A Dead Man in Deptford (22 page)

- What are logarithms? Kit asked humbly.

- A logarithm, replied Raleigh, is the index of the power
to which a number or base is to be raised to produce the number.

- I am no wiser.

- Nor I, said Sir Walter cheerfully puffing. Let us go
back from logarithms to godarithms, pardon me, or God in
his infinite rhythms and cross-rhythms and counter-rhythms. I propose that we accept as a needful proposition the existence of
a God and ignore what the old schoolmen call the ontological.
Ontological confronts hypothetical. Or may one happily live with
atheism? Our new friend Merlin has pounded London ears with
the atheistical ravings of his Tamburlaine. I am no dramaturge,
but it would seem to me that what the creator aims to create is
no more than himself through an optic.

- You know nothing of optics, Harlot said.

- I cry your mercy, master philosopher. Is Tamburlaine
but the enlargement of Merlin?

- You are truly Merlin? the Earl smiled.

- Merlin or Marlin or Marley or Marlowe. The names of us
common people, my lord, are subject to change in the process
of onomastic circulation. They are fluid stuff. Nobler names are
chiselled on stone or stamped on brass.

- I would as soon be Merlin as Percy. Have you not heard that
an earth tremor at Glastonbury has disclosed a marble slab below
the abbey’s ruins? Post mille exactos a partu virginis annos. This
is the warning of Merlin that the empire of Uther Pendragon,
which our queen now rules, is due for ruin.

- Leave superstition, Harlot said. Are you not ashamed?

- Well, there will be the prospect of ruin, the Earl said,
but I have no doubt that the ambitions of another empire will
suffer. What was that about the necessity of atheism?

- Sir Walter is a fine poet, Kit said, but he will not have it
that a stage poet differs much from your common striker of the
lyre, not that his gift is common, may I be struck down if I say
so -

- And who will strike you down? Raleigh smiled.

- I must create men and women and eke create voices
for them, but they are not my voices.

- If you create them they must of necessity be yours.

- No, Sir Walter. There may be a directive will, Plato’s
charioteer, but there are many horses and they pull diverse
ways. I may dream atheism and solidify that dream in personae
that stalk the stage, but it follows not that I proclaim a damnable
non credo.

- The soul is many rivers, nodded Warner.

- By whom or what damnable? the Earl asked.

- By the fools that exalt themselves by damning. My Tamburlaine has no argument. He puffs God out like his other enemies.
In a sense he believes.

- And do you believe? Raleigh asked bluntly.

- Does belief or disbelief affect God’s substance? I would put
it this way, that there may be an unmoved mover. But this is not
of necessity of intelligible make, no primary model of ourselves.
What is termed God may well be a force as inhuman as the
sun, and as indifferent whether to bless by warming or curse
by burning. It may be a force progressing through change,
whose faculty is built into its essence, and coming through the
transformation of matter into spirit to a final realisation of what
it is. At the end of time, so to say, there may be God realised,
but God is till then no more than a conceptus hominis. We are
in advance of God in possession of the concept. He or it must
wait.

- Well, said Warner, nodding, you are on the right side.
You deny stasis.

- Can you deny it wholly? the Wizard Earl asked Warner.
You work in the chemistry that was called alchemy in search of
solidities that by some miracle of sudden fusion turn into a new
solidity. Things are not wholly continuous. And I would put
it to Mr Merlin here that in denying a God with characteristics
that seem human merely because we are made in his image, we
are like him, he not like us, he denies also divine sanction or its
opposite for human acts. There may be no great Day of judgement, but all that would seem to matter is whether a man
follows good or evil. I put it so, I am not of necessity one that
subscribes to the belief that man is mere substance for moral
adjudication, but must it be assigned solely to human government the business of defining the good, the evil, the right, the
wrong?

- It is so assigned, Kit said. Our rulers decide, then call
on God to justify. So God is dragged into presiding over the
state’s enactments, and God’s eternal foe is conjured to inspire warlocks and witches, Jews and Jesuits and others of the heretical
brood.

- And hath God an eternal foe? Sir Walter asked.

