Morality Play (16 page)

And so we fell to talking of how it might be done. There was little enough time, either for talking or practising. It was decided to begin in the same form as before and to go in the same manner to the point where the woman, still played by Straw, changed to her demon-mask. At that moment, when the woman's guilt seemed beyond doubting, Truth would intervene, halt the proceedings and question the players, who would answer as it came to mind, their answers pointing towards the Benedictine. In a third scene, with Truth still in attendance, the true story would be played in mime by Martin as the Monk and Springer as Thomas Wells. Tobias and myself would have the same parts as before. This left no one but Stephen to play Truth and there were some doubts on this score among us, not because he was drunk — it seemed that he often played his usual roles when drunk, God the Father, the King of Persia, the Pope, his air of majesty unimpaired, even enhanced. And he could keep his memory of the lines. But his wits were not thought to be quick enough, whether drunk or sober, for exchanges of speech that were not prepared, and there was a fear he might flounder. However, he was loudly confident of his ability and there was no other way that anyone could see, Tobias not having the stature for it.

'We will do what we can,' Martin said. 'Tomorrow we shall be better in our parts, we shall learn from our -'

'We will not be here tomorrow.' Stephen's voice was loud in that confined place. 'By this time tomorrow we will be well on our way to Durham.'

'It is too dangerous,' Tobias said. 'The Lord's confessor, the Lord's steward ... if it was not the girl who killed him, the one who did it is out there still. The feeling grows on me that he is protected ...' He looked directly at Martin and again there was something of pity in his look. 'We never set out to save the girl, it is you who have taken this idea into your head.'

'Yes, it is you, Martin.' Straw, as usual, was swept by the tide of feeling among us. 'You are always heedless of us when there is something you want,' he said. 'We are in danger here. A knife through the hamstring,
tad
and our day is over. I have known it done once by a lord who was jealous of another's players.'

'We cannot save the girl,' I said. 'How could we? This Justice that is come to town, perhaps he intends to inquire into the matter.'

'What is it to him?' In the passion of being opposed, all colour had gone from Martin's face. 'What does he care for poor folk?' 'It is her best hope nevertheless.'

Springer, the peacemaker, spoke next and he spoke for us all. 'We want to leave this town,' he said gently to Martin. 'We never wanted to come here, it was only for Brendan, and then we spent our money. After tonight we will have money aplenty, more than ever we had together at one time. It is enough, Martin. We are afraid. Every thread draws us deeper into this devil's web.' For a moment his clear voice shook a little. 'We are afraid,' he repeated. 'I would be for leaving tonight after the play, if it were not for the dark and the snow.'

'Yes, then we would not need to pay that arse-faced innkeeper for the barn again,' Stephen said.

And so in the end it was decided among us, with all voting save Martin: we would leave the town as soon as the play was over, travel by torchlight until we came to the cover of woodland, then wait as best we could for the morning light. Martin too had to agree, though there was wretchedness on his face. Whether he would have kept to it is something we were never to learn.

CHAPTER TWELVE

We had decided for the inn-yard again, because everything was there already and so it saved time. Stephen wentto the gate to shout the True Play of Thomas Wells, shortly to begin. And we made ready to do it.

This time we set the curtain-posts farther apart to make a greater space for changing and we made it in the middle instead of the corner, with torches set on either side. We would enter into view from the sides so that the people would not be aware of a new player till he came forward into the light. Martin marked the playing-space with pegs and a rope, so that none of the people would come on to the ground needed for the players.

All this was done by Martin's invention and design. He set himself to prepare the play with a passion of earnestness greater than I had ever seen in him. He seemed recovered now from his defeat in the voting; and in this seeming recovery, had we but known it, there was mortal danger to us all. That the play and the life outside it were not clearly distinguished in his mind, this we knew; that he hoped still to save the girl we knew too, though we thought it a hope forlorn. But none of us knew how far he would go to save her, what was in his mind to say and do that night, not even those who had been with him longest and knew the extremes of his nature.

