Each beating each through Albion.”
A cross now shoots upwards between the floorboards of the stage, unfortunately in the spot where Everyman is standing, so that he is hoisted into the air astride the timber. He continues to declaim his lines, hanging onto the top of the cross with both hands to keep his balance.
“Ah! Lord Jesu, where may we go?
Must we be in such wicked woe?”
At this moment, a Jesuit priest in a black cassock rushes from behind the scenes and pulls Everyman down off his high seat, audibly whispering, “Get off that cross!” The shaken Everyman is then propelled forwards out of harm’s way by the priest, who disappears as suddenly as he has come. The boy continues in a trembling tone:
“Certes, Lord, we must make moan
At Magus’ rule so sorely borne.
Yet barns do burn and widows weep,
If Grim do rouse us from our sleep.
Thou art wise, Christ, who sayest this:
Peace is but in paradise.”
No sooner does Everyman shut his mouth, when a fat boy, draped in a cassock far too long for him and wearing a gold crown of paper, comes galloping in, pretending to ride on a hobbyhorse. As he mimics the pawing of hooves, he treads on his cassock and takes a toss. Quickly recovering himself, he strikes a proud pose and tries a tentative strut or two, carefully hitching up his cassock about his bare calves as he does so. So Magus declares:
“A prince I prance, prickit in pride,
My sovereign Satan, at thy side!
Full faint and feeble creatures are.
Yet kith on kin he wageth war.
When Magus ruleth, none shall harm
The naked babe on mother’s arm.
None shall murder, none shall steal,
Nor rust corrupt the commonweal.
Would ye be rich? Bow down to me,
Else all is grisly misery.”
Everyman duly bows down before Magus, who puts his foot on Everyman’s back and drops his cassock over Everyman’s head. There is the thumping of a drum off-stage, and a tall boy dressed in a false brown beard and a red tablecloth clumps in on three-foot stilts. He tries to balance on the stilts without using both hands to steady their tops; but he immediately goes into such a desperate wobble that he has to catch a turret to stay upright. The turret bends alarmingly so that he staggers forwards and saves himself by grasping the cross. With one hand hooked round the beam, he beats his chest with the other, declaiming each word in a slow monotone:
“Alarum! Alarum! tro ro ro ro!
’Tis Grim, thump thump, come come, go go!
False Magus, while thy rule shall last,
Cometh the flood fleeting in full fast.
Drown dead crops and drown dead men,
On fowl and beast a great murrain.
Magus, avaunt!”
With Grim’s final word, he makes a mighty gesture with both hands and topples forward off his stilts, crashing down on Magus and the bowed Everyman, who yells, “Bugger it.” The Jesuit rushes on with a cane and whips Everyman off-stage, saying, “And ten thousand Hail Marys and a mouthwash.” Magus and Grim pick themselves off the boards and square up to each other, trading insults as sweetly as if they were exchanging cricket scores, and grappling with each other as though they were loving each other up. The dialogue runs:
MAGUS
“Fly, else I trow
The blood shall flow bright on thy brow!
GRIM
“Lose thy hands from off my ears!
Take thy fingers from my hairs!
MAGUS
“What, curst knave, art not down yet?
I trow to lie thee at my feet.
GRIM
“Rascal, wouldst thou scratch and bite?
MAGUS
“Yea, marry, will I, if thou dost smite.”
Grim now swings at Magus with a straight arm and catches him a clip on the ear, for the poor Magus is so tangled in his cassock that he cannot duck in time. The result is that Magus bursts into sudden tears and runs off-stage, finally tripping over the hem of his robe so that he literally falls into the wings. Grim struts about the stage and a pasteboard trumpet descends from the sky on another string, knocking the sun awry in its path. Grim seizes upon the trumpet and pretends to blow it. Off-stage, the scratching of a gramophone is heard, followed by the music of a wild ukelele. Grim, annoyed by the accompaniment, makes a valiant attempt at realism by pursing his lips and producing a rasping noise, followed by a halloo of “Tarrah, tarrah.” Then one of those exquisite thirteen-year-old boys, who make English public schools a heterosexual’s hell by the enticement of their pink lankness and blue-eyed blondness and segregated innocence, wriggles onto the scene in a sequined shimmy dress from the twenties. The Jesuits have allowed Lechery no breasts for decency’s sake; but they cannot stop the dress from being too tight on his rump, which waggles delicately behind him like two blancmanges in a satin bag. Batting his eyelids in the style of a vamp and chucking Grim under the chin, the moppet declaims in a cracked treble:
“Come to me,
Lechery,
Je vous prie,
Sir, I say.