- If God exists he must have, Kit said. For the universe,
though conceived as one thing as the name saith, yet is properly
sustained through the action of opposites. That is, I think, good
Brunonian doctrine. All change is the clash of opposites.

- And opposites, the Earl said, are not chemical or physical
or whatever the term may be, they are moral, would you say
that?

- Morality is to be kept out of it, said Harlot. Morality is
made by men. The moral is the expedient, an empiric matter,
no more.

- So there be two forces opposed and one may follow either?

I see, Warner said, head shaking, that you require the
pursuit of learning to be a matter of ecstatic spasms. The
pursuit is not venery. I know what you are coming to. It
is a matter of the imperfect balance of humours in you, I
say this without intention of offending. You would be happy
to conjure Merlin in Glastonbury or elsewhere and thus gain
great knowledge without the agony of the long pursuit.

- Well, Bruno believes in the ecstasy of the magic of the
sudden revelation. A truth flashes out from no place. By occult
means one may invoke such flashes.

- You mean, Kit said, necromancy?

- Have a care, the Earl said. It is a perilous word and a
perilous mode of enquiry, if indeed it be possible. To call on
the dead is not in our province. And yet Holy Mother Church
counsels praying to the dead. To enquire of the dead what shall
be, to require of the dead a power not given to them that live -
well, we all shake heads. Nonetheless, must not all roads be travelled? Some lead nowhere so, in no ill humour, smiling rather,
though thinly, we must trudge back to engage yet another path.
Is not this (to Warner) your agony of the long pursuit?

- When you and I have played at ruff or trump, Sir Walter
began.

- And you have won invariably by some diabolic means.

- You have taken the cards and used them for conjuration.
Nay, divination, a word that containeth holiness most unholily.
Do you really believe they can foretell, or is it no more than a
game to follow the other game?

- Cards, entrails, stars. Harlot here is a stargazer. Surgentia
sidera dicunt, so Virgil prophesied. They talk to him.

- They are implacably silent, Harlot said gravely. I call
myself an astronomer. Astrology is a noble term for an ignoble
superstition. The stars tell us nothing except that they are there
and very distant.

- But the Queen herself listens when the astrologers speak.

- The Queen is exalted by her blood not by her intellect.
Oh, that is fair, her wit, she is a wise woman though no
witch. Those books must be answered with scorn, this thing
of Richard Harvey’s of terrible threatenings and menaces in the
stars. Harvey, and Hariot turned to Kit with brows abeetle, him
you will know, he was at Cambridge.

- And his brother Gabriel. Asses, good for nothing. Asstro-logy is good for them both.

- The stars, the Earl said, rule us, so we are told. Stars
reign at our nativity and allot us whatever it be they allot us.

- Ass, Warner said, trology. I see. That will do for the
clown or vice in one of your plays. A joke, a jape, we must not
be diverted by such in our graver dealings. So, my dear lord, I
beg you, no talk of the stars or of conjurations or the like. Stern
enquiry will, in a figure not a fact, lead us ad astra.

- I know, the Earl said, and I but play with the other
conjectures. But there is a power in words. Can words work on
matter? They can on spirit. Grinning, he mock-thundered: Sint
mihi dei Acherontis propitii; valeat numen triplex Jehovae; ignei,
aerii, aquatici, terreni spiritus salvete!

- Avete, Sir Walter corrected. There is better stuff to learn
by heart. It is late, let us finish, you will need link boys. Merlin,
throw open the door to let the fumes out. Good. Servants are
never to be trusted, let my untrustworthy ones hear us fall to
our knees and join in a prayer. For prayers, he roared to the
departing blue smoke, are better than all these disputations.