I had again the part of Good Counsel in this new play. As before, I had to give my sermon to the boy setting out and I was dressed and ready in my priest's habit and black hat. Peeping through the opening where the curtains joined, I watched the people enter by the gate. Stephen was still shouting the play and Margaret was taking the money, with the innkeeper's man beside her watching everything her hands did. It was useful in some respects to have this fellow, as he knew those who had business there and those who merely said so in order to avoid paying. Also, he barred known troublemakers and the obviously drunken, which Margaret might not have been so well able to do.

The people came in without rowdiness. There was an air of expectation, but it was not altogether the privileged expectation of spectators. It was as though they were gathering for a meeting in which each was expected to play his part.

'They are too quiet,' Straw said. He was dressed already in the bonnet and padded gown of the boy's mother. Springer stood beside him in the drab brown of Thomas Wells. 'They are coming in as if it were church,' he said.

'Stephen should be here now,' I said, 'if he is to be in time for his scene in the tavern.'

We were all nervous, though showing it in different ways. Martin came out to say the Prologue. He was in his usual clothes still and without a mask. He had made up new lines for this, though without saying to us what they were. Perhaps it was only now, with the sound of them filling the yard, that I realized fully what we were embarked on.

'Gentles, we have pondered further. This grim and grievous deed of murder Which proven seemed to one and all And pointed clear to woman's fall...'

But there was no time now for second thoughts. There was no time for anything but the playing. We began in the same way as before, with the entrusting of the money and the boy's setting forth. However, Good Counsel had more to do now, my scene of exhortation took up more time, and this was at Martin's direction. 'They will be more bound to the play if they are made to wait,' he said, 'now that the ending is thrown into doubt.'

So Tobias, in a demon's mask and carrying a stick with an inflated pig's bladder fastened to the end of it, was also now a part of this scene. Thomas Wells would listen and nod and appear to be persuaded by my words. But then the demon would steal upon me and buffet me with the bladder and I would be distracted into pursuit of the demon and meanwhile the woman would do her mime of pleasures and Thomas Wells would take steps towards her until stayed by some further admonition from me. This made a pattern of movement and gesture very effective and it provoked laughter, which is a welcome thing as saving from silence, but also frightening when there are many laughing together - it is then a sea with strange tides. Players swim in the rise and fall of it and if they lose the mastery they drown.

This laughter sounded near and far, like a shell held to the ear. I moved before the people and tried to do my part. I felt no great ease or confidence in my movements, there had been too little time for practising beforehand and the timing of things was not easy; the words of the sermon, which I spoke as they came to mind, the gesture of startlement at the touch of the bladder, the breaking off, the turning, the loose-wristed gesture of shooing away, the blundering pursuit. All this had to be done slowly so as to give Straw time for his miming of pleasures. 'You must do it as if wearing a loose blindfold,' Martin had said to me. 'You can see, but not quite clearly. Then you will have an uncertain, groping kind of movement that will slow you and give Straw the time he needs. Also, your blundering will give the demon more seeming of nimbleness.'

So I tried to do it in this way. Pretending dimness of sight gave me a distance from the people and I was glad of it, being naked-faced and so seen fully by them. It was not, to speak truly, so much of a pretence: my sight was reduced to a shorter compass; it ended where our shadows ended, as they moved before us; it did not extend to the faces of the people. I turned from the moving shadows to the fluttering light of the torches on the wall, I felt the buffets of the demon, I followed in clumsy pursuit, recovered myself, spoke on a theme from Matthew the Evangelist.

'Thomas Wells, keep you the strait way that leads to salvation, turn not aside. They are voices of Satan that tempt you with soft words and promise of delight. Oh sinful soul, keep you the narrow way ...'

Voices came from the people, one more persistent than the others, shouting advice to me. Always there are those who think it a great joke to counsel Good Counsel obscenely. 'Wrest his stick from him, sir priest, and push it up his arse,' this fool shouted, and some laughed and some made sounds to hush him. He was taking attention from the play and this can lead to trouble when people have paid to see it.

