Morality Play

by Barry Unsworth

  'It has no meaning but a death,' I said again, though knowing that the argument was lost. 'There has not been time enough for God's meaning to be known.'

  'Men can give meanings to things,' Tobias said. 'That is no sin, because our meanings are only for the time, they can be changed.'

  Yes, it was Tobias, shrewd and equable, the player of Mankind, who was the first to speak in Martin's favour, though he had been at first opposed. The others followed.

  'God cannot wish us to starve while we wait for Him to give us the meaning,' poor Springer said - he was well acquainted with hunger.

  'We will die by the roadside before we come to God's meaning,' Straw said. He made the sign of the Reaper, a long sweeping gesture from right to left with the palm of the hand held upward. 'Death does not wait for meanings,' he said. 'Sword or rope or plague, it is all one to him.'

  Stephen leaned forward and the flame of the fire lit up his darkly frowning face. 'It is not so much the meaning,' he said.

  'There is a child, a woman, a monk ...' He paused, struggling to find words. 'It is only one thing,' he said at last. 'It is particular. There are no Figures in it.'

  'It can be made a type for all,' Martin said. 'Can you not see it? We all have played the Morality, when we call the one who strays from the path Everyman or Mankind or the King of Life. And the Virtues and the Vices battle for his soul. So we make him a Figure for all. But it is the same battle in each separate soul, in ours and in that of the woman who robbed Thomas Wells and killed him. It is a very old form of play and the one that will endure longest.'

  He was using the argument of particular to general, which is admissible in logic but never in moral discourse. However, what he said about the form was true. For a thousand years, ever since the Psychomachia of Prudentius, there has been this story of the Battle for the Soul.

  'We can do it as a Morality Play,' he said.

  Springer blew on his fingers, I think more from habit than anything, we were not so cold there near the fire. 'But we have no words for it,' he said. 'There are some speeches of the angels and demons that might serve, but I do not remember them well, I could not do it without prompting.'

  'Nor I,' Straw said. 'And there will be little time for learning.'

  'We can do it in dumb-show and say lines as we think them, it need not be verse,' Martin said. 'We have done such things before. It will be no more than a half-hour of playing, perhaps not so much.' He spoke confidently now, sensing the battle won. 'After it we will do the Nativity,' he said. 'The two will go excellently well together, a child killed for avarice, a child born to redeem our sins. Think of the money we will take, good people, only think of that. We will fill the yard.'

  He was looking to us for agreement. No one gainsaid him, not even I, but I cast down my eyes because I knew this enterprise was ungodly. We would be usurping the bodies of living people, our profit would come from the shedding of a child's blood.

  'We will call it the Play of Thomas Wells,' Martin said. There was a pause, then he spoke again but in a voice quite changed: 'Come,' he said, 'warm yourself, good soul.'

  I looked up to see to whom he was speaking. In the air that quivered above the brazier the snowflakes rippled and blurred. They seemed not to fall but to waver in this trembling air and make a shimmering screen. And in this shimmer, as if the flakes clung together and clotted there, was a white moonface, smiling open-mouthed. I saw the mouth work loosely, as if the words had to be chewed before they were soft enough to utter. A ragged hood came close round his face. His sparse beard was wet and the wet gleamed on his eyelashes. I had seen this idiot face before but could not remember where. He had come to squat near our fire.

  'He would say something to us,' Tobias said. 'What is it, friend?'

  There was again that working of the mouth but words came from him now, soft and slurred but clear enough, the words of the boy's name. 'Thomas Wells,' he said, and peered at us with bright eyes over the glowing embers of the fire. 'Thomas Wells, him they found.'

  When he said this, I thought he might be a demon and it seemed to me that I could make out the shape of horns under his hood. The breath caught in my throat and I said some words, but cannot remember what. Springer started back. 'God protect us all,' he said and he crossed himself.

  'It is a beggar who comes sometimes to the inn-yard,' Margaret said in her usual flat, muttering tone. 'I have seen him also in the street outside,' she said. 'Good soul, what is it?'

  'Him they found before the angels found him,' he said. 'Early in the morning they brought him home. Robert Moore's son and the youngest one of Simon the smith and the boy who herded the sheep, John Goody, them the angels found first.'

  'What do you mean?' Martin said. 'Were there others? Who found him? Who found Thomas Wells?'

  'Jack Flint found him.' The idiot's eyes shone brightly. His mouth was a pool of spittle. 'Sins are like stones,' he said. 'But children are light enough, they can fly. With these eyes I saw them.' He raised a hand, palm outward, fingers splayed, and held it for a moment before his smiling face, as if shielding his eyes from rays too strong to bear and yet wishing at the same time to peer through the gaps at some sight not to be missed. 'I saw over the houses,' he said. 'They were singing as they carried them away. The light hurt my eyes. I told Jane Goody, your child is with the angels in Heaven, but she took no comfort in that saying. She went looking for him high and low.'

