The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  ‘Tunstall and Stokesley,’ said the Mercer, ‘gave and took many shrewd raps that day, so I hear.’

  ‘Yet they shall not have the better, proud papist prelates that they are,’ cried Gib, with a tight smile. ‘That I’ll warrant.’

  The other rubbed his plump, firm jowl with one finger.

  ‘As I see it,’ said he, ‘the issue pleases and displeases both them and us. For they have had their own way over their seven sacraments—’

  ‘Fie!’ said Gib. ‘Shall we never be free of this prating of sacraments?’

  ‘Yet Faith is set clear above any sacrament.’

  ‘That’s well done!’

  ‘And as clear our men have made it that Faith alone justifieth.’

  ‘So,’ said Gib, ‘that is very well.’ Yet he did not meet the other’s eye, nor did he seem in his appearance at all jubilant, but kept looking down at the floor. For though theologically he was convinced of the truth of that doctrine, he was not able to feel it true in himself. All the Faith which he had, and it seemed to him to burn clear as a great fire, was not enough to enable him to do that simplest first work of all – merely to love his neighbour and receive those little ones, scrabbling and tittering behind him, as if each one were Christ. Without that, should Faith save him?

  The Mercer chuckled.

  ‘None will wholly rejoice,’ said he, ‘excepting the Bishop of Worcester.’

  ‘Why he?’ Gib asked quickly.

  ‘By the Mass! Because he is not learned in these subtleties and thinks it’s all one, so as pilgrimages and relics and images are brought down, with purgatory, and so as justice be done between high and low; for that last has always been in especial his constant sharp concern.’

  ‘I know it has. I have heard it.’

  Twelve o’clock struck with dilatory halting concurrence from all the steeples near, and from further off came the faint floating sound of other bells.

  ‘Go! Go!’ Gib flung over his shoulder at the lads, and they rushed out. The pounding of their feet on the boards ceased; from the yard outside rose the sharp babble of their voices. He turned to Master Hawkes and asked – would he bring him to the Bishop of Worcester?

  ‘Well,’ said the Mercer slowly and with a cautious look, ‘if I could do so, what would you have of him?’

  ‘That he should set me to work. He’s a man after mine own heart,’ cried Gib. ‘If I could preach or write—’ He thought, but did not say – ‘If I should mightily set forth God’s word, that might suffice.’

  ‘You write for my Lord Privy Seal.’

  ‘He,’ said Gib, ‘has done much for the Gospel. Yet he is a worldly man. He minds power and policy, aye, and lucre, more than he minds God’s matters.’

  He looked at Master Hawkes, righteous indignation now contending with the resentment of a rejected author in his face. ‘Will you bring me to the Bishop?’ he urged.

  The Mercer, unwilling to meddle further than he need in Gib’s affairs, consented, but stiffly. He brought Gib to the Bishop’s house and then handed him over to a small, square priest who had the figure and complexion of a ploughman, rather than of a clerk, and whose perfunctory, brief questions made Gib chafe.

  Yet within half an hour he found himself sitting at a table opposite Hugh Latimer, Lord Bishop of Worcester, no stately person like Archbishop Lee, but a lean, stooping man, in an old gown and rubbed fur tippet, and with great horse teeth pushing out his lips in the midst of his greying beard.

  Before him lay the remains of his dinner – the backbone of a herring on a notched wooden plate, salad, bread, and a horn cup of ale. He made Gib eat and drink too, sending away the square-shouldered chaplain for another fish, another penny loaf and more ale.

  So it was easy for Gib to speak to this man, though he were a Bishop, and Latimer sat and listened, only chumbling with his lips in a way he had, as if he could never arrange them over his teeth quite to his liking.

  When Gib had finished both his dinner and his explanation – which was a great deal of the lads at the chantry school, and a little of Lord Privy Seal, and nothing at all of Malle and dumb Wat – Latimer leaned back in his chair.