Come, then. Our Father, which art in heaven -

P o O R Kit’s prancer had been prigged, cant of the moon
minions. Brown Peter, grazing near the Scadbury woods, had
got himself filched; some filthy thief had abducted him and he
was not to be seen again. It was the loss of a love, a whinnying
and nuzzling friend that, after munching of his oats, had loved
his treat of honeycake, who, as Kit had dreamed of other love
when mounted, had sometimes in the jogging brought him to
the blissful small death. So there was no more riding to the larger
bliss whereof that had been a comfit or kickshaws of parody, nor,
to tell truth, was the old love at all holding. Tom Walsingham
had laughed from the cottage bed when Kit had slunk back in
misery to announce he was bereft and must march the dusty
London road. And once, driven by remembered transports, he
had borrowed Ned Alleyn’s pampered jade to visit, presenting
himself boldly at the manor house in Frizer’s despite, there to
find Edmund the elder inheriting brother in full possession, Lord
of the, not dead of an imposthume nor poisoned by Frizer but
displaying all the outer symptoma of the French pox, nose two
great holes and such teeth as had not rotted out very black, cheeks
blotched, groaning with stiff joints, voice a muted corncrake call
with Who is the fellow? One that should not be here, master, for
he is a foul bugger. Kit had worn his sword, his own not Poley’s
father’s, but had made for Frizer with his fists. Then the great
door slammed, and was it Tom’s far laughter he soon heard?

Such love between men of age ripe for marriage could not with
ease be sustained, there being no nest to tend, no partitioning
of the labour proper to the bonding of the opposed and complementary sexes God, perhaps in doubtful wisdom, had made,
he to work, she to the distaff. If there had been in Tom
Walsingham’s brain a flame or even a flicker of response to
Kit’s poetic ardency or the cunning of his learning, then there
would have been other linkings and knottings and the joy of discourse in the cool of after love, but there was there a great
idleness, a pouting for praise though nought to be praised, a
too great leaning on Ingram Frizer who had him in a sort of
fawning thrall that Kit could not for all of his taking thought
comprehend.

I was at that time lodged with Tom Kyd, a man lonely and
timid with boy and woman alike, moaning that his new play did
not go well and yet seeking to instruct me in the right fashioning
of what he called a decasyllabon. I had left Ned Alleyn because
he was to marry and also because he had puffed himself up with
fame and gave too many orders. Kit would sometimes come when
Kyd was out to woo me to undressing with I love thee I love thee,
but I was older and shaving once a week and conning the parts
of young men, though this would be a sharp declension from
the glory of Bel-Imperia and Zenocrate. I had come to hate the
prying paws of the small gallants who came to the tiring room,
by wine emboldened, saying What hast under here? - fardingale
or stuffed bodice - and a moment only sweetheart, it is my need.
So in something like gentleness I would thrust Kit away, and he
would shrug and droop but bear small malice. One day I put it
to him:

- Why boys, why men, why never girls nor women?

- There is a divine command, Lucretius calls on Alma
Venus, delight of gods and men, and it may not be questioned.
She commands me the way I must go and ever has, and nothing
may be done.

- And why does she, what is the reason in nature?

- It is not in nature, Alma Venus rides all above her, one
may say it is a rebuke to nature, we will go our own way nor
follow the bestial law of breeding. And thus too we may escape
from our mothers. To bed a woman, which I have never done,
has a strong stench of incest.

- You like not your mother?

- I love her as a son should, but best from afar.

And he would cross the river to the Bankside, to visit the
loud and bloody world where Henslowe ruled, where paid venery could not be free of the consort of bulls bellowing and bears roaring for bass, dogs howling, yapping, screaming for alto and
treble. And now and then there was a crying ape that rode a
dog’s back, and was rent, dog too, by the other dogs. In the
Paris Garden house where Henslowe kept his geese there was a
back room where gander goslings might be tupped for a tester.
Kit’s presence in a manner remained after his departure in the
token of a tobacco reek, for he would pleasure his lungs with the
nymph while he indulged the satyr in his loins. Some, though
not often to his face, spoke of Mr TS, the tobacco sodomite.

It was in the April of the year 1588, for which the stars of
their scryers made monstrous predictions, that Kit heard himself
called in an alehouse, which was as good as a public place, by
the name of atheist. This was grave, this was perilous, this was
worse than an ascription of disbelief in God, for meaning denial
of the authority of England’s holy Church it meant also denial of
the Queen her right to rule it and the realm over which it was
an unsleeping paraclete. But the word was uttered by none in
authority, merely by the ruffians William Bradley and George
Orwell, who sat at their ease at a table in the corner by the door
of the Unicorn.