The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  But, though Kit might be happy at such praise for a while, he was always too conscious that Robin was coming on hard at his heels, ever to be really content. Robin was never tired, never ill, never, except when he fought with Kit, out of temper; and even the fighting he seemed to enjoy, and only to wish to knock Kit down for the fun of it. If he missed the mark with his arrow, he laughed; if he hit in the midst, he laughed. It was not that he was contented to do a thing badly; when he failed he would go on trying always harder, but cheerfully, and without any shame of his failure. Kit knew very well, that soon, though Robin would never equal him as a horseman, in everything else his younger brother would pass him, and the knowledge was bitter.

  Things were always happening which made it clear how quickly Kit was being overhauled by the youngster. Though Kit was a very pretty bowman he had not the plain strength for a man’s bow till he was close on seventeen. Then he got his first bow of full force, a lovely one with a fine long grain from one end to the other. He was immensely proud of it, though it was as much, even now, as he could manage, and for a while his shooting fell off, and Robin beat him at every match. All Kit could do was to mock the boy unmercifully for the way he had, when he had loosed, of standing on one foot and curling the other round his leg till he saw the arrow strike.

  But as he came into his new bow Kit began to go ahead again. They were at the butts one still evening in summer, just after hay harvest. The light was beginning to fail a little, and Sir Robert, who had been shooting with them, had gone in. Their mother had left the place long ago to see that the little girls had been put to bed, so only the Aske boys and some village lads were there. Jack said it was time to go in; what use in shooting when you could not see, and to hit was all luck. But Kit, who was shooting beautifully, would not give up, nor would Robin, simply because he knew that when they went into the house it would be supper and then bed.

  So, at last, it was Kit and Robin shooting against each other, the one from the men’s distance, and the other from further forward, because children’s bows, being cut from the branch and not the bole, are weaker in their cast.

  Then Robin, drawing strongly, snapped his bow; the arrow went wreathing aside, with everyone yelling ‘Fast! Fast!’ to warn each other out of the way. But it lit, with no harm done, in a patch of thistles.

  ‘You little fool!’ cried Kit, ‘you might do hurt to anyone that way.’

  ‘How could I help it? It’s that bow. It’s all knotty and weak.’ Robin slipped the string out of the notch, chucked away the splintered pieces of the bow, and went off to get his arrow. He was not put out, being used to Kit’s tongue, and being indeed rather pleased with himself for breaking his bow. When he came back he said, again, ‘It was all knotty and weak. I’ll ask if I can have a man’s bow.’

  ‘You!’ cried Kit, but Robin had gone to Jack and was crouching down by him. ‘Lend me yours, Jack,’ he said. ‘Let me try how I can shoot with it.’

  ‘No!’ Kit shouted, in such a strange voice that Jack turned and stared at him.

  ‘I pray you, do,’ Robin wheedled, and Jack pushed the bow into his hands.

  Kit got up and went away as quickly as he could, but not quickly enough. He did not hear the thrum of the string as Robin loosed, but heard him shout, ‘Ouch!’ as the shaft flew wide and everyone laughed; Kit caught the sound of Robin’s laughter among the rest. Then Robin must have loosed again, for he cried, with triumph in his voice, ‘There! That was better. I like this bow. I like the way he pulls so strong against the hand.’

  It was Robin who brought Kit’s bow up from the butts where he had left it. He found Kit reading in the tower corner in the Hall. Kit only glanced up from the book, and then held out his hand for the bow, without a word.

  ‘Shall I wax him for you?’ Robin asked, and stooping over the bow he rubbed his cheek on the wood, as if he loved it.

  ‘No.’ Kit wrenched it out of his hand, and Robin went away whistling, to snatch as he passed at a dish of pasties that one of the women was carrying in for supper. She let out a blow at him, and he dodged it, laughing, his mouth full, and spluttering crumbs. Kit thought him insufferable.

