Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories

by Leon Garfield

  But in another part of the forest, two travellers were not so fortunate. They had journeyed far, and one, the elder, was almost at his end. “Dear master, I can go no further,” gasped old Adam, his piled-up years at last overcoming his willing spirit. “O I die for food. Here lie I down,” he sighed, sinking to the ground, “and measure out my grave. Farewell, kind master.”

  “Why, how now, Adam?” cried Orlando, rushing back to help the old man, “no greater heart in thee?” Desperately he chafed the old man’s freezing hands and smoothed his brow. He gathered moss and leaves to make a pillow for his head, and laid his coat over the old man to keep him warm. “Live a little; comfort a little!” he pleaded; and hoping that the habit of long service would make the old servant obey, he sternly bade him keep death away while he, Orlando, went in search of food. “Thou shalt not die for lack of a dinner,” he promised, and, drawing his sword, set off into the forest. “Cheerly, good Adam!” he called back encouragingly, but could not subdue the dread in his heart that when he returned, old Adam would no longer be alive.

  As he crept among the darkening trees, he paused from time to time to listen for a rustling, or the crackling of a twig, that would betray some wild creature that would serve them for food. But the forest was as quiet as a grave. Then, suddenly, he heard, very faintly, a strange sound. He strained his ears. It was a voice, singing! With beating heart, he hastened towards it . . .

  “Under the greenwood tree

  Who loves to lie with me . . .”

  It was a young man’s voice, full of easy confidence, and seemed to be moving from place to place. Eagerly Orlando followed it, sometimes mistaking the echo for the substance, but ever drawing nearer . . .

  “Come hither, come hither, come hither,” tempted the wandering voice,

  “Here shall he see

  No enemy

  But winter and rough weather

  Come hither, come hither . . .”

  Stumbling over roots, scratched and torn by spiteful branches, Orlando pursued the song. Suddenly, it ceased. Lanterns were gleaming among the trees, and there was a murmur of voices. Orlando stopped, amazed.

  In a golden clearing, like a little summer’s day, a company of outlaws were gathered together; and in their midst were spread enough good things to eat to save a dozen dying men! With a wildly desperate cry, Orlando rushed into the clearing, fiercely brandishing his sword. “Forbear, and eat no more!”

  The outlaws turned in astonishment. “Why, I have eat none yet,” protested one, a long-faced melancholy fellow, pointing to his empty plate. Then another, who, from the respect accorded him, seemed to be the leader of the band, reproached Orlando for his show of needless force. “What would you have?” he asked courteously.

  “I almost die for food,” answered Orlando; to which the other replied: “Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table.”

  Strange forest! where fury was answered by gentleness, and outlaws spoke with the tongues of kindness! Ashamed, Orlando laid his sword aside. “There is an old poor man,” he told them, “who after me hath many a weary step limped in pure love. Till he be first sufficed I will not touch a bit.”

  “Go find him out,” said the leader kindly, “and we will nothing waste till you return.”

  “I thank ye!” cried Orlando, weeping with gratitude, and hastened back to his old servant, praying with all his heart that he would not be too late.

  “Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy,” observed the Duke when the wild young man had gone; for this leader of the outlaw band was indeed the banished Duke, and the outlaws gathered round him were the young men who had flocked to join him and live the greenwood life. “This wide and universal theatre,” continued the philosophical Duke, “presents more woeful pageants than the scene wherein we play in.”

  “All the world’s a stage,” instantly observed the melancholy one, whose name was Jacques, “and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.” He paused and, picking up his empty plate, polished it on his sleeve till it shone like a mirror, and studied his reflection. Then, suiting his expression to his words, he expounded the seven ages of man, from, “the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms” and continuing on his relentless journey to the grave, concluding with, “second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

  But no sooner had his bleak and dreadful vision of man’s old age been presented, than, in an instant it was overthrown! Orlando returned, bearing old Adam on his back. The good old man had obeyed his young master, and remained alive! Here was the visible evidence of age not useless, but wonderfully enriched by courage, loyalty and love! “Welcome!” cried the Duke, mightily glad to see it. “Set down your venerable burden and let him feed!”