  ‘As clear it is to me,’ said he, ‘that you are a man who can preach, so clear it is that you are not one made to teach. And as for these massing matters in your chantry, neither you nor I see aught but blind superstition in them. So, if you, having as I can hear heart and will for it too, consent to come with me to my diocese, I will set you to preach God’s word to those who have not heard it this many a day.’

  Gib stared at him across the table.

  ‘I – I – I can write,’ he stammered, and seemed altogether taken aback, and not at all as if this was that very thing he had hoped. ‘That is no less to advance God’s cause than if I preach.’

  ‘But I,’ said the Bishop, ‘cannot maintain you here for that end. If you will write, you must go to Lord Privy Seal for your reward.’

  ‘I could remain at the chantry. It is enough without more reward.’

  ‘And the chantry, you tell me, is torment to you.’ Gib blundered up, pitching back the stool he sat on.

  ‘It is. It is. If I could come—’ He covered his eyes and Latimer saw his throat work.

  ‘Well, Master Dawe,’ he said coldly, ‘I can do no more for you than this. I had not done so much, perhaps, but that you sent up word that you were a man poor, and in danger of the judgement.’

  ‘Oh!’ cried Gib, ‘shall I have time to think?’

  ‘Humph!’ said the Bishop, with some not unnatural impatience. Then he said, ‘Well, you shall have time. Come again within this week and ask me if you will.’

  Gib went down the Bishop’s stairs knowing that far from escaping the judgement he had brought himself to it. For once more he must choose whether to bide or to run.

  *

  Thunder came after dark and with it rain, a rushing sluice of unseen waters that mashed down great swathes of the tall, head-heavy wheat. Rain beating on his head and neck brought Aske back for a little while out of nightmare into conscious horror. He saw in the scribble of lightning which split black night the sheer drop of the wall beside him; the green far away below.

  And as his eye told him of the sickening depth below his body, and as his mind foreknew the lagging endlessness of torment before him, so, as if the lightning had brought an inner illumination also, he knew the greater gulf of despair above which his spirit hung, helpless and aghast.

  God did not now, nor would in any furthest future, prevail. Once He had come, and died. If He came again, again He would die, and again, and so for ever, by His own will rendered powerless against the free and evil wills of men.

  Then Aske met the full assault of darkness without reprieve of hoped for light, for God ultimately vanquished was no God at all. But yet, though God was not God, as the head of the dumb worm turns, so his spirit turned, blindly, gropingly, hopelessly loyal, towards that good, that holy, that merciful, which though not God, though vanquished, was still the last dear love of a vanquished and tortured man.

  July 22

  By this time that which dangled from the top of the Keep at York, moving only as the wind swung it, knew neither day nor night, nor that it had been Robert Aske, nor even that it had been a man.

  Even now, however, it was not quite insentient. Drowning yet never drowned, far below the levels of daylight consciousness, it suffered. There was darkness and noise, noise intolerably vast or unendurably near, drilling inward as a screw bites and turns, and the screw was pain. Sometimes noise, pain, darkness and that blind thing that dangled were separate; sometimes they ran together and became one.

  *

  That evening Wat came skulking into the chantry chapel to be out of the way while his father and old Kat quarrelled upstairs. Kat had returned from the tavern very drunk and in good fighting trim, so it was likely they would both be at it for some time.

  When he had shut the door behind him he was sorry and turned to steal out again; b
ut a stick fallen from one of the jackdaws’ nests in the roof snapped under his foot, and Malle, who stood near the altar with her hands over her face, turned, saw him, and called, ‘Wat!’

  He went edging towards her, stepping lightly, as if at a word he would run. Yet she did not touch him when he came, but plumped down on the altar steps, and looked up at him standing a little way off.

  She said:

  ‘Darkness, and God moving nigh-hand in the darkness.’ Her hands wrenched one against the other, then dropped lax on her knees, and she smiled. In the long silence that followed they could hear the sound of Gib’s voice and old Kat’s voice, and the bump of something heavy that might have been a bench overturned in the room above.