  'Poor soul, you are touched,' Tobias said, and he got up to give the man some of the bread that was left, but the movement was too sudden, the man shifted back on his haunches and then rose. In the space of a moment he was gone, there was only the heated air rippling above the fire and the falling flakes and the sound of shovels striking against the cobbles as they cleared the snow from the yard.

  'Well, he is gone,' Martin said. 'This Flint, who he says came upon the boy ... We must find out what we can. If we are to do this thing we must know all the circumstances of it. We must go severally about the town and talk to the people, but as strangers, without seeming to have any purpose in it.'

  'They will know us for players,' Straw said.

  'No, they will not, most of us were masked and they saw us by torchlight, which changes the look of a face.' This was Stephen, and to his face there had come something of the same radiance I had seen on Springer's. Martin's idea spread among us like a shedding of light.

  'We will go about the town and learn what we can,' he said now. 'When we hear the bells for Vespers, straightaway we will come back here. Everyone will say to the others what he has learned about the matter and we will plan the play and decide on the parts. Then we will make a procession on foot, by torchlight, each in his part, and we will shout to the people what we are intending to do. Afterwards we will practise the play so that we know our parts in it, as far as time allows. Tomorrow is the day of the market, the town will be full.'

  This he must have found out already, before he had our consent. 'What did you talk to the grave-digger about?' I said. It was a question that came out quickly, before I was decided to ask it.

  'What' For a moment he looked disconcerted, as if I had found him out in some wrong.

  'This morning, when you stayed behind.'

  'I asked him if he had seen the boy's body, but he said he had not because he could not see through a wooden box, and so I asked him who had made it and he said there were three carpenters in the town, it would be one of them. I asked him also if he knew who had paid to have the work done but he said he did not.'

  'So this idea was in your mind already?'

  He looked at me steadily. 'It has been in my mind for years now that we can make plays from stories that happen in our lives. I believe this is the way that plays will be made in the times to come.'

  I took this at the time for a true answer but not fully an honest one, thinking that between truth and honesty there lay the hope of a replenished purse. He looked away from me now and spoke to the others: 'So then, we are all agreed?'

&nb
sp; There was silence among us for some time. Then, one by one, beginning with Tobias, we signified assent. I too, at the last. The boldness of it took me. I saw fear and exhilaration on the faces round me. We were staking all on one throw. And then there was the light that came from him, we were all bathed in it. I think now it was pride of mind that led him, a worse thing than love of money. From pride there can only come brands for the burning. The resin of the wicked branch makes it flame more brightly and it may seem for a time to light up the dark; but it is soon consumed away, leaving the world darker than before. Nevertheless, having spoken against it, I gave my assent. This company of players was shelter to me, I did not want to be cast out. And then there was Martin's face and voice. He did not convince us, he infected us with his feeling. Like an infection of light there among us...

  I spoke no more in argument against him - it was useless in any case. It may be that he was right in what he said about the nature of plays and playing in times to come. He was of those who can look forward without wavering and he had no grudge against a time when he would be in the world no longer and because of this his sight was clear. And all estates of man perhaps will change with time. That they can so change we see from the Order of the Benedictines, who do not keep to the rule of their Founder but travel abroad like this one that had found the stolen purse and was the Lord's confessor and lived with them there in the castle. We see it also in the Order of Knighthood. As we sat there round the fire, with the decision made, I thought again of the Knight, how he came riding slowly up the hill through the falling snow with the red breath of the Beast above him. I took that front rider for Death, but I know now that it was his own death that he bore about him. I remembered his pale face, the calm, reckless glance, the long scar down his cheek, that effeminate square of silk to guard his finery against the touch of the snow. The knights are a killing class, they are trained from childhood in the use of weapons and the doling out of grievous hurt. But if we believe our fathers, or their fathers before, this training had a purpose once, just as the practice of players has a purpose. As it is the purpose of the Devil's Fool to console the Devil, and that gives him licence for buffoonery, so it was a knight's purpose to protect the weak against the oppression of power and to fight for Christ in the Holy Land, and this it was that gave him licence to deal in death and the right to hold estates. But perhaps our fathers' fathers say only what they heard from their fathers before them and it was never true that the knights had this role, it was the Church that said it in hope to soften their ways or the king that said it to explain the grants of land he made them. They were necessary and so some role had to be assigned to them. However it may be, if they had a part to play once they have lost it now, even in battle - it is the common people that win battles, the archers and the pikemen, as these our times have abundantly shown, while the knights and their war-horses flounder in blood and are butchered together. And so they turn to sport They deck themselves out to kill in play, as this one was decked out.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We followed Martin's plan. I spent my time among the stalls round the market cross and in a tavern nearby. The snow had stopped but the clouds were still swollen with it. I tried as cleverly as I could to provoke gossip, striving always to conceal from them that I was a stranger in the town. Martin had been wrong in this; to betray ignorance made people fall silent or turn away, as the ostler had done. There was something, some fear or distrust, that held them back from talking. Such a thing happened when I asked a man selling eggs whether the woman who was condemned had confessed to the crime. He looked at me for a moment half smiling, as if I had made some familiar jest. Then his face closed and he looked sullenly away.

