Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  Friends are the enemies you’re still just getting to know.

  Shit me, and some say old age is when it takes all night to do what you used to do all night. In which case, mine is still to come. I ate four figs for Miranda last night. Only three of them worked, admittedly; but she enjoyed the fourth fig too.

  One of my familiars was a young gentleman from Gloucestershire, Robert Shallow by name. This Mr Shallow had one important aspect in which he was my superior. He had more ready cash than I had. The Shallows are one of the oldest families in England. You can still turn up their representatives from under any stone. This particular Shallow specimen had, as I say, plenty of money, but no sense. From the beginning, when we met over a Michaelmas goose, I think he longed for nothing more this side of a heavenly mansion than to be my friend. As for me, I counted Farewell’s I.O.U.’s, grew tired of drinking dew, and decided that Robert Shallow should indeed enjoy the privilege of my friendship – so long as he paid for it.

  He did enjoy it.

  He certainly paid for it.

  I was as poor as Job. But not so patient.

  Shallow was a law student. After a fashion, so was I. I suppose I was still technically Mowbray’s squire. But Mowbray had been banished by Richard II, for quarrelling with Henry Bolingbroke, now IV. So I was masterless, and worked independently and for myself.

  Shallow, with whom I lodged, was five years my senior. Those five years had not improved him. In appearance he was spotty and failed to fill his breeches. The latter looked always unhooked and ready to drop off. He wore a great pair of spurs – for no particular reason, since he could not ride – and jingled like a Morris dancer everywhere he went. His face bore a great resemblance to a gallows. There was little more of him, mentally speaking, than what I have described. Which is to say that his brains were about the same size and shape and about as much use as his bollocks.

  I patronised Shallow. And Shallow was my ape, my mate, my toady. I swore at him. He swore by me. He never tired of quoting my sayings and boasting of my exploits. Often in the process they became his sayings, and his exploits. We drank in the same taverns. He told me of the law, and I worked out ways to get round it.

  Ophelia had sent me a new coat. It was very nice, with fur inside. Out walking one day with my friends, we were stopped in the street by a gang of villains with nothing better to do than hope that a scuffle might bring them a penny or two from our pockets. Now, I had no intention of spoiling my coat in such a fray. Ignoring the insults of our assailants, I walked quickly on until I reached London Bridge, where I leant and loafed for an hour, watching the water flow, thinking to myself how an oiled feather is more use in easing open a lock than any amount of force.

  Some of my friends were critical of this reaction. They thought I should have bloodied my coat. The common opinion of a band of pages and students did not bother me much – but Shallow always went with the crowd, and I did not intend to lose my access to his purse.

  It was at this point – when I was looking for a way of reestablishing my supremacy in Shallow’s shallow eyes – that I met Henry Skogan.

  There was a tavern near the Pool, which was called The Sleeveless Errand. (This sleeveless should really be written sleaveless, by the way, as it comes from sleave, which is a ravelled thread, or the raw edge of silk.) Sitting one night there, playing a gentle game of cards, I began to notice the poetical noises of a burly, red-barbed fellow, far gone in his cups. His rigmarole was elaborate, and peppered with the names of heathen deities, but it appeared that he was challenging all of us present.

  ‘I am a major poet,’ he declared.

  Nobody seemed much worried.

  ‘Henry Skogan,’ said the major poet. ‘Ballads, fatras, fabliaux. You name it, I can do it.’

  I was more interested in the Queen of Hearts. But I could sense that some of the other drinkers in the room were becoming irritated by the poet’s bullying manner. Every word he uttered seemed to come as though he intended it to spit on us from a great height.

  ‘Rhyme royal,’ said Skogan. ‘Give me a ghost of a theme and I will toss you off stanzas by the yard – every one correct, with the seven lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming ABABBCC. Where’s your Troilus and Cressida now?’

  Nobody offered any suggestions as to their whereabouts.

