Morality Play

by Barry Unsworth

  He nodded once again and said to the others, not looking at me, 'He is quick enough and neat in movement and he sees well to both sides and steps clean. The voice is good enough. He will not be another Brendan, but with teaching he might do.'

  This praise, though far from plenteous, gave me pleasure and that is to my shame. But there was something in him, some power of spirit, that made me want to please him. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, it was no more than the intensity of his wish. Men are distinguished by the power of their wanting. What this one wanted became his province and his meal, he governed it and fed on it from the first moment of desire. Besides, with the perversity of our nature, being tested had made me more desire to succeed, though knowing the enterprise to be sinful.

  He looked at them now and smiled a little, a smile that made his face young. 'We took Margaret because Stephen wanted her, and a stray dog for Tobias. Why not a runaway priest who may be of use to us all?'

  He was the leader but he needed still to persuade them. As I was to learn, everything touching their life as players was debated among them on equal terms.

  'He will be known by the tonsure,' Stephen said. The woman was his, she was not for them all as I had first thought. I knew it by the way she kept close and listened to his words. But she had eyes for me too, mocking but not altogether so, and I resolved there and then that if taken into the company I would not return these looks, so avoiding sin. Besides Stephen was dangerous. 'He will be known for a runaway,' he said now, turning his dark face from one to another of them.

  'Yes,' the one in the white robe said, 'he is travelling without licence or he would not seek to join us. He can be held in any parish, and then they would close down our play.'

  'A hat, let him wear a hat,' the old one said. He had been seeming to take no notice of the talk, pushing at the dog in play, much to the brute's delight. 'His thatch will grow soon enough,' he said. 'Not like mine.' He grinned to reveal a paucity of teeth and passed a hand over his scant grey hair and weathered scalp. 'He is a likely man for a player, priest or no,' he said. 'He wants to be of our company, so much is written on his face. And we are in need of a sixth, now that poor Brendan is gone.'

  'In sore need, that is the heart of the matter,' the leader said. 'We have practised the Play of Adam and we begin with that as all have agreed, and we cannot do it without six, and three parts doubling. This man came upon us at the bidding of a thought, as do the Virtues and Vices that contend in a Morality. He came as Brendan died and we will do best to profit from it. That is my word as master-player of this company by our lord's order. And so will we do, with your consent, good people.'

  There was silence among them for a short while, then each in turn nodded as the leader looked at him. The woman he did not look at. When all had signified assent he turned back to me and asked me my name and I gave it, Nicholas Barber, and he gave me his, Martin Ball, and he told me how the others were named. The fair-haired one was known only as Straw, and they called the boy Springer, though whether these were their true names I do not know. The old one was Tobias. The woman said her name was Margaret Cornwall.

  So with a song and a game of catch that children might play I was elected a member of this company of goliards, and so I accepted the election. Had I refused, had I left them in the clearing there, the dead Brendan in the midst with all his sins upon him, I might have now been a sub-deacon again, with all privileges restored, back among my books in the Cathedral library. However that may be, the terrors that come to me still at night I would without doubt have been spared.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It is the weakness of my case that I can seek pardon only by revealing the pass I had come to.

  But this in turn was the result of my own folly and sin. And so I seek indulgence for a fault by revealing faults anterior to it. And there are further faults anterior to those. It is a series to which I see no end, it goes back to my mother's womb.

