The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (53 page)

Neither her father nor mother vowed chastity when she was begot. Therefore she thought they begat her not to live chaste, and either she must prove herself a bastard, or show
herself like them. Of Leander you may write upon, and it is written upon, she liked well; and for all he was a naked man and clean despoiled to the skin when he crawled through the brackish suds to scale her tower, all the strength of it could not hold him out. Oh, ware a naked man. Cithereare's nuns
³⁶⁵
have no power to resist him; and some such quality is ascribed to the lion. Were he never so naked when he came to her, because he should not scare her she found a means to cover him in her bed; and for he might not take cold after his swimming, she lay close by him to keep him warm. This scuffling or bo-peep in the dark they had awhile without weam or brack,
³⁶⁶
and the old nurse (as there be three things seldom in their right kind till they be old: a bawd, a witch and a midwife) executed the huckstering
³⁶⁷
office of her years very charily and circumspectly, till their sliding stars revolted from them. And then, for seven days together, the wind and the Hellespont contended which should howl louder. The waves dashed up to the clouds, and the clouds on the other side spit and drivelled upon them as fast.

Hero wept as trickling from the heavens, to think that heaven should so divorce them. Leander stormed worse than the storms, that by them he should be so restrained from his Cynthia. At Sestos was his soul, and he could not abide to tarry in Abidos. Rain, snow, hail or blow it how it could, into the pitchy Hellespont he leapt when the moon and all her torch-bearers were afraid to peep out their heads. But he was peppered for it; he had as good have took meat, drink and leisure, for the churlish frampold
³⁶⁸
waters gave him his bellyful of fish-broth, ere out of their laundry or wash-house they would grant him his coquet
³⁶⁹
or
transire
;
³⁷⁰
and
not only that, but they sealed him his
quietus est
³⁷¹
for curveting
³⁷²
any more to the maiden tower, and tossed his dead carcass, well bathed or parboiled, to the sandy threshold of his leman or orange,
³⁷³
for a disjune or morning breakfast. All that livelong night could she not sleep, she was so troubled with the rheum, which was a sign she should hear of some drowning. Yet towards cock-crowing she caught a little slumber, and then she dreamed that Leander and she were playing at checkstone
³⁷⁴
with pearls in the bottom of the sea.

You may see dreams are not so vain as they are preached of, though not in vain preachers inveigh against them and bend themselves out of the peoples' minds to exhale their foolish superstition. The rheum is student's disease, and who study most dream most. The labouring men's hands glow and blister after their day's work; the glowing and blistering of our brains after our day-labouring cogitations are dreams, and those dreams are reeking vapours of no impression if our mateless couches be not half empty. Hero hoped, and therefore she dreamed (as all hope is but a dream). Her hope was where her heart was, and her heart winding and turning with the wind, that might wind her heart-of-gold to her or else turn him from her. Hope and fear both combatted in her, and both these are wakeful, which made her at break of day (what an old crone is the day that is so long a-breaking) to unloop her luket or casement to look whence the blasts came, or what gait or pace the sea kept; when forthwith her eyes bred her eye-sore, the first white whereon their transpiercing arrows stuck being the breathless corpse of Leander. With the sudden contemplation of this piteous spectacle of her love, sodden to haddock's meat, her sorrow could not but be indefinite, if her delight in him were but indifferent; and there is no woman but delights in sorrow, or she would not use it so lightly for everything.