  Skogan pulled a greasy scrap of paper from his wallet. ‘My genius was once recognised by Chaucer,’ he told us, ‘who did himself the honour of honouring me. He’d just lost his job as Clerk of the King’s Works, of course, and needed my influence to get him a decent pension.’

  He thumbed back his red locks and started to read in a voice that sounded like a gong being struck over a sea of treacle:

  Skogan, that kneelest at the stream’s head

  Of grace, of all honour, and worthiness!

  In the end of which stream I am dull as dead,

  Forget—

  ‘Oh piss off with your poetry!’ shouted some little critic.

  ‘It’s not my poetry,’ hissed Skogan. ‘This is Mr Chaucer’s poetry.’

  ‘I don’t bleeding care if it’s Mr Virgil’s poetry!’ said the critic. ‘I came in here for a drink, not for envoys.’

  Skogan folded the greasy scrap carefully and replaced it in his wallet. ‘I am always glad,’ he said in a mournful voice, ‘to meet one sensibly tired of this mortal life.’

  Then he leapt to his feet, snatched a cudgel from his belt, and threw himself in the general direction of the literary criticism. A messy fight ensued. Tables were turned over, benches smashed, flagons flung at the walls, fingers stamped upon. The critic ended up with a new parting in his hair that seemed to go some way into his skull.

  Forget in solitary wilderness;

  Yet, Skogan …

  The victorious poet, seated in a pool of blood and wine, had retrieved from his wallet the envoy addressed to him by Chaucer, and was obviously intent on reading the rest of it to the clients of The Sleeveless Errand. What was worse, nobody now dared to interrupt him. I could not concentrate upon my hand of cards. I slipped out of the tavern and made my way home. A pity. I’d had three queens.

  That night I dreamt of a golden opportunity. In amongst his general thrasonical rantings and ravings concerning his own merits, Skogan had promised the company that tomorrow the world would know how good his verses were – when he read aloud at the court gate some poem which he had written in honour of the birthday of Thomas, Duke of Clarence. Here was my chance. A chance not to be missed. At the court gate, with the four princes of the blood royal in procession to the tilt-yard, this Skogan would make his poet’s noise. All my friends would be there, as well as others with more money and influence. All London would be there.

  Now, in the brawl with the critic I had noticed an abundance of defects in Henry Skogan’s technique with the cudgel. He might do his ABABBCC’s all right when it came to rhyme royal, but when it came to the ABC’s of fighting he had not been to school to as good a master as I had. My uncle Hugh, before the passion for relics overcame him, had taught me a thing or two at the quintain. And I knew from my experience at the Battle of Slugs that when my blood was up I could fight like a demon.

  I said my prayers to St Swithin and to the blessed St Boniface that night that Henry Skogan would not be too hung over to put in an appearance as he had promised.

  The birthday of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, dawned fair, as a prince’s birthday should. I put on my fur-lined coat and went early to the court gate. Robert Shallow was already there, simpering in company with the little gang of my erstwhile friends, now affecting to despise me because of what they were pleased to call my cowardice. Coward! Me – fisty Fastolf! I’d show them!

  On the stroke of Phoebus’s whatever-it-is (that poets are always on about), Skogan loomed up all red and arrogant and full of spondees. He had a wad of celebrations in his hand. He scattered rhymes and morals as he walked. Insincerity oozed from every pore. Or, rather, a most sincere devotion to his own magnificence and a d
eep conviction of the worthlessness of everything else except in so far as it could be translated into his verse and swallowed up to his greater glory. He gesticulated with his hands and arms and bushy eyebrows. He bullied. He poeticised. I suppose he looked a scraping cleaner in his person, but not so much that you’d really have noticed.

  For a strophe or two, I let the people listen to Skogan’s jabber, gabble, gibberish, and rhapsodies. Then I sauntered over to see my friends. They received me distantly. Even Shallow. Though Shallow being always an invincible yes-man I should not say ‘even’. He dared not stand apart from a majority.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, playing with the hilt of my sword in the approved manner, ‘you will all be acquainted with the story of the blacksmith who, very near to death, confessed his sins to a priest, and added that he did not wish to forgive his enemies. The priest said to him, “If you don’t do that, you’ll go to hell for certain.” “Is that so?” said the blacksmith. “Well, in that case you can cut out the Extreme Unction – I’d prefer it if the Devil ate me up raw, as I am, without any oil or salt.”’