  *

  Next morning, which was the morning before Jack’s wedding day, he and Kit got up as soon as it was light, and dressed quietly. But Robin woke as Kit was getting into his hosen. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked, and without waiting for an answer, bounced out of bed.

  Jack told him, ‘A-fishing,’ and Kit said, ‘We don’t want you,’ but he cried, ‘Ah! Let me come,’ and Jack, too weak, thought Kit, allowed it. It had been Kit’s idea to have Jack to himself this time. Now Robin had spoiled it.

  The sun was not yet up as they went out from under the gatehouse, but the sky was delicately and serenely blue. Some of the men were just going by from the village to mow their own hay, now that the Askes’ hay was cut and carried. One of them hailed, ‘Master Robin! Master Robin!’ and Robin ran off to him, and came back waving a pipe in his hand, such as shepherds play on. ‘See what Mat has made for me. Thank you, Mat,’ he yelled shrilly after the men; Mat’s red hood jerked in acknowledgement.

  They went down past the churchyard, across the ings, and on among the pools; the waters seemed as still as the air above them; they were bright with the sky, though a thin mist steamed up from them. The mist would be gone before noon, to gather again towards evening.

  ‘It’s as still as glass,’ said Kit, looking down into one of the pools and speaking low because of the silence and stillness of the unsullied day.

  ‘No,’ said Robin, pointing at the shadows of the alders on the far side; ‘look how the leaves shiver in it.’ It was true that the reflection trembled ceaselessly in the water, perfect and unbroken, while the trees themselves were still. But, ‘God’s Blood!’ Kit muttered crossly, and went on after Jack with his rod jigging over his shoulder. Robin came behind; he began to tootle on the pipe; then he ran forward and said that he was the minstrels from York, playing before Jack at his wedding, and so preceded them, posturing and blowing on his pipe. Even Jack was angry with him and Kit hated him. When they came to the place where they meant to fish they turned their backs on him and told him to go to the devil.

  He did not go, and soon, one way or another, he tried Kit beyond endurance. Kit struck him, and the blow sent Robin off into one of his brief rages. He skipped back, and fishing out a big handful of weed from the water’s edge he slung it at Kit’s face, yelling with triumph when he saw how lucky his aim had been. Kit, half blinded by the dripping, stinking stuff, ran at him, the long rod held like a lance.

  And then Robin gave one scream, and went backwards; for a moment he wriggled about on the dewy grass as wildly as if he had been a fish they had landed, but he got up again to his knees, and knelt, bowed and with his hands over his face.

  They both ran to him, Jack scared, and Kit scared and angry, crying, ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’

  He did not answer, and Kit wrenched at one of his hands and managed to drag it away. He let it go very quickly.

  ‘His eye!’ he said. ‘His eye!’

  Because Kit was no good at running, it was Jack who went back to the house, and burst into his father’s and mother’s bed-chamber, shuttered and dark still, to tell them what had happened. Kit came after, leading Robin, who stumbled along with his hands over his face, and blood running down his chin on the right side, and blood sopping the breast of his shirt.

  Kit wanted to be the one to ride to York for the surgeon, but Sir Robert sent off one of the men with a led horse. There was nothing for Kit to do but to go down to the river bank and bring back his fishing rod, and Jack’s; he found Robin’s pipe there, and brought that too.

  This happened in July, and it was early September before Robin was out again. He had grown while he was in bed; he was pale now, instead of brown as a nut; and, for a while at least, he was rather quiet. Kit, whose heart had been wrung by fear, shame and compassion, was uncommonly gentle to him, and fo
r a few months there was peace between them.