In licking and lust,
He shall rust – Till death’s dust
Do him to clay.”
Grim blushes at such a straight proposition and seems ready to go along; but another boy, supporting a cushion with both his hands under the front of his purple shirt, rushes on late for his cue, then remembers the part that he is meant to play and waddles exaggeratedly, sticking out the cushion on his stomach like the bow-wave of a vast belly. And Gluttony speaks in a deep voice that would be bass if it did not sound like a tenor drowning in the depths:
“Ya, ya, man,
Drink red wine,
Eat fat swine,
Swell belly.
In hell shall sweat
He who doth eat
Too much at meat
His soul to slay.”
When he has finished his lines, Gluttony fiddles with his hands to unstring a goblet, tied round his neck; his belly, now unsupported, falls on the floor. Gluttony hands Grim the goblet and begins stuffing his belly back inside his shirt; Grim quaffs great draughts of air from the goblet, making jolly enjoying noises, as Lechery paws him timidly well above the belt to avoid Jesuit anger. Magus enters again, his cassock now securely hitched up by a cord about his waist. He carries a noose of rope in his hand, and, creeping up behind Grim, he slips the noose over his head and neck and pulls tight. Grim immediately begins choking to death, while Lechery says, “Round his arms, you fool.” The noose is unloosened and put round Grim’s arms, while Magus declaims:
“Mickle the worse, wail and woo.
Thou shalt thy rebellion rue!
With folly full from Envy’s school.
Must peasant madmen make to rule?
I’ll whip thee sore!”
As Magus raises his arm to beat Grim, Grim backs away, pulling Magus after him, since Magus has forgotten that he has used the other end of the cord which binds Grim to hold up his own cassock. Both boys begin tugging at the rope which ties them together, declaiming in turn:
GRIM
“Mercy, pardee!
MAGUS
“I’ll break thy bones till thou shalt die!”
While the tug o’ war of life and death continues between Magus and Grim, there is a creaking from the top of the tent and a pair of sandals appears, dangling beneath the brown canvas that cuts off the view some twenty foot above the stage. Magus and Grim and the two Sins look upwards in horror and wait without speaking. After some thirty seconds, the sandals descend another two feet, until the waist and legs of a boy are visible; his knees are covered by a white robe and are locked about a knotted rope. He remains stuck and lopped off halfway down; but his voice sounds heroically from beyond the canvas top of the proscenium:
“Ye peevish pests, patience I pray!
Hark to the horn of Judgement Day!”
; As there is no sound from the wings, Grim improvises his “Prrrrp, tarrah, tarrah,” several times to prove that Gabriel blows no mean trumpet. Above him, the bottom half of the white-robed boy continues:
“Christ cometh . . .’’
With a screech of pulley, the boy suddenly drops ten foot into sight, oscillating fearsomely on the end of the rope, twirling thisaway, thataway and hanging on for dear life. Lechery hitches up his dress above his pubescent thighs, scrambles up Magus and leaps onto Grim’s shoulders. Sitting astride the tall boy, Lechery can just reach the feet of the swinging Christ, and catching them, he steadies their owner by this superb display of team spirit and pulling together. Thus Christ, standing on the hands of Lechery, at last faces the audience in a state approaching equilibrium, and declaims:
“Christ cometh to save all this isle
From grisly Grim and Magus vile . . .”
Gog looks at the white-robed boy on the rope and suddenly sees himself twenty-five years before, his long square chin beardless and soft, his spreading lips blooming with ignorance, his broad nose not yet rough with age, his cheeks rounded rather than fleshy, his hair long and loose instead of short and stuck down, his body lean and disjointed, not set by the fat and the purposes of the years. And the boy on the rope sees the great Gog standing at the back of the rows of folding chairs, and his eyes widen and he shouts, “Father,” and he falls off the rope, knocking down Lechery and Grim and landing with a soft crash on his head on the boards.
