broom and shovel to clear away the new fall of snow. There was a stink of horses on the cold air and I saw a white slope of hillside beyond the roofs of the town. Afterwards I remembered these things very clearly, with that longing we feel sometimes to recover a state of life that we have lost for ever, though perhaps that we have lost it is all its value.

It seemed like peace to me, that cold morning, with the hush of snow lying over the town and all the surrounding country. It is strange that it should have seemed so, because I was in trouble enough already to any outward view, and my sins crowded upon me. I had left the transcribing of Pilato unfinished, I was outside my diocese without permission, I had sung in taverns and diced away my holy relics, I had lain with a woman in adultery, I had joined a troupe of travelling players, a thing expressly forbidden to clerics of whatever degree. In all this I had offended God and given pain to the Bishop of Lincoln, who had been like a father to me. And yet this was a time free of trouble compared with what was to follow upon our acting the Play of Thomas Wells.

I kept on the Fool's headpiece and covered myself as best I could with Eve's robe and sat inside with my back to the wall as the light strengthened and sounds and voices began to come from the rooms above. It entered my mind that I could get up, leave these scraps of travesty behind and walk away into the quietness of the morning in my proper dress of a priest, as I had been when first I came upon them. My condition was the same: I was cold and hungry and penniless now, as then. But I was confused between the playing of the thing and the living of it; it grieves me to say it but I am resolved to tell the truth, the habit of a priest seemed travesty also, no less than the white robe that Stephen wore as God the Father or the horse-hair suit of Antichrist. Or perhaps I was merely attached to my sin. In any case the moment passed.

I saw Straw's tousled head rise from the bundle it had been resting on and turn vaguely this way and that. There was no movement from Springer beside him. Margaret lay like one dead under a heap of red curtain-cloth. Then Martin rose from his place and winced and muttered a little in the cold and bade me good-morning. And so the day started.

The morning passed in practising, though there was not space enough in the barn to do the movements properly. Tobias and Margaret together fashioned an effigy of Thomas Wells with straw from the barn floor and twine and bits of clothing and they put on him the white mask that Straw sometimes wore when he played the Man of Fashion, and which has no expression, either of good or bad. This effigy it was necessary to make in order to show the change of death, also to make the burden light enough to be carried.

Martin was at first intending to do as we had done in the Play of Adam, that is to make our changes in the barn and come back again through the people. But Springer, who after his death as Thomas Wells was to be the angel that showed the Monk where the money lay hidden, would not agree to this. 'I will not pass so close among them,' he said. Springer was a fearful soul and like a girl in some ways: he felt no shame in showing that he was afraid. And the rest of us were secretly grateful for this, as the same fear was in all of us. Some measure of fear a player feels always because he is exposed to view and there is no shelter for him without abandoning the play; but now it was stronger, we knew that we would be coming close to the people's lives. So it was decided among us to make a space with curtains against the wall of the yard in the corner close to where we were playing.

When the noon bells began to sound we were still busy with this. The curtains were threaded through canes and the canes rested on corner posts, two of the sides being formed by the angel of the corner. While this work was being done by Stephen and Tobias and me, the others did tricks to entertain the people - there were already more folk in the yard than had come for our play ofthe evening before, and they were coming still. Straw and Springer did cartwheels, going different ways across, while Martin stood on his hands with a coloured ball resting on the sole of each foot, one white, one red -the same that had been thrown to me as a test - and he walked on his hands over the icy cobbles, keeping his legs so straight that the balls did not roll off, a thing I had never seen in my life before.

Then our work with the curtains was finished and all of us save Martin and Tobias crowded into the room we had made and began to ready ourselves. Martin and Tobias continued some minutes longer before the people, one throwing up the balls and the other somersaulting to catch them. Then Tobias joined us. 'The yard is full,' he whispered. We stood there in the cramped space, listening first to the breathing of his exertions and then to the voice of Martin, as he began to speak the Prologue:

'Good masters, we beg for your patience

And also to give good audience

To this our play ...'