  By this time Jack’s young wife was getting used to her new estate. Nell was fifteen, a little fair thing, with a finished prettiness which time might harden and sharpen. After being very meek at first, she was now beginning to show off. Sir Robert laughed at and petted her, Dame Elizabeth was too gentle to give her more than a mild rebuke. It was Robin only who infuriated her with his teasing. In return she would jeer at him for lacking an eye, and then he would threaten to lift the empty eyelid, and would chase her about the house on that threat. They were never good friends, and it was still worse between them when, in the New Year after Robin lost his eye, Dame Elizabeth died. Robin stopped teasing Nell; that had been done not out of unfriendliness, but because, being a boy, tease he must. Now he left her alone, except to scowl at her under his heavy brows, and sometimes to go out of his way to cross her. But Kit came on him one day, hammering at a bent arrow-barb on the anvil in the workshop as if it were a thing he meant to kill, and with tears running down his face.

  He smudged them away with a dirty hand when he saw Kit, and said, ‘I hate her. She is glad that our mother is dead.’

  Kit had seen that too. They talked about Nell, then about their mother for a time, and afterwards for a while Kit was quite warm towards Robin.

  By the time spring came, and Robin had passed his thirteenth birthday, he was strong again, but he had found out that there were things that could not be well done by someone who was short of an eye. He could not now aim surely with the bow, nor play at quarterstaff. At first he tried, harder and harder, then suddenly gave it up, and after that would sit watching the others, calling out now and again, ‘Oh! well shot!’ or ‘Well laid on!’ At home he would keep his bow most carefully waxed, so that it glittered like gold – it was a good bow, full strength, which Sir Robert had brought from York while he was in bed – but he rarely took it out, except sometimes to go fowling among the pools by himself.

  One blustering evening that April, the young men were again at the butts. Kit was shooting most cunningly, so that the shifty wind hardly balked him at all. Robin sat watching among the rest, but when the groups broke and reformed, as one after another went to take his turn at the mark, he was left alone. And now he did not watch. Kit, glancing that way more than once, saw him digging his hands into the new grass, tugging at it, and frowning. After a while he got up and went away; Kit noticed that too, and grew angry, knowing whose doing it was that Robin did not now take his turn with the rest. Their brief accord was over. Kit could not forget what he had done to his brother, and besides that, since Robin had been ill he seemed to have grown up in his mind; whereas before he had fought Kit with his fists, now it was with his tongue, and he was as resolute, and was becoming as quick in argument, as he had been in the other kind of fighting.

  Robin set off to go to Ellerton, through the great open Mill Field, in which two ploughs were still at work, breaking up the fallow for next autumn’s wheat. He walked with his head down, kicking at the clods that lay loose on the trodden path. Before him Ellerton was half buried in pear-blossom and the bright budded apple-trees, but he did not glance about, nor, hardly, at the men trudging back from the fields or the women at their doors when they gave him good evening. The gate of the monastery was open; he did not trouble to knock, but went in, and straight to the kitchen. When he came near he could hear the sound of scrubbing. He looked in and saw Dom Henry stand in the midst; one of the lay brothers was scrubbing wooden bowls; he had those that were already done set out in a long row at the window to dry in the evening sun; another, with his gown hitched up, kneeled on a folded sack and swabbed the floor from a wooden pail.

  Dom Henry turned, saw Robin and said, ‘It is nearly done.’ To the lay brother with the scrubbing brush he said, ‘Are all the towels dry in the press?’ and to another monk who came in beside Robin, ‘There. All’s ready for your week’s serving. And I have come to the end of mine, and to-day shall eat my meat with a conscience as clean as a well-scoured bowl.’ Then he laid his hand on Robin’s shoulder, gave him a push and bade him, ‘Get out of this. I’m weary of cooking pots and sauce ladles. I would the brethren might live holily on manna, as Moses.’

  ‘Beginning to-day?’ asked Robin saucily, and the monk chuckled and said, no – beginning last Saturday night, and ending to-day. He reached down two horn cups from a shelf, went out of the kitchen and came back with them full of ale. ‘My brewing,’ he told Robin, giving him one, and together they went outside, walking with care so as not to spill the ale. The horse-block in the outer court still had the sun, and was sheltered from the wind, so they sat down there, Robin on the top step and the monk below him.

  Dom Henry raised the horn cup. ‘Ah!’ he said, after a silence, ‘That’s better.’