  Shallow smirked. The others shifted their feet uneasily.

  I went on: ‘You see before you one equally impenitent. I have not the slightest intention of forgiving any of you for the doubts you have entertained concerning my courage. And as for being eaten raw by the Devil – I’m about to risk that, and make liars of the lot of you, by picking a fight with this Skogan.’

  ‘He’ll anagrammatise you!’ gasped Shallow, prompted of course to the witticism by someone right behind him, whose muttered remark he managed to overhear and then blurt out in that bleating voice of his, like a sheep with the colic.

  I waved my hand, stroking the feather that trailed from my hat like a fox’s brush. ‘If one of you could be obsequious enough to ask him to read his verses,’ I invited, ‘I will pick holes in them.’

  They grinned, and bit their lips, and shuffled. One of them – it was, I remember, Mr John Doit, another low law student, out of Staffordshire, where the cups come from – took three hesitating steps forward, and in a cringing fashion begged the poet the favour of reciting his poem for us as a kind of rehearsal.

  Such as Henry Skogan don’t need asking twice. He poked his fingers in his fiery hair, tugged it out in a couple of points like a bull’s horns, and commenced –

  Caesarian Clarence, son of Henry 4 …

  ‘Poeticule,’ I said.

  ‘What!’ roared Skogan, looking round.

  ‘Tell me, little poeticule,’ I said, ‘what it signifies, this hard word you have there, Caesarian. Do you mean to imply that our fine Prince, Thomas, Duke of Clarence, has some of the attributes of Caesar?’

  Skogan’s eyes rolled furiously, but there came a growl of what I took to be assent.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘your lack of a classical education is showing. The word you have there, Caesarian, from the Latin, caeso, to cut from the womb, must mean some libel such as your thinking that the Duke of Clarence was extracted prematurely from the womb of Mary de Bohun in something other than the normal manner.’

  ‘Who is this cacodemon?’ demanded Skogan, gnawing at his own poetical parchments in his fury.

  ‘Jack Fastolf,’ I said, with a little nod of the head.

  ‘And are you a poet, Mr Fastolf?’ sneered Skogan.

  ‘Certainly not,’ I said. I shuddered, remembering my mother’s experience of poets in Naples. ‘Poets I regard as a lowish form of human life,’ I said. ‘But then you, Mr Skogan, judging from that single line of yours which I have heard, can hardly be reckoned a poet at all. That is why I addressed you as a poeticule, didn’t you notice?’

  Skogan’s face was now as purple as a Flagellant’s banner.

  ‘I’ll Caesarian you!’ he shouted.

  I slipped off the precious coat that had been Ophelia’s gift to me. ‘In which sense?’ I enquired politely. ‘Yours? Or the real one?’

  Cudgel in fist, Skogan flung himself towards me in just the impetuous, burly manner I had seen him employ the night before in The Sleeveless Errand. I stood aside, and allowed him to knock Robert Shallow into the arms of a grateful crone. The crowd began to dare to laugh.

  ‘Your doggerel line embodies another lie,’ I said, as the poet lumbered to his feet. ‘The Duke of Clarence is of course second in line to the throne.’

  Skogan paused, head down, shaking it. ‘I know that,’ he blustered. ‘What did I say that denied it?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘my tutor Ravenstone instructed me that Homer and Virgil and the other true poets regarded precision of language as of the essence of poem-making.’

  ‘Clarence is second in line! I didn’t question it!’

  ‘But you said “son of Henry 4”,’ I said. ‘And that could mean, fourth son of King Henry.’