  At once, willing hands assisted the old man to a place at the feast, and helped him to food; and, while his guests were satisfying their hunger, the Duke called for music, and the singer who had been heard in the forest, obliged the company with another song.

  “Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

  Thou art not so unkind

  As man’s ingratitude,”

  he sang, while the courtiers in the forest sighed and nodded: it was a truth they had learned only too well.

  “Then heigh-ho! the holly!

  This life is most jolly!”

  and all were agreed.

  Even as Orlando found gentleness in the savage forest, so his brother Oliver found savagery in the gentle court. The maddened Duke Frederick, still seeking his daughter, had learned that Orlando had also fled. “Find out thy brother!” he shouted at the fearful Oliver. “Bring him dead or living within this twelvemonth!” and, with bloodshot eye and direst threats, despatched him to obey or lose all that he possessed. So Oliver, like many another bewildered by sudden adversity, turned his desperate steps towards the Forest of Arden . . .

  A strange malady had begun to afflict the trees of the forest. It first appeared as Touchstone and the good countryman Corin were walking together, near to the cottage that Celia and Rosalind had newly bought. “Here comes young Master Ganymede,” said Corin, interrupting the jester’s unending flow of wit as Rosalind, still in her man’s attire, came winding slowly among the trees. She was deep in the study of a paper, and, unaware of her audience, was reading aloud:

  “From the East to western Ind,

  No jewel is like Rosalind . . .”

  “This is the very false gallop of verses!” cried Touchstone, unable to endure such poor stuff. “Why do you infect yourself with them?”

  “Peace, you dull fool!” cried Rosalind, blushing to have been overheard reciting her own praises. “I found them on a tree.”

  “Truly, the tree yields bad fruit!” said the jester, to which Rosalind returned as good as she got, and the battle of wits would have continued had not another deep reader appeared among the trees. It was Celia, likewise with her nose in a paper that declared still more wonders of Rosalind.

  “O most gentle Jupiter!” protested Rosalind (when it was plain there was no more to come), “what tedious homily of love . . .”

  Startled, Celia turned, to discover an audience crowding at her heels. She was no better pleased than Rosalind at being overheard reciting, not her own praises, but another’s. Sharply, she dismissed the jester and the countryman. Then she turned to Rosalind and held out the paper. “Didst thou hear these verses?” Humbly Rosalind confessed she had, but hastened to add that she did not think highly of them. Celia gazed at her cousin thoughtfully; and asked if she had not wondered how it had come about that half the trees in the forest had been stricken by the same poetic malady? Again, Rosalind confessed it, and held out her own paper in evidence. Celia ignored it, and inquired if Rosalind knew who had hung up her name so far and wide?

  “Is it a man?” ventured Rosalind, striving to keep a mounting excitement out of her voice.

  Celia
nodded. “And a chain,” she said, striving to keep a bubbling up of laughter out of hers, “that you once wore, about his neck. Change you colour?”

  A needless question. At once Rosalind began to plague Celia for more particulars, which Celia laughingly withheld, like sweets from a child, until, having been pursued round trees and bushes by her wildly importuning cousin, she gave up and confessed that the poet had been none other than the young man who had wrestled so well: Orlando! But far from contenting her, the news drove Rosalind at first into a frantic dismay that Orlando should see her in man’s attire and not at her best, and then into another tempest of questioning that was only stopped when Celia cried: “Soft! comes he not here?”

  Rosalind’s eyes grew huge. “ ’Tis he!” she whispered, and jerked Celia into concealment as her beloved approached.

  He was not alone. He was walking with a long-faced melancholy fellow, a wretch who was daring to complain that Orlando’s love-songs were spoiling the trees. But Orlando defended his verses with spirit. “Rosalind is your love’s name?” the wretch inquired; and, on receiving confirmation, most impertinently declared, “I do not like her name!”