  First there was the shame, to cause distress to my Bishop, who had given me the tonsure, who had always treated me like a father, because this was not the first time I had left without permission but the third, and always in the Maytime of the year at the stirring of the blood. This time the reason was different but the stirring was the same; I had been sent to act as secretary to Sir Robert de Brian, a noble knight and generous in his benefactions but not of discerning taste in letters and in short a very vile poet who set me to transcribing his voluminous verses and as fast as I copied them he would bring others. All this I endured. But then in addition he set me the task of transcribing Pilato's long-winded version of Homer. The birds were singing with full throats, the hawthorn was breaking into flower. I made up my pack and walked out of his house. It was December when I met the players, the flowers of spring were long withered. Misfortunes had come to me. I had lost the holy relic that I had kept for several years and bought from a clerk newly come from

  Rome, a piece of the sail of St Peter's boat. I lost it at dice. And then, that same morning that I met them, I had lost my good cloak, leaving it behind in my coward's haste. I was chilled to the bone when I came upon them and hungry, and discouraged by these blows of fate. I wanted to be in community again, no longer alone. The community of the players offered shelter to me, though they were poor and half-starved themselves. This was my true reason. The badge of livery was only an argument I used for myself.

  To make my transformation complete I had to wear Brendan's stained and malodorous jerkin and tunic and he had to be dressed in my clerical habit, there being no alternative to this exchange except the outlandish scraps of costume on the cart. It was the woman who undressed Brendan and put my habit on him. The others would not do it, nor would they watch it done, though men for whom travesty was common enough. But I watched, and she was deft and tender with him and there was kindness in her face.

  When it was finished Brendan lay in his priest's garb, a man who in life had been impious and full of profane jest. And there stood I in the garb of a dead player. But now an argument sprang up among us. Martin was for taking the dead man with us on the cart. 'Brendan died unshriven,' he said. 'We must bury him in hallowed ground.'

  'The horse is slow enough as it is,' Stephen said. 'The roads are bad and there is snow coming. We have lost time already, with the broken wheel. We are sent to Durham for Christmas to play there before our lady's cousin. We cannot fail in it and still keep favour. The first day of Christmas is- eight days from this one. By my reckoning we are still five days' journey from Durham. Shall we travel with a dead man for five days?'

  'The priest will ask for money,' Straw said. He looked round at our faces with that strange, febrile eagerness of expression. As I was to learn, he never stayed long in one state of mind but was led always by some vein of fancy all his own, gloomy and exuberant by turns. 'We can bury him in the forest,' he said. 'Here in the dark wood. Brendan will sleep well here.'

  'The dead sleep well enough anywhere,' Margaret said. She looked at me and there was provocation in her look but no malice. 'Our priestling can say the words over him,' she said.

  'Margaret has no voice in this,' Martin said. 'She is not of the company.' He said these words directly to Stephen, whose woman she was, and I heard - and surely the others did also - the tremor in his voice of feeling barely held in check. His right hand was clenched and the knuckles had whitened. 'You would leave him here?' he said. For me, who did not know him then, this passion was strangely sudden and strong, as if not only his plan for Brendan was being questioned but with it some cherished vision of the world.

  No one answered at once, such was the fierceness in him. I think Stephen was making to answer but Martin spoke again, in a voice that had deepened. 'He was like all of us,' he said. 'While he lived he never sat at his own hearth or ate at his own table. Pot and jar he needs no longer, but he will have a home properly made in the earth for him, deep enough, and a roof over his head at last.'

  'Brendan had his habits, he would not have denied it himself, and t
oo much ale was one of them,' Tobias said. 'But drunk or sober he played the Devil's Fool better than anyone you ever saw.'

  'To make his grave what would you use?' There was contempt now in Martin's voice. 'Adam's spade and Eve's rake that are made of wire and lath-wood? The ground is hard with the frosts of these last days. We will labour till dark to make a grave and it will not be deep enough to keep the crows from picking his eyes.'

  'We have knives,' Stephen said.

  He had meant for digging but there was now a terrible pause while Martin looked steadily at him and he returned the look. Then the boy Springer stepped forward before either man could say more. He was always a peace-maker, though the youngest, one of the blessed who will be known for the Children of God. 'Brendan taught me to tumble and stilt and play the woman,' he said. 'We will not leave him in a ditch, for our hope in Christ, good people all.' And to amuse us he gathered the trailing pieces of his shawl round his shoulders and made gestures of a woman who is vain of her long hair.