Thomas Wells was silent and motionless in the centre of the space. I gathered myself to speak again, this time on a theme from Job,
The life of man upon earth is a warfare.
But then Straw came forward and swayed before the people in his dance of delights and from behind the sun-mask of the Serpent he uttered the unearthly sounds of the dumb woman that he had practised with Martin, and there fell such a silence over the yard that you could hear the scrape of a shoe on the stones. Facing the people still, Straw tilted his head in the attitude of question and held up his hands, palms outward and fingers held apart. For perhaps ten seconds he remained thus, a long time for a player to hold still. Then from behind the smiling mask came the sounds again and they were drawn out now and wailing in tone so that they seemed like a lamentation of all the dumb things in the world. Then she backed away, and Thomas Wells took his tranced steps towards her, raising his knees in the manner of a dream-walker, but now it was a sorrowing dream, not lustful. I advanced to make the gesture of sorrowful resignation and no voices came from the people at all.

And so we proceeded until that moment when the woman crouches close behind the backs of Avaritia and Pieta and changes masks and shows herself to the people in the horned mask of murder and makes the beast-sign with hooked fingers. The people were still hissing at her when Stephen came forward. He made an imposing figure as he paced between the lights in his white robe and gold crown. He had wanted at first to wear his golden mask but this had seemed wrong to us as it belongs to the part of God the Father. So instead he had painted his face with a thin wash of silver. In his right hand he carried a stave of peeled willow as long as himself. What none of us knew at the time, except Margaret, was that Stephen had drunk more ale while shouting the play and was now quite clouded in his mind.

The first signs of it came soon. He was to have kept to his pacing, with the eyes of the people upon him, while the woman and Avaritia moved out of the light and Tobias came to exchange the mask and cloak of Pieta for the hood of Mankind and emerge again ready to be questioned. But Stephen did not continue long enough for this last to be done, coming to a sudden halt in the centre of the space and raising his stave to command attention, so that Tobias had to wait with me inside the curtain until he saw a good moment to come out. However, Stephen's memory for the lines still held and he began without faltering:

'I am Truth as all men can see.

With speed I have come to thee,

Sent by God, out of His majesty ...'

There was now, however, a disconcerting pause. Not seeing anyone to whom he could put his questions, Stephen made a vague gesture of summons with his stave. 'Where is Mankind?' he said, and this was an unwise question, inviting ribald replies. However, none came, so great now was the attention of the people. 'Some questions I must put to him,' Stephen said, still gesturing.

Tobias came quickly forward, his face shadowed by the hood: 'My name is Mankind, I am made of a body and a soul...'

With his left hand Stephen made the gesture of accosting. 'Goodman, know me for Truth,' he said. 'Tell us now, where was the boy killed and where found? Speak without fear or favour. Truth is your armour and your stay.'

'By the roadside, I hear tell.'

There was another pause. Stephen nodded solemnly and raised his stave. It was clear to us that he had lost the thread of the discourse, but fortunately not yet so to the people, who took his silence for majesty. Tobias helped him: 'Between the killing and the finding came the dark of night...'

Stephen drew himself up. He had remembered:

'Goodman, fear not, tell us where Thomas Wells lay between the killing and the finding.'

Mankind now moved forward and spoke directly to the people, making at the same time the gesture which accompanies statements of the obvious, palms held up as if testing for rain then moved sharply outwards from the body: 'Why, good friends, that is no hard question, he lay by the road.'

Thomas Wells himself now spoke for the first time and he too addressed his words to the people, speaking, as agreed beforehand among us, in his own voice and without any gestures or inflections of rhetoric:

'Good people, it cannot be so.

I must have lain elsewhere.

If I had lain there all night there would have been frost on me,

but there was none. This we know from the man who found me.'

There were voices from somewhere at the back of the yard and then a man called out: 'Jack Flint is here. He is a quiet man and he wants me to speak for him. He wants me to say it is true.'