  To which Orlando justly replied, “There was no thought of pleasing you when she was christened!” The fellow sniffed and asked, “What stature is she of?”

  “Just as high as my heart!” came back the answer, which, in Rosalind’s opinion, could not have been bettered by any man. At length, they parted with expressions of mutual disdain, and Orlando was left alone.

  “I will speak to him like a saucy lackey!” determined Rosalind; and, before Celia could stop her, she had strutted out with a swagger and a manly frown. Uneasily, Celia followed. She could not believe the young man would fail to recognize his Rosalind, no matter what she wore. But love proved blind, not only to the loved one’s faults, but to her virtues as well! True, once or twice he looked curiously at ‘Master Ganymede’, as if a recollection was stirring; but it was plain he never saw, in the impudently posturing youth before him, the gently bred Princess of the court.

  “I pray you, what is’t o’clock?” she began; and thereafter Celia was lost in wonderment as she found herself audience to the strangest courtship in the world! Lacking the assistance of a gorgeous gown, rich golden hair and speaking eyes, Rosalind had only her wit with which to dazzle her lover, to entangle and bewitch him with a thousand whirling words. “Love is merely a madness,” she was saying, having at last, like a skilful shepherd, guided her unruly flock of words to that very subject; “yet I profess curing it by counsel.”

  “I would not be cured, youth,” sighed Orlando; upon which, Rosalind, concealing her joy, insisted that her remedy at least be tried. Then, sailing so near to the wind of discovery that Celia held her breath, she proposed that Orlando call her Rosalind and come to court her every day, when she would be so wild, so fantastical, so changeable and contrary in her moods, that the very name of Rosalind would become a torment rather than a delight. “And this way I will take it upon me,” she promised, “to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep’s heart that there shall not be one spot of love in’t!” Orlando smiled at the youth’s confidence, but assured him that the remedy would have no success. But Rosalind insisted, and Orlando, with a laugh, gave in. “With all my heart, good youth!”

  “Nay,” cried Rosalind, raising her hand in stern rebuke, “you must call me Rosalind!” and, extending a brotherly arm to Celia, stalked away before solemnity was blown to the winds.

  Love lay upon the forest like a blight. The very trees, as if they had sucked in sugar from the verses that had been hung upon them, seemed to twine together in gnarly embraces; and Jacques, who had just parted from one love-sick fool, now found himself witness to a pair of them, like cock and hen, crowing in a glade. One was a fool by nature, the other, a fool by profession.

  Touchstone, wearied of country life, and finding nothing to aim his wit at, save a few sagely nodding bushes and a philosophical sheep or two, had decided to take unto himself a wife. It seemed to be in the fashion, and he was nothing if not fashionable. He had chosen, for this high office, one Audrey, a country wench, thick of speech and stinking like a goat. The union suited him very well. As male and female, they agreed as readily as the beasts of the field; and as courtier and foul slut, they were worlds apart. In this manner, he found satisfaction both as a man and as a gentleman: for Audrey never understood a word he said and, accordingly, held him in high respect. But yet there were moments when he could not help having his doubts . . .

  “Truly,” he sighed, gazing at Audrey, whose mouth stood open, like a kitchen door, blasting forth stale cabbage and onions, “I would the gods had made thee poetical.”

  “I do not know what ‘poetical’ is,” pleaded Audrey, humbled by the wondrous mystery of language. “Is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing?”

  “No, truly, for the truest poetry is the most feigning,” returned Touchstone; then, perceiving that his pearls had been cast away, sadly shook his head. “But be it as it may be,” he sighed, having weighed Audrey against a lonely life, which was something against nothing, “I will marry thee.” And Audrey laughed and clapped her hands. “Well, the gods give us joy!” she cried.

  Orlando had not come. The morning sun, bursting through the forest in misty beams and sudden glares, made a thousand flickering phantoms of him; but none proved real, and Rosalind, disgracing her man’s attire, wept. Celia, who knew nothing of the pangs of true love, tried to comfort her cousin by abusing Orlando for lack of constancy—

  “Nay, certainly, there is no truth in him,” she declared.