  'Do you remember how he would caper round on those shanks of his?' Tobias said. 'He would step short as if he could not help but fall.'

  'He never fell save by intention,' Martin said. He had recovered from that passion of feeling, now that he felt the others turning to his will. And he spoke directly to me, including me in these memories of Brendan, and I was grateful, there was a sweetness in his nature that made him attentive to others when not disturbed in feeling or crossed. 'He would wear the cap and bells with ass's ears and a half-mask,' he said. 'Or sometimes a mask with four horns like a Jew's.'

  The one they called Straw laughed suddenly, the same sobbing laugh, and struck his knees with open hands. 'He would steal the Devil's ale and spill it in his lap, being in such haste to drink it,' he said. 'You would see him shuffle with his knees kept close and the ale dripping down while the Devil hunted high and low for his can.'

  'You would just think he had pissed himself,' Springer said tenderly.

  'Do you mind how he would comfort the Devil with his song?' Stephen said. It was to Martin that he spoke and I saw it was the way his pride had found of making peace. 'He made his own songs,' he said. 'He made the words himself. When the Devil was sad because Eve would not take the apple at first, Brendan sang a song of his own to lighten the Devil's mood. "Were the World All Mine", that was the song.'

  Springer took up his reed pipe and played the air and all joined in the song for a verse, singing together there and looking at one another's faces as they sang, in the cold weather among the bare trees:

  'If the world belonged to me I would make a broad way From the hills to the sea For Fools to ride ...'

  Thus they mourned Brendan with his own song and were again in harmony one with another. I see them again now, their faces as they sang, that gleam of light touching the dead oak leaves, Straw's white angel-robe, the round copper tray in the back of the cart. But what chiefly lives in my mind is the strangeness of our nature, that men should come close to violent quarrel over the disposing of one poor husk of flesh in a time of plague and blood like ours, when every day is a Feast Day for Death, when we have seen the dead piled in the streets without distinction, rotting in carts, heaped together in common pits for graves. That is some years past, but there is again an outbreak in the north here, a stronger strain, even winter does not halt it. The fields lie unfilled, many die of famine, they fall and in haste they are shovelled away in obscure corners. Bands of brigands infest the countryside, peasants in flight from their dues of labour, soldiers returning from these endless wars with France, men who have known nothing but murder from earliest life. In parishes you will find less than half the folk left alive. And few will know clearly where those they loved have been laid. Yet there was this care over one poor player.

  Little more was said of him either then or later. They had sung his epitaph. Nor was there any further argument about taking him on the cart. Then and there he was lifted up. He was laid down among the masks and costumes with a coil of rope for his pillow, and covered with pieces of scarlet cloth that they carried to make a curtain at the back of the stage. After this we set off again on our way. And so I began my life as a player.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In the days that followed Brendan stayed on the cart and we placed over him boards and sackcloth to keep him from rats in the yards of the poor wayside inns where we stayed, sleeping sometimes on straw in the outbuildings of the yards, sometimes all together on pallets in the wretched rooms of hovels that claimed to be inns. Martin paid all scores from the common purse. He kept the money-belt always on him and his dagger within reach. The purse was thin and there was the cost of Brendan's burial to think of. None of the players had money left except for Tobias, who was thrifty; the others had spent their share of the division. In these days we passed through no place peopled enough to make a performance worthwhile; villages were reduced to hamlets by pillage and plague, houses stood empty and half-ruined, dust of rubble was thick in the streets. The snow held off but the weather was cold, keeping Brendan's body from corruption.