  ‘The fellow’s an idiot!’ thundered Skogan. ‘A suicidal idiot!’ And he charged again – missed again – and went head-over-heels into the now applauding crowd.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I said to the crone, and Shallow, and Doit, and the rest of them, ‘it appears that our Mr Skogan, while now seeing double, is still capable of missing any irony going.’

  Then cudgel work commenced in earnest. I let him come in close, and take a whack at me. But I had learnt from Uncle Hugh to dodge and weave. I had learnt also an interesting technique of fighting in which you make any fight your own fight by moving away from your opponent all the time. You make yourself absent, truant, fugitive. You leave all the decisions – save the final decision – to your adversary. Of course, to achieve this, you need an excellently accurate cudgel with which to answer back. If you do it right, your own answers get more and more unanswerable.

  I did not just fight Henry Skogan. I entered elusively into a conversation of cudgels with him.

  An unmoved mover, I was going round and round and round him like a minute hand circling the dot in the middle of a clock. Each time round, at a predetermined spot, I hit him. I woke up a bruise as red as his hair, extending his foxy eyebrows. Then the bruise was all blood.

  Such conversations with the cudgels must be terminated when the principal fighter decides he has heard enough. I had heard enough when I saw Skogan’s blood flow. Still on the run, soliloquising a little, thinking aloud with my stick, I thought hard and fast and hit the rotten poet twice.

  Skogan’s skull rang like a goblet.

  His cudgelling arm fell flabby at his side.

  He put his left hand up to his eyebrows and brought one of them half away with it, covered in blood.

  He tried a smile. It wouldn’t fit. He fell on his back with a thump.

  I don’t mean to suggest that I am a magician – or that my uncle Hugh taught me some kind of necromancy regarding fighting in that Caister barnyard. He taught me the rudiments of an art. When it comes to cudgels, I am an artist. And like all true artists I am quite naturally inspired by my material, at one with it even while remaining cool and separate and distinct. I had watched Skogan at work in The Sleeveless Errand. I had goaded him deliberately and crudely at the court gate. I made him shout and bluster and lose his temper, and then I listened, and then I answered.

  As a warrior, if I have a secret it is that I am so obliging. I give each fighter that I meet just what that fighter wants: defeat. The nature of the defeat is of course as various as there are men needing it. But the secret of my success is simple – I hand my opponents themselves on a plate. They can never resist it.

  And there’s another secret within the secret. I’ll tell you.

  It’s not exactly cowardice, I think. But it is an art of something almost the opposite of the fighting which I have done so well, and all my life.

  I, John Fastolf, have made an art of not liking fighting.

  If Robert Shallow and John Doit and the others had been paying close attention, instead of cheering their heads off in praise of the man who a few minutes before they had considered a failure – if they had been really looking, I say, sir, they might have
noticed what nobody ever noticed in my long career as a warrior, save Hal, and he misunderstood it …

  They might have noticed a look of outright horror and distaste on my face as I had to finish that poeticule off, and break Henry Skogan’s head at the court gate.

  Yes, madam. John Fastolf does not care for blood.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A parallel adventure: Mr Robert Shallow v. Mr Sampson Stockfish

  St Mark’s Day

  (Hemp-seed I sow,

  Hemp-seed grow;

  He that is my true love,

  Come after me and mow.

  – Miranda was in the orchard last night, St Mark’s Eve, practising the usual divination according to this formula, and scattering hemp-seed over her shoulder. The figure of your future husband is supposed to appear, with a scythe, mowing behind you. She saw nothing.)

  When Robert Shallow saw how I had broken Skogan’s head, he wept. I will not say that he wept like Heraclitus, since Heraclitus wept because he grieved at the folly of man in general, whereas Shallow was always concerned only with his own folly in particular. (I never cared for Heraclitus anyway. Give me a laughing philosopher, not one whose tears turn into metaphysics. Up Democritus!)

  Shallow wept, then, shallowly. I saw at least four tears ooze from his right eye, proving that his mother – whatever else she was – could not have been a witch. His tears were one part rapture, three parts rupture.