They were the lines agreed on, taken from the Interlude called Way of Life, with some changes to accord more with the tenor of our play. But when Martin had spoken them he did not come at once to join us but remained there before the people, which we had not known he would do, and I think he had not known it either. There was a silence of some seconds. No sound came from the people. And then he spoke again but in his own voice:

'Give us your attention, good masters.

This is the present play of your town.

It is yours, and that is a new thing,

to make a play that belongs to a town.

And this play does honour to your town,

because it shows that wrongdoers are punished here

with great speed of justice.'

Inside our tent of curtaining we regarded one another mutely. Tobias was frowning as he prepared to put on the mask of Pieta. I saw that Straw's lower lip was trembling slightly. The others I did not look closely at but I think we were all in fear. I went to the curtain and opened the parting a little and looked out. At that moment the rim of the sun showed above the wall on the side towards the sea, and a faint radiance fell across the yard and gleamed on the wet stones. There was a strange light on things, a snow-light, although the yard had been swept clear; and this light was gentle and at the same time pitiless: there were no shadows in it. It was as if the light of all the miles of snow outside had gathered here for our play. And it lay on the faces of the people as they stood close together there, dressed for the day of the fair, rough faces of labouring people, paler ones of servants and maids, with here and there the sharper or more stately look of people more well-to-do. These faces all were turned towards Martin and his voice filled the yard.

'When we make a play of a wicked act

we give God's pity further occasion,

for those who play in it and those who watch.

So as you look for pity you will be ready to grant it to us poor players

and to those whose parts we take.'

With a sudden gesture he raised his arms to the sides, palms outward to the people and raised above the shoulders. 'Gentle people,' he said, 'we give you our Play of Thomas Wells.'

He came back now to join us and his face was calm but his breath caught a little. Straw and Springer and Stephen stepped out to begin the play, Straw dressed in a countrywoman's bonnet with his kirtle padded out to make him buxom, Stephen in his own ragged jerkin — the one he had worn at our first meeting, when he had threatened me with his knife. Springer, as Thomas Wells, wore his own drab doublet and hose.

Tobias had fashioned a purse out of black felt, a good big one that all could see. And Stephen tossed it up so that the people should see it well, and he laughed in the manner of a boor, ho-ho-ho, with the hands held loosely clenched against the sides of the waist and the trunk of the body moved forward and back. Martin had schooled him in this and he did it well. There was laughter among the people to see a man laugh so at having made a bad bargain, because all knew that the cow had been sold out of need, and one or two called out, but not in anger as it seemed to me - if the man himself was there among them, he gave no sign of it. The laughter died away soon into silence and this quick dying away was a disturbing thing.

I watched through the curtain as the play went on. Things were done as we had planned and practised them, the drunkenness of the man, the woman's filching of the purse, her miming of the dangers facing her son on his six-mile journey back to the town. Despite the full skirt and the bulk of his padding, Straw succeeded well in miming the perils of bears and wolves and robbers, and Springer followed all these movements with a goose-like turning of the head to show his careful listening and good intention.

Then Stephen and Straw came back to change and I stepped out into the shelterless open and began my sermon to Thomas Wells.

'Good Counsel is my name and some call me Conscience;

my task it is and also my delight to urge and prompt you

and every man to keep well on the way of life,

which way was opened for us by the sufferings of Christ...'

I said the words as they came to me, keeping my eyes steadily on Springer all the while, and making from time to time the gesture of exhortation, right hand raised and three middle fingers extended. There was some talking aside among the people and shifting of feet, they found the sermon long. Then there came again that sudden hush and I looked away from Thomas Wells and saw the woman come forward in the robe and wig and mask of the temptress - Straw had put on the round sun-mask of the Serpent before the Fall.

For a moment I faltered in my lines. In that full unshadowed light there in the yard, the scarlet robe and the yellow wig and the unchanging smile of the white mask with its round pink cheek-patches were very striking. I felt my breath quickened as by some shock. And she did not come nearer, but stayed at a distance and at first without movement, while I continued my good counsel to Thomas Wells, using now some set lines I had kept in my memory:

'Of ghostly sight be you not blind

On earthly store to set your mind.