  Then Malle said:

  ‘The darkness is done. The sun’s risen, just one morning like any other sunshine morning, with folks about their business and wives baking bread, and the mill-wheel turning. It’s all light in the churchyard, young new light, the colour of green apples when they’re golding over.’

  Wat crept a little nearer, but he was shaking.

  ‘God ’a mercy!’ Malle cried, ‘God ’a mercy! Here He comes between the graves, out of the grave.

  ‘When He was born a man,’ she said, ‘He put on the leaden shroud that’s man’s dying body. And on the Cross it bore Him down, sore heavy, dragging against the great nails, muffling God, blinding Him to the blindness of a man. But there, darkened within that shroud of mortal lead, beyond the furthest edge of hope, God had courage to trust yet in hopeless, helpless things, in gentle mercy, holiness, love crucified.

  ‘And that courage, Wat, it was too rare and keen and quick a thing for sullen lead to prison, but instead it broke through, thinning lead, fining it to purest shining glass, to be a lamp for God to burn in.

  ‘So men may have courage,’ she said, and caught Wat by the skirt of his coat as she stood up. ‘Then they will see how bright God shines.

  ‘Come,’ she said, dragging Wat towards the door, ‘and tell him that’s been taken far from here to die.’

  *

  But Robert Aske had gone too far, nor did he need now that Malle should tell him.

  For now (yet with no greater fissure between then and now than as a man’s eyes are aware, where no star was, of the first star of night), now he was aware of One – vanquished God, Saviour who could as little save others as Himself.

  But now, beside Him and beyond was nothing, and He was silence and light.

  The Chronicle of Robert Aske, Squire, ends here.

  November 2

  Wat came in late for dinner. He stumbled into the room, leaving the door wide. When Gib cried, ‘Shut the door!’ he turned and lurched towards it, but fell before he reached it. Up jumped Kat, to stare at him as he lay on the floor.

  ‘The Sickness,’ she said.

  There it was, in a word, for they all knew that the Great Sweat was still about in London since the unseasonable warm autumn.

  As the disease had struck Wat suddenly so it worked quickly upon him. By evening Gib could endure the sights and sounds of the lad’s malady no longer. He got up, tucked his book under his arm, and said there was an errand he must do, and not to bar the door for he might be back late.

  ‘Aye, by God’s Teeth,’ said Kat, busy stirring something over the fire, ‘go forth if ye’re afraid of the Sweat.’

  Gib was not afraid, and for a moment he hung on his heel, willing to show her that her taunt was unjust. But he cast a look upon Wat, and then he hurried out. He had not thought where he would go, and now did not choose his way with any very clear intention, yet when once he started he went in a great hurry, as if he were late for an appointment. And he was indeed very late. Bishop Latimer had said – ‘Come to me again next week,’ but that was months ago. No use to go now. ‘He’ll not see me,’ thought Gib; and then – ‘Nor I’ll not ask that he shall – only look upon the house when I go by.’ Yet there lurked in his mind a thought that it was the finger of Providence which had brought the Bishop here to London to preach dead Queen Jane’s funeral sermon, just at this very time.

  When he came to the house, and saw the broad, brown-faced ploughman of a chaplain even now going in, he was sure that Providence was pointing him in too. And by that sheer conviction he got in, and up to the same small plain room where the Bishop sat reading by the light of a candle, and blowing his nose loudly and frequently for he had a great cold.

  ‘Well,’ said Hugh Latimer, when Gib stood before him, glowering at the floor, ‘what do you want with me this time?’

  ‘Sir,’ Gib lifted his eyes, and Latimer, though in the throe of a great sneeze, did not miss the meaning of his look; he had known enough men that despaired of salvation to recognize one such when he saw him.

  ‘Sir,’ said Gib, ‘is it better that he that knoweth himself to be a castaway should preach or be silent?’