Down she ran in her loose nightgown, and her hair about her ears (even as Semiramis
³⁷⁵
ran out with her lie-pot
³⁷⁶
in her hand, and her black dangling tresses about her shoulders with her ivory comb ensnarled in them, when she heard that Babylon was taken), and thought to have kissed his dead corpse alive again, but as on his blue-jellied-sturgeon lips she was about to clap one of those warm plaisters,
³⁷⁷
boisterous woolpacks of ridged tides came rolling in and raught him from her (with a mind belike to carry him back to Abidos). At that she became a frantic Bacchanal outright, and made no more bones, but sprang after him, and so resigned up her priesthood, and left work for Musaeus and Kit Marlowe.
³⁷⁸
The gods, and gods and goddesses all on a row, bread and crow,
³⁷⁹
from Ops to Pomona, the first apple-wife, were so dumped
³⁸⁰
with this miserable wrack that they began to abhor all moisture for the sea's sake. And Jupiter could not endure Ganymede, his cup-bearer, to come in his presence, both for the dislike he bore to Neptune's baleful liquor, as also that he was so like to Leander. The sun was so in his mumps upon it, that it was almost noon before he could go to cart that day, and then with so ill a will he went, that he had thought to have toppled his burning car or huny-curry
³⁸¹
into the sea (as Phaeton did) to scorch it and dry it up; and at night, when he was begrimed with dust and sweat of his journey, he would not descend as he was wont to wash him in the ocean, but under a tree laid him down to rest in his clothes all night, and so did the scowling moon under another fast by him, which of that are behighted
³⁸²
the trees of the sun and moon, and are the same that Sir John Mandeville tells us
³⁸³
he spoke
with, and that spoke to Alexander. Venus, for Hero was her priest, and Juno Lucina, the midwife's goddess, for she was now quickened and cast away by the cruelty of Aeolus, took bread and salt and ate it that they would be smartly revenged on that truculent jailer, and they forgot it not, for Venus made his son and his daughter to commit incest together. Lucina, that there might be some lasting characters of his shame, helped to bring her to bed of a goodly boy, and Aeolus bolting out all this heaped murder upon murder.

The dint of destiny could not be repealed in the reviving of Hero and Leander, but their heavenly-hoods in their synod thus decreed, that, for they were either of them sea-borderers and drowned in the sea, still to the sea they must belong, and be divided in habitation after death as they were in their lifetime. Leander, for that in a cold dark testy night he had his passport to Charon, they terminated to the unquiet cold coast of Iceland, where half the year is nothing but murk-light, and to that fish translated him which of us is termed ling. Hero, for that she was pagled
³⁸⁴
and timpanized,
³⁸⁵
and sustained two losses under one, they foot-balled their heads together, and protested to make the stem of her loins of all fishes the flaunting Fabian or Palmerin
³⁸⁶
of England, which is Cadwallader Herring; and, as their meetings were but seldom, and not so oft as welcome, so but seldom should they meet in the heel of the week at the best men's tables, upon Fridays and Saturdays, the holy time of Lent exempted, and then they might be at meat and meal for seven weeks together.

The nurse or Mother Mampudding
³⁸⁷
that was a-cowering on the back side whiles these things were a-tragedizing, led by the scritch or outcry to the prospect of this sorrowful
heigh-ho, as soon as, through the ravelled buttonholes of her blear eyes, she had sucked in and received such a revelation of Doomsday, and that she saw her mistress mounted a-cockhorse and hoisted away to hell or to heaven on the backs of those rough-headed ruffians, down she sunk to the earth, as dead as a door-nail, and never mumped crust after. Whereof their supemalities,
³⁸⁸
having a drop or two of pity left of the huge hogshead of tears they spent for Hero and Leander, seemed to be something sorry, though they could not weep for it, and because they would be sure to have a medicine that should make them weep at all times, to that kind of grain they turned her which we call mustard-seed, as well for she was a shrewish snappish bawd, that would bite off a man's nose with an answer and had rheumatic sore eyes that ran always, as that she might accompany Hero and Leander after death, as in her lifetime. And hence it is that mustard bites a man so by the nose and makes him weep and water his plants when he tasteth it; and that Hero and Leander, the red herring and ling, never come to the board without mustard, their waiting-maid; and, if you mark it, mustard looks of the tanned-wainscot hue of such a withered wrinklefaced beldam as she was that was altered thereinto. Loving Hero, however altered, had a smack of love still, and therefore to the coast of Loving-land (to Yarmouth near adjoining and within her liberties of Kirtley Road) she accustomed to come in pilgrimage every year, but contentions arising there, and she remembering the event of the contentions betwixt Sestos and Abidos, that wrought both Leander's death and hers, shunneth it of late, and retireth more northwards. So she shunneth unquiet Humber, because Elstred
³⁸⁹
was drowned there, and the Scots Seas, as before, and every other sea where any blood hath been spilt, for her own sea's sake, that spilt her sweet sweetheart's blood and hers.