The whole audience swings to stare at Gog, some hundred faces looking at the author of this final catastrophe, which has overtaken the miracle play of Everyman in Albion. And Gog, the father, turns and runs away out of the green and fallen cloisters of Rievaulx, as two Jesuits pull the curtains of the tent closed on the drama of chaos. And Gog flees up the way towards the south, leaving the road for the high bareness of Scawton Moor, overlooking Ryedale. And he turns to look back at the ruins of the abbey. And behold, the audience on the green square of the cloisters is vanished away, and the brown tent between the west transept and the lavatory is struck and gone utterly, and only the grey ruins sit in their squares and lines, a regular labyrinth that gives no clue to the puzzle of half an hour ago.
And Gog wonders if he has seen his own son, forgotten until now in the crannies of his brain, his own son playing Christ in a miracle play for his public school. Or he wonders whether he has seen a vision of his own past in the ruins of Rievaulx, when he himself once came down from the heavens on a pulley and had a vision of parental authority and fell down and concussed himself. And as he looks down at Rievaulx, the squares and oblongs of stone walls yawn at him with their roofless mouths. And he knows that the past is the past and cannot be checked. What is remembered is. Whether it were fact or fantasy, doing or dream, memory makes it history. And if there is evidence remaining from time gone, letters or documents or other witnesses, letters may be forged and documents may be untrustworthy and other witnesses may suffer from mass hallucination. Each man carries his own past within his own skull. That is the truth for him and there is no outside appeal nor confirmation. Gog as a boy or Gog as a father, what does it matter who he was or is, what does it matter to the great chain of the living and the dead, which begets Gog after Gog after Gog, world without end, amen.
XVI
Fire has purged the slopes of the moor, spreading its black absolution over turf and root and thicket. Low tufts of dead grass raise their bristles like old paint-brushes embedded in an abandoned builder’s yard. Briers are reduced to twists of wire, gorse bushes to burned splinters. Powder fine as dirty concrete rises at each tread of Gog’s boots. Beyond the dark blodge of the limits of the fire, runs of ochre pebbles make channels among the heather and felled trunks, weathered into silver pipelines by the wind. Gog makes his way towards a ruined tower near the crest of the moor, where ivy has spread its green-gloved hands up the stone walls and over the trunk of the nearby oak.
Gog rests with his back against the tower wall, lolling in the staccato peace of the day, where only birdsong and the rustling creatures of the undergrowth punctuate the silence. Then, in front of the drowsy blinking of his eyes, he seems to see a troop of cavalry dressed in iron breastplates and round iron helmets as it wheels over the crest of the hill and disappears. Gog stares after the horsemen; but they are gone. “Roundheads?” Gog says to himself, thick lips mumbling. “Roundhead cavalry. In sixteen hundred and forty-four, Cromwell went to Marston Moor.” And Gog laughs to recollect this doggerel of childhood that tells of King Charles and Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers routed by Cromwell’s troopers in most uncivil war.
When he has rested, Gog strolls up the gentle swell of the ground to the height of the moor. But as he crosses the ridge, he finds that the Roundhead horsemen are really charging the massed peasants, ranked round their peacock Dukes as dun and earthy as furrows. To Gog’s left, the Cavaliers gallop behind Prince Rupert, black curls and white feathers flying, gilt spurs and bright blue doublets a garish assault on the discretion of the moor. By Rupert’s horse, a small black-and-white dog snaps and yaps, Boy, Boy, not yet sliced in two by a Roundhead sabre, but gambolling along in the best chase of all, the hunt of men.
“Cut!” the voice of distant rage sounds faintly through the wind. And Gog turns to see a round bald figure in black britches and a brown hacking jacket jumping up and down with fury, while the minions grouped about him all begin running towards Gog and the operators leeched to their great cameras fall back like ack-ack gunners at the wail of the all clear.
The minions in their uniforms of grey trousers and canvas jackets and caps hustle Gog off towards the bald man, who has stopped jumping up and down and is tearing the tin of a megaphone into strips as though he were shredding silver paper.
“You schmuck!” the bald man says in an accent that seems to be a mixed cocktail of Viennese and Brooklynese with a dash of grated British. “You have cost me two thousand pounds. That wasted take cost two thousand pounds. Is any man worth two thousand pounds? No. Except me, who am worth millions, many millions. You know, of course, who I am. Hon Sternheim. You have heard, perhaps, of Hon Sternheim, the greatest director in the history of motion pictures.”