  During all this time Martin was tireless in teaching me. He spoke to me as we went along. All walked usually behind the cart, taking it in turn to lead the horse. He told me of the qualities a player needs, quick wits, easy movement, a ready tongue for parts that are not fully written. He showed me the thirty hand-movements that all must learn and made me practise them, reproving me always for my clumsiness, the stiffness of my wrists and shoulders. Making these signs must be as natural and easy as any normal habitual motion of the limbs or the head. Over and over again he made me do them until my movements were fluent enough and the angle of the hands and position of the fingers as they should be. He was as relentless in this schooling as in all else. The slightest praise from him had to be earned doubly over. He was proud of his art and passionate in its defence - everything with him was passionate. His father before him had been a player and had brought him up to it.

  No opportunity for my instruction was let pass. In the intervals of our travelling he would put me to practise, when we paused at midday to eat our scraps of cheese and rye bread and pig's-blood sausage and drink our thin ale, in the poor lodgings we found at night, and in spite of all weariness - Martin shed weariness in the eagerness of his teaching. He gave me the Play of Adam to con over, the pages tattered and the hand poor - I vowed to make a fair copy when time allowed it.

  All of them helped me, each in his different way. And each, in doing so, revealed something of himself to me. Straw was a natural mime and very gifted in it. He could be man or woman, young or old, without the need for any speech. He had been travelling alone until seen by Martin at a fair and taken into the company. He was a strange, excitable fellow, very changeable in his mood, with bouts of staring gloom. Once during these days he fell and writhed his body on the ground and Springer held him and wiped his mouth till he came to himself again. He did three times for me the mime of one who finds he has been robbed, showing me the importance of head movement and clear gesture and the frozen moment of the mime when all the meaning is expressed in stillness.

  Springer gave his age as fifteen but he was not sure of it. He did women's parts. He could sing high and his face was like rubber, he could pull it any way and twist his neck like a goose, so that you laughed to see it however many times it was done. He was sweet in nature and fearful and without malice. He and Straw were close and kept much together. He came from a family of jongleurs - his father had been an acrobat who had abandoned him when he was still a child. He showed me cartwheels and somersaults at the roadside as we went. He could arch his back like a hoop, with only heels and head touching the ground, and from this position spring forward like a whip and come upright. This I could not hope to emulate, but tumbling I practised when I could. I am nimble and light of foot and achieved some skill in it, with Straw and Tobias holding a rope at the height I had to clear.

  It did not seem to me that Stephen had such skill in playing as these two. He was no
t so concerned in it as they. But he was tall and deep-voiced and had a memory for his lines. He did parts requiring dignity and state, God the Father, King Herod in rage, the Archangel Michael. He had been an archer for some years, in the pay of the Sandville family, Earls of Nottingham - the same that owned this company of players. He had raided for them and fought for them first against Sir Richard Damory and after against the Earl of March. He was captured in a skirmish by the Earl of March's men and they severed his right thumb at the first joint, disabling him forever as a bowman and forcing him to change trade. This had been done at the lord's behest; nevertheless, Stephen was an admirer of the aristocracy and proud of his part in these bloody disorders. 'I know men who had their eyes put out,' he said. 'I was lucky.' He carried a bronze medallion of St Sebastian, patron saint of archers, in a pouch at his belt. It was a great mark of friendship on his part when on the third day he showed this medallion to me, also his mutilated thumb.

  Margaret was with us for his sake. They quarrelled, though less in these days, I was told, as they had not money enough to get drunk on. She had played the whore in her time and made no great secret of it. She was harsh-tongued and gentle-handed. She had no part in the playing and very little in the counsels we took among us. She earned her place by washing and mending for all and cooking when there was something for the pot. This last often depended on the sixth person, Tobias, who played Mankind and doubled the small parts and did attendant demons. He also could play the drum and the bagpipes. He took always a practical view of things and was listened to on account of this. He was our handyman, seeing to the horse, keeping the cart in repair as best he could, making wire snares for rabbits and bringing down a quail or a partridge sometimes with his sling. He was patiently trying to teach the dog to flush out game birds but so far without any success; the brute was full of good-will but brainless. Tobias taught me how to fall without doing hurt to myself. He never spoke about the past.