  He glanced up at the boy. Robin was twisting his cup about; a little of the ale slopped over onto his hosen; he shifted his leg and struck the drops off with his hand, but he did it absently. Dom Henry had taught all the Aske boys, and knew them as well as any man did, but he knew that Robin was changing, and he did not know what he would change into. ‘Not so sharp and eager a wit as Kit’s,’ he thought to himself, ‘but it grips, and there may be more than wit in him.’

  ‘Well?’ he said at last; but Robin, who was generally very ready, gave him no answer for a long time.

  ‘If you’ll not drink that ale, give it to me,’ Dom Henry prompted him.

  Robin shook his head, and began to drink, then he put the cup down on the stone beside him, and said, ‘Sir, if I tell my father that I would be a monk, will you stand by me?’

  Afterwards, thinking it over, Dom Henry wondered why he had received the suggestion so unfavourably, pouring scorn on it as if it must be only a boyish notion. ‘All because you can’t hit the middle of a painted mark with your arrow!’

  Robin said, stiffly and angrily, that that was not all, and when the monk asked what else, he would not say, only he looked both resentful and unhappy. In the end Dom Henry made him promise to do nothing in the matter for a year. ‘And you shall say no word of it to anyone.’

  ‘Why should I? But why should I not?’ Robin asked shrewdly.

  ‘Because if you have told it to any, you’re of that stubborn humour that you may hold yourself to it for very pride. And an unfit monk is a misery to himself, and a hair shirt upon the backs of his brethren. I know.’

  Robin flung off the horse-block then and went home. He told himself that he had been a fool to speak of it to Dom Henry, worldly and witty, who read more in Plautus than in any of the Fathers, even if he were a distant kinsman, and his schoolmaster.

  Dom Henry, mechanically singing the responses which he knew so well, was able to reflect upon the conversation throughout Compline. He understood, better than the boy himself, he thought, why Robin, halting between longing and dread, had come to him, and not to the Prior, who would have rehearsed for him all the old arguments why it was good for every man to be a monk, arguments so old that all the truth seemed to have been worn off them, like the pile on the old velvet copes. ‘Robin knows,’ Dom Henry thought, ‘that he’ll get the truth from me, as I think it.’ That it was not the whole, or the only truth, the monk was well aware. Men became monks for many reasons; leisure and comfort were his own. But if Robin were to be a monk, it would not be for these, but because for him the Prior’s old worn reasons were still harsh and fiery with truth.

  He shut the Office book with a clap. Compline was over. As they went out into the windy chill of the Cloister he thought, ‘In the old days – Yes, perhaps. But not now. Monks should be quiet men.’ He was sure of one thing, that Robin Aske, either in the world or in the Cloister, would not be a quiet man, contented, easy, amused and comfortable. And he did not want his own quiet disturbed with something that would be too like shame to be pleasant. He went into the little room beside the Chapter House where the books were kept. For a moment he hesitated over Origen. Origen had a piercing subtle wit that Henry could relish, but thoug
h he drew half out the big book in its yellowing sheepskin binding, he drove it back again with his fist, and took to read instead the companionable Horatius Flaccus. ‘Man,’ he thought, ‘isn’t all soul.’ He did not confess to himself that he could have wished to be entirely without that troublesome and hungry flame.

  Before Dom Henry’s stipulated year was out Kit had gone to Skipton, to be one of the gentlemen in the Household of the Askes’ Clifford kinsman, the Earl of Cumberland, and Robin to the Household of the Earl of Northumberland. When his father had first told him that he was to go there he had come, rather shamefaced, to Dom Henry, asking, ‘What shall I do?’

  But the monk, who was in the grip of one of his great and sore winter colds, had little patience for him this time.

  ‘Do? Go,’ he answered.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Do you suppose that you cannot as well choose to become a monk, if you do so choose, at Wressel as at Aughton?’

  ‘No,’ said Robin with an obstinate look, and went home.