The minions’ heads nod like poppies in the breeze, while memory stirs lazily in Gog’s mind as he watches the bald and oblong skull, the eyes that are mere gashes at right angles to the straight nose, the mouth as fat as cruelty, the chin blunted at its tip, the obese body strutting as only a small man’s body can strut who seeks to dominate. Gog can now close his eyes to see the figure striding in jackboots, monocled and leering, across the screen of his projected memories.
“Von Sternheim,” Gog says, opening his eyes again. “The man you letch to loathe. Von Sternheim.”
The greatest director puffs like a turkeygobbler and saliva sprays out his mouth. “Hon Sternheim, you Frankenstein! I am Mr. Hon Sternheim. Ever since the war. Do you think, fool, that I could remain Von after Hitler had raped my beloved Vienna? I am Mr. Hon Sternheim. And you will pay me the respect my honourable title deserves. Ach, Vienna!” Like bathwater from a loofah, tears suddenly begin to roll down the seamy cheeks of the greatest director. “The cafés, the coffees, the Imperial Guard! The cream cakes, the Habsburgs, the corsets! The frauleins, the steins, the wines! How should you know? When I was Prince von Sternheim . . . but you will have seen Deaf Husbands, Dumb Wives, Crippled Children, Twisted Princesses, Queen Paralysis. My classic movies of dear Vienna, where the strong and the straight and noble once ruled and loved the Austrian Empire . . . Ah, King Charles!”
Gog turns with the greatest director to see a withered vine of a man hobbling towards them on crutches. His right foot is encased in a floppy black boot with an elegant pointed toe; his left foot is a club one. His left hand wears a dashing elbow-length suède glove, his right hand wears a hook. Below the broad crown of his plumed velvet hat and below his long ringlets, his chin rests on the curious hump that protrudes from the middle of his ch
est.
“How well you look today, King Charles!” the greatest director rasps. “Too well! Make-up!” At his shout, a swarm of girls in overalls cluster about the twisted king, powderpuffs and combs at the ready. “I want bags under his eyes. Make them portmanteaux! And a scar at the end of his moustache. Age him! I want him to gain twenty years in five minutes.” In a moment, the King is beset by the horde of cosmeticians, he is hidden behind a waving bush of etching and plucking and stencilling and applying arms. “My dear Charles,” the greatest director purrs, “remember, you are suffering for the woes of your people. That villain Cromwell, with all the gold of London in his saddle-bags, makes war on the King and his country folk. And you suffer! My God, how you suffer! I want that suffering to show.”
Here Gog dares to interrupt. “But King Charles the First was surely a healthy upstanding man . . .”
The greatest director whirls round on one heel, his hands on his hips. “If this was Vienna, I would whip you. Insolence! Do you think a painter can capture the reality that I, Hon Sternheim, can show in a movie? What can you show on flat canvas? A tinted photograph! While I, I capture the essence of the man, the suffering King, Charles the Martyr, crucified for the people and the good old days. Ach, in cinema, we must show the inside on the outside, portray the warpings of the soul.” His hand sweeps out to include the armies on the barren moor. “You might say, why Scawton Moor? Why not the real Marston Moor? But have you been there? No. It is all cows now, meadows and pretty hedges. It looks like a postcard, not a moor. But this, this is a wild moor, as Marston was once a wild moor. This is more like the original than the original. And that is film, my friend, that is the truth of the movie. We make people, we make places more like the original than the original. For the moving picture convinces more than any place, any person, any event there ever was. And if we convince more, we are then more true. We deny time, we resurrect the lost, we recreate what never has been. Do you know, there were no steps in Odessa? But now, because of that little Eisenstein, the guidebooks of Odessa, they have to put a cross on the map saying, ‘The steps were once there!’ ” The greatest director pauses for a moment, overcome with philosophy, then he commands Gog, “So put on your peasant coat, my giant schmuck. Pick up your pike. And go and stand over there, in the front rank of Good King Charles’s foot soldiers. You’re a big man and this is a big picture. And when you die, you can be proud of one thing. Once, the greatest director of them all, Hon Sternheim, talked to you, a mere extra, of the art which he invented and which shall die with him.”
Gog Page 19