Whippet, turn to a new lesson, and strike we up ‘John
for the King', or tell how the herring scrambled up to be king of all fishes. So it fell upon a time and tide, though not upon a holiday, a falconer bringing over certain hawks out of Ireland, and airing them above hatches on ship-board, and giving them stones to cast and scour,
³⁹⁰
one of them broke loose from his fist ere he was aware; which being in her kingdom when she was got upon her wings, and finding herself empty gorged after her casting, up to heaven she towered to seek prey, but there being no game to please her, down she fluttered to the sea again, and a speckled fish playing above the water, at it she strook, mistaking it for a partridge. A shark or tuberon, that lay gaping for the flying fish hard by, what did me he, but, seeing the mark fall so just in his mouth, chopped aloft and snapped her up, bells and all at a mouthful. The news of this murderous act, carried by the king's fisher to the ears of the land fowls, there was nothing but ‘arm, arm, arm, to sea, to sea', swallow and titmouse, to take chastisement of that trespass of blood and death committed against a peer of their blood royal. Preparation was made, the muster taken, the leaders allotted, and had their bills to take up pay. An old goshawk for general was appointed; for marshal of the field, a sparrowhawk, whom for no further desert they put in office, but because it was one of their lineage had sustained that wrong, and they thought they would be more implacable in condoling and commiserating. The peacocks with their spotted coats and affrighting voices for heralds they pricked
³⁹¹
and enlisted, and the cockadoodling cocks for their trumpeters (look upon any cock and look upon any trumpeter, and see if he look not as red as a cock after his trumpeting, and a cock as red as he after his crowing). The kestrils or windfuckers that, filling themselves with wind, fly against the wind evermore, for their full-sailed standardbearers; the cranes for pikemen, and the woodcocks for demilances,
³⁹²
and so of the rest every one according to that place by nature he was most
apt for. Away to the land's end they trig,
³⁹³
all the sky-bred chirpers of them. When they came there,
aequora nos terrent et ponti tristis imago
,
³⁹⁴
they had wings of goodwill to fly with, but no webs on their feet to swim with; for, except the waterfowls had mercy upon them and stood their faithful confederates and back-friends,
³⁹⁵
on their backs to transport them, they might return home like good fools and gather straws to build their nests, or fall to their old trade of picking worms. In sum, to the water fouls unanimately they recourse, and besought duck and drake, swan and goose, halcyons and sea-pies, cormorants and sea-gulls, of their oary assistance and aidful furtherance in this action.

They were not obdurate to be entreated, though they had little cause to revenge the hawks' quarrel from them, having received so many high displeasures and slaughters and rapines of their race; yet in a general prosecution private feuds they trod underfoot, and submitted their endeavours to be at their limitation in everything.

The puffin, that is half-fish half-flesh (a John Indifferent,
³⁹⁶
and an Ambodexter
³⁹⁷
betwixt either), bewrayed this conspiracy to Protaeus' herds or the fraternity of fishes; which the greater giants of Russia and Iceland, as the whale, the sea-horse, the norse, the wasserman,
³⁹⁸
the dolphin, the grampoys, fleered and jeered at as a ridiculous danger, but the lesser pigmies and spawn of them thought it meet to provide for themselves betime, and elect a king amongst them that might derain
³⁹⁹
them to battle, and under whose colours they might march against these birds of a feather, that had so colleagued themselves to destroy them.

Who this king should be, beshackled their wits and laid them a-dry ground everyone. No ravening fish they would
put in arms, for fear after he had averted their foes and fleshed himself in blood, for interchange of diet, he would raven up them.

Some politic delegatory Scipio, or witty-pated Petito,
⁴⁰⁰
like the heir of Laertes
per aspherisin
,
⁴⁰¹
Ulysses (well-known unto them by his prolixious seawandering and dancing on their topless tottering hills), they would single forth, if it might be, whom they might depose when they list, if he should begin to tyrannize, and such a one as of himself were able to make a sound party if all failed, and bid base to
⁴⁰²
the enemy with his own kindred and followers.