  “Not true in love?” wailed Rosalind.

  “Yes, when he is in,” said Celia; “but I think he is not in.”

  “But you heard him swear downright he was!”

  “ ‘Was’ is not ‘is’,” pointed out Celia, and would have said a great deal more, had not their shepherd, old Corin, interrupted the argument.

  He came in haste, his weathered face all aglow. With twinkling merriment, he told his mistress and his master of an entertainment nearby in the forest that was well worth their attendance. The young shepherd, who, as they remembered, was so in love that he was almost dying of it, was even now pleading his cause before his Phebe! “Go hence a little,” he urged, “and I shall conduct you . . .”

  “O! come,” cried Rosalind eagerly: “the sight of lovers feedeth those in love!” and the cousins followed after the beckoning old countryman.

  The lovers were in a clearing, like a tragical picture framed in tangled hawthorn and sharp briar. The young shepherd, whose name was Silvius, was on his knees before his Phebe, who sat on a tree-stump, a rustic queen upon a rustic throne. “Sweet Phebe, do not scorn me!” he pleaded; while she, proud impossible she, her black eyes sparking like coals in a grate, dealt him blow after blow of sovereign disdain.

  At length, Rosalind could endure her unkindness and arrogance no longer. “Who might be your mother,” she cried, striding into the clearing and confronting the lofty shepherdess, “that you insult, exult, and all at once, over the wretched?”

  The wretched fell over backwards, and the rustic queen gaped in amazement at the sudden youth whose eyes out-flashed her own. Quite dazzled, she sat in silence as he indignantly rebuked her for her pride. Nor was Silvius spared. “You foolish shepherd,” the youth declared, more in pity than in anger, “wherefore do you follow her, like foggy South puffing with wind and rain? You are a thousand times a properer man than she a woman; ’tis such fools as you that make the world full of ill-favoured children; ’tis not her glass, but you that flatters her!” Then he turned again on Phebe, and, pointing an accusing finger, cried: “But, mistress, know yourself. Down on your knees, and thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love; for I must tell you friendly in your ear—” He beckoned, and she most willingly left her throne and inclined her head to the youth’s red lips as he softly advised, “Sell when you can; you are not for all markets. Cry the man
mercy; love him; take his offer!” Then, with a last injunction of Silvius to take his Phebe to himself, the youth and his two companions departed from the glade.

  Long after the youth had gone, Phebe sat gazing after him. No youth had ever spoken to her so sternly before; and she was full of bewilderment and sighs. She looked at Silvius, who loved her dearly, and she sighed again. Then she thought of the youth, and her sighs came fast as a blacksmith’s bellows. “I’ll write to him a very taunting letter,” she said thoughtfully, “and thou shalt bear it; wilt thou, Silvius?” she asked, with such a smile at her lover that he, feeling he had been paid in better than gold, could deny her nothing. “I will be bitter with him,” she said; and Silvius believed her!

  Marching through the forest, with a festive sprig of holly in his cap and whistling an air that was all the fashion with the banished Duke and his companions, Orlando came at last to where the youth and his sister dwelt. “Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind,” he announced to his pretended love, with a flourish of his cap and a gallant bow; only to be greeted by a frown, severely folded arms and a tapping of the foot. He was late. “My fair Rosalind,” he protested, in answer to her reproaches, “I come within an hour of my promise!”

  “Break an hour’s promise in love!” cried she; and he, contrite as a crocodile, hung his head and pleaded, “Pardon me, dear Rosalind!” She thought about it; and pardoned him. She was no more able to keep sullen than a child could keep still in church. “Come, woo me, woo me,” she commanded, with a royal clap of her hands; “for now I am in a holiday humour, and like enough to consent!” and so once again Celia found herself witness to this strangest of strange courtships in which pretended love hid honest love, and false words were true.