Morality Play (20 page)

'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.

'As Pride and Arrogancy,

Lordship and Sway.

But what care I for names so I keep my dominion?'

He was using a voice not his own. It came through the cruel and bitter mouth of the mask, slow, deliberate, with a sound of metal in it: it was the voice of the Lord. I glanced at the others as they stood there motionless and stiff with no parts to play. Straw and Springer had moved closer together and they were holding hands. And now Superbia spoke again, again in that borrowed voice.

'What care I for one dead boy, or five, or fifteen,

so I keep my name and state?

Pride it was that held the court,

that buried the boy in dark of night,

that hanged the traitor Monk in his shift...'

It was more than the voice now. To my staggered mind and fevered eyes, as I looked from the mask of Superbia to the face of the seated man, I saw them come closer in resemblance until in that flickering light there was only one face, that of the mask, with its sneering mouth and bulging eyes and jutting brows.

Terror grew with this confusion. Martin in his madness had set himself to flout the judge in the shadow of the judgement seat, to strut before this Lord and simulate his voice, this Lord who held us in his hand. The offence was mortal in itself. But there was more than offence in it. If the threefold arraignment were true, only one meaning could be found to bring it into a relation of logic: Sir Richard de Guise had not wanted the body of Thomas Wells to be seen, because in some way it was marked and he knew this, he knew it because it was into his hands that Simon Damian had delivered the living boy.

How far we would have been permitted to proceed I do not know. I saw Tobias, who was framed strongest of us all and proved it now, come into movement, step forward into the play again, into Martin's view, raising his hand as he did so in the sign of reproach, which is like the sign of cuckoldry save that the hand is held with the fingers pointing forward. I think he would have tried to save us from wreck even now, by upbraiding Pride for his presumption, but before he could speak there was a disturbance at the door and a young woman came in quickly, bare-headed, wearing a dark cloak over the pale blue silk of her evening gown.

She checked at sight of us, a strange sight no doubt in that silent room, with Pride still making his motions of a swimmer and Tobias with an arm raised stiffly towards him and the rest of us still in our frozen cluster. Then she came forward again to the side of the Lord's chair and he gestured sharply to us and the play stopped.

'I am sorry to disturb you, father,' she said. 'I did not know where the players had been taken. Sir Roger of Yarm, that was hurt today, is worse, poor soul, he cannot last till morning and the Chaplain nowhere to be found that could administer the Sacrament.'

The steward had stepped aside at her approach and the Lord turned towards her in his chair. We took advantage of this to stare reproach at Martin. Straw gestured to him to unmask, but he made no move to do it.

'I am sorry to hear this,' the Lord said, in a voice less cold than he had used with us, 'but I do not know why you have come to tell me of it now, when I am occupied here.'

'It was mother sent me,' she said. 'She has heard from a maidservant that one of the players is a priest. Perhaps that is the one, who is dressed so.'

The eyes of father and daughter were now on me. After a moment the Lord spoke to the steward, who hooked a finger and beckoned me forward. I came to stand before the chair. I was out of the playing-space now, I was Nicholas Barber, fugitive priest, sick with fear of death. He raised his head to look at me and the falcon sensed the movement and took a delicate step to the side and it was so quiet in the room that I heard the scratch of talons on the leather.

The Lord had raised the lids of his eyes and his gaze was on me, steady and cold, without curiosity or even hint of question in it. I met this stark gaze for a moment only, then looked down. 'Well,' he said, 'you are dressed for it. Is it true you are a priest?'

'Yes, my Lord, it is true,' I said.

'He could come and perform the office,' the girl said. 'Then I would have him brought back to you here. It would not be long.' She hesitated for a moment, then said, 'The Knight cannot speak.'

The Lord hesitated briefly, raising the ungloved hand to his ear and taking the lobe of it between finger and thumb. Then he nodded. 'Perhaps I have seen enough,' he said. He looked at the steward. 'One man-at-arms goes with him. You and the other man remain with me. Afterwards our priest is to be conveyed again to the chamber where they were kept before.'

With the lady leading and the man-at-arms clattering behind, we passed from that room, which I was very thankful to do, and went by ways I was too troubled to take much note of towards the place where they had lodged the dying Knight.

He lay in a room without windows on a low bench padded with cushions, with a white quilt drawn up to his chin and white linen binding his head like another helm and candles set on either side. The squire knelt at his feet and he was weeping. There was a low door in the far wall with a table standing near it made with a board and trestles and on this were cloths and a ewer of water and a shallow bowl with the oil in it. A serving woman stood near this and the lady of the house was seated at the bedside. She rose as I entered and moved away without speaking and the squire shifted back to give me room.

The binding came low over the Knight's brow and his face was as pale as the linen. The eyes were brown and long-lashed and they were fixed on something very near or very far. His mouth was a little open and the breath struggled from him. I asked him if he sincerely repented his sins and was ready to make confession, but the eyes did not change and I understood then that the blow had taken away hearing and speech. He seemed very young to me, hardly more than a boy. The skin of his face was smooth, making the scar on his cheek the more strangely incongruous. Death would come in stealth to take the Knight in his youth. And it was near; already his eyes were dwelling on Death.

Absolution I could not give to one who could not signify repentance or speak his sins. I took the oil and blessed it and I began to speak the words for the anointing of the sick and dying and to touch with the Holy Unction his eyes and ears and mouth. He showed no sign of knowing what was done, who only some hours before had dressed in pride for the jousting in the colours of his line and donned his helm of extravagant design, masking for his role as players do. Now he was passing from the playing-space with no role left to play but this last one of dying, that comes to all. What there was besides I gave him from my poor store. I said the words he could not hear, I blessed his fading senses. It was my own repentance I gave him, my own hope of Heaven.

The moment of his death was not exactly to be seen, since his breathing had quietened some time before and his eyes had no sight in them. From one moment to the next, with no movement or sound, as I held the Cross before him, his soul took its flight. But the squire knew it and he came forward and knelt by the body, taking my place. And the lady, seeing this, advanced on the other side. The serving woman perhaps did not know he was dead, she had turned to the table, she was wetting a cloth to wipe the sweat of agony from his face. For these few moments no one was looking at me. Outside the door by which I had entered the man-at-arms waited still. But there was this other door.

The hardest thing, once such an impulse has come, is to move slowly. Three steps brought me close enough. I stood with my back to the door and tried it behind me: it was not locked, it gave to my touch. I hesitated no longer but backed from the room on to the narrow landing beyond, closing the door behind me softly. In the last slant of light from the room I was leaving I saw two steps immediately before me and a passage leading away, narrow but straight. There was a latch on the door with a wooden bolt and I pushed this home into the socket. There was no light, but I went forward with what speed I could. I had no plan and no real belief I could get away. It was fear that drove me, but for such as myself fear is a potent ally, sharpening the wits and giving wings to the feet.