  ‘It is best,’ Latimer answered, after he had trumpeted into his handkerchief, ‘that he should by the Grace of God be a man redeemed, and no castaway. But though he hath no assurance of salvation, yet he must preach. For,’ said he, warming to his subject, ‘our Bishops and Abbots adulterate the word of God, mingling it with the dreams of men, like taverners who pour good and bad together into one pot. Purgatory, which they preach, is, forsooth, a fiery furnace, for it has burned away many a poor man’s pence. Go you to Canterbury, or even no further than Westminster hereby, and you shall find images covered with gold, and dressed in silks, and lighted with wax candles, yea, even at noon, while Christ’s living images are anhungered and thirst. Surely if we who know the light of the true Gospel shall hold our peace, the very stones will cry out against us that let their preaching go unanswered.’

  Gib, shuffling his feet, listened, but sullenly. All this was true. The Bishop’s counsel was also in effect what he wanted to hear. Yet he could not but consider the Bishop’s eloquence ill-timed. Shall one preacher preach to another?

  However, at the end of it he said, humbly enough, ‘Then, Sir, if you will, as you offered me before, set me to preach, I will be your bedeman with God for it.’

  ‘Good,’ said the Bishop, and worked his lips a while in silence snuffling heavily, and at last asked when Gib would be ready.

  ‘I am ready.’

  ‘Come then to-morrow. There is a church in Worcester—’ and the Bishop began to tell Gib about it; the benefice was no great matter, but there were souls to save, and bitter enmity to meet of papist priests, informers, adversaries of the true light.

  November 4

  All through the dark morning hours Gib lay waking and wrestling, but whether he wrestled with the devil or with the Angel of the Lord he did not know; nor did he know, when the light came, whether he had won or lost. The scholars found him by turns absent and savage; yet for once he regretted their going, for he must now return to the room below, where Malle and old Kat watched over the sick lad. There, when they had eaten, he plumped down in a corner, and with fingers stuffed into his ears, and face averted, he tried to read; at least he kept the book open on his knee.

  Towards evening, seeing that Wat lay quiet, Kat mumbled that she’d go forth a while, but not for long. She had not been to the tavern either yesterday or to-day, so she went now with eagerness, yet with a backward look. ‘Not for long,’ she said again before she shut the door.

  When Malle had blown up the fire, and set bread and bacon and a jug of penny ale on the table for supper, she drowsed with her head against the wall. So she did not see Gib wrap the New Testament and The Prick of Conscience inside two clean shirts and his best gown with a budge fur tippet, and take his staff in one hand and half the bacon clapped between two pieces of bread in the other, and go softly to the door. He, like old Kat, looked back before he shut it behind him, but he did not speak.

  *

  The short afternoon was almost gone when Malle woke. She did not look about her, not even to see whether Wat slept, but sat for a long time without moving, her hands in her lap, staring straight in
front of her, with her mouth a little open, and her eyes very wide.

  At last she got up and came to Wat. He lay quite still, just as he lay before she fell asleep, his face turned to the wall, and one hand under his cheek. She bent down over him, so that she could whisper in his ear.

  She said: ‘No darkness, no darkness, for God hath come so nigh in the darkness that it tore all to tatters, and now is quite done away.’

  When he did not stir she stretched out her hand and, touching his neck, found him as cold as any little frog. So she cried over him for a while, but then, without wiping away her tears, she began to talk to him, though, simple as she was, she knew that he could not hear.

  ‘Wat,’ she said, ‘listen how the wind blows, as if it were a great water rushing. All the trees in the wood toss their branches, and the leaves hiss and sigh. And though the doors are shut, in church it speaks too, groaning in the tower, for He groans with us. But the candle flames burn bright, lovely fire that we pluck from the empty air, s0 close He comes to us, for us to lay hold on in our need. So is the triumph of that High One great and peaceable, homely and glorious, and now and forever He sitteth down to His feast, waiting till we sit down with Him, and all the children have come home. But it is He Himself who bringeth us, each one upon His shoulder. We have but to stay still until He lift and carry us.’

  She leaned her head closer, as if she waited for an answer. Then she laid:

  ‘Stay till I come. I must tell your father.’