  However, some things I discovered, the most important of which was that the woman had been seen near the road on the evening that the boy was killed - it was believed that he had been killed in the evening or sometime during the night. She had been seen quite close to where he was found, by that same Benedictine, the one who had next morning gone to the house and found the stolen money there.

  I told this to the others when we assembled again in the barn. Already the dark was coming. We sat as before round the fire, but it was a poor fire now, we had to husband the fuel that remained, having no money for more - we had spent almost all on this night's hiring of the barn.

  As newly arrived and least significant of the company I was required to say first what I had learned. I began with what I supposed would be common knowledge among us by now, keeping the more particular things to the end. The boy, Thomas Wells, was twelve years old and small for his age, not much given to smiling owing to the fact that he was frequently beaten by the drunken man his mother lived with. His own father was dead or gone away.

  'The father walked off one fine morning,' Springer said. He was sitting cross-legged, but by some squirming motion of the body and by moving his shoulders first one then the other, he was a man walking blithe and free. There was no smile on his face, however. 'He went to join the wars, they say. They said that about mine, but I never believed it.'

  'They are poor,' Stephen said. 'The man is in bondage of labour to the Lord de Guise. He has a strip of ploughland, not more than three acres.'

  'He finds money for ale,' Martin said. 'He was drunk on the day the boy died. Drunk and quarrelsome. In the end the innkeeper would not serve him.'

  'Will we play that?' Springer's eyes were round. 'Supposing he is there, among the people?'

  'Devil take him, we will play it,' Stephen said. 'If he quarrels with me he will be the sorrier.'

  'He tries to pretend he is not drunk, so the innkeeper will serve him more ale. He gathers all his forces.' Straw straightened himself and held his body in precarious balance and his head trembled in the effort to appear sober. Then he shivered, and it was a true shiver. It was cold in the barn, but I knew that Straw was frightened.

  'The innkeeper waits,' Martin said. 'The man cannot sustain it, his legs turn to jelly.' And he acted both in turn, the stare of the innkeeper and the collapse of the man, and it was very comical.

  'They had sold their cow,' I said, when the laughter had stopped. 'Poor they must be, to sell a heifer in winter. Their hay was spoiled with rain and they could not feed the beast through the spring. That was where the money came from that the boy was carrying. They must have sold it somewhere outside the town...'

  'The beast was sold six miles away,' Tobias said, 'in a village called Appleton, on the edge of the moors. The man and woman stayed there, drinking in a tavern. At least the man drank and the woman stayed with him. She gave the money, as much of it as she could get hold of, to the boy for safe keeping and sent him home with it.'

  'But he never got home,' Martin said. 'He was seen in the afternoon, two or three miles along the way, by one gathering kindling at the border of the woodland.'

  'He was found half a mile outside of the town,' Stephen said, 'where the road runs below the common. I walked out to it. The way is narrow there, with the wood growing close on one side and the waste on the other, rising up to the common. The house where the woman lived is on the edge of the common, a little nearer to the town.'

  'She lived there with her father, who is a weaver,' Straw said. 'Why did they not take him also, if the money was found there?'

  No one knew the answer to this.

  'It was the Lord's confessor that saw her,' I said. 'The Benedictine.' I paused, experiencing the pleasure of one about to impart something of moment. I was excited — we all were. Excited and afraid. These things had happened. Now with our words we made them happen again, as later we would with our bodies. 'He saw the girl on the common land that evening. She was near the roadside at the place where the boy was found.'

  'What was she doing there?' Stephen said. 'Was she waiting there for Thomas Wells? Perhaps she had seen him coming. The land rises there, you can see some way along the road.'

  'Why should she wait for Thomas Wells?' I said.

  'In that case, the Monk would have
seen the boy too,' Martin said. His face showed something of that bright abstracted look it had worn when he first spoke to us of his idea. 'It seems that the last one to see Thomas Wells alive was the man gathering wood, and that was some three miles from where he was found.'

  'That will be why the Monk went to the house,' Margaret said, speaking now for the first time. 'He saw her near the place, then when the boy was found he remembered he had seen her and went there, to the house, and so found the money.'

  It is always difficult, when we look back with our minds, to be sure of a time when things became different, when a current darkened or brightened, when words or glances changed the mood. To my mind it was then that the shadow fell, while Margaret was speaking. I seem to remember some reddening of the light, as if the last poor glow of our fire was diffused around us and we sat there in this light while darkness thickened outside, and we were the same people yet different. It was then we began to see that this matter was not so simple as we had thought. These three things concerning the Monk - seeing the woman, learning of the boy's death, finding the money - though they had seemed at first to explain everything, raised more questions than they settled.

  'Perhaps there are others who saw her there,' Martin said slowly. 'In any case, it is common land, she could have had a dozen reasons for being there, and the Monk would have known that.'