It was late; night had draped the sky in violet shadows and one star burned in the sky. The ghosts had vanished and the curfew that rang out now into the silence was a bell that tolled for their passing. Nicolas, as he turned in under the Gate, was not quite sure if he were the last mourner in a funeral procession or the first messenger who comes hard upon its heels with the tidings of a new birth. The violets that he still held crushed in his hand were the color of sorrow, but their scent was the scent of the spring.
Chapter 5: The Teachers on the Steps
Where man’s mind hath a freed consideration,
Of goodness to receive lovely direction;
Where senses do behold th’order of heavenly host,
And wise thoughts do behold what the Creator is.
Contemplation here holdeth his only seat,
Bounded with no limits, borne with a wing of hope,
Climbs even unto the stars.
PHILIP SIDNEY.
1.
THE June sun, flinging a shower of gold in at the uncurtained window, rescued Faithful from an unpleasant dream in which he was still a chimney sweep and was stuck in a loathsome pitch black chimney, unable to get either up or down. He woke up still bowed down by that awful sense of oppression and filth, and it was with amazement that he found himself lying in a pool of golden light, and stretching his body found himself free and unfettered. . . . Then he remembered where he was. . . . In one of the scholars’ rooms at Christ Church, a room that he shared with Giles Leigh.
The windows faced east and sitting up on his flock mattress, hugging his knees, he looked out across the quadrangle to the tower of Christ Church outlined sharply against the sheeted gold of the sunrise. He could tell by the feel of the cold air that it was very early yet and he need not get up for a little while. . . . He could sit and gloat.
He was a scholar of Christ Church. He had got what he wanted and he was so utterly and completely happy that he felt as though he had been born again. He realized that his experience was unique, that not many people got what they longed for, or if they did get it liked it when they had it. He was intensely grateful to whatever gods there were that he had been allowed this satisfaction. Perhaps, he thought, his present joys would not always satisfy; there would be fresh hungers, and he would set out on new journeys towards goals that he might never reach; but at least, he thought, the fact that he had once been satisfied made life worth while. Nothing in life, he thought, is so lovely as fresh beginnings, and nothing breeds more courage. He saw all the fresh beginnings in a man’s life burning like prophetic torches along the way, beckoning him on, crying aloud the good news in the charactery of flame upon darkness, and the little figure of man passing from darkness into light and then into darkness again, until it disappeared at the end of the journey into a blaze of light to which those torches that had seemed so bright were as night’s candles to the light of day.
The power of the sun increased, wrapping him round with its warmth, filling the room with beams of light that were like pointing fingers showing him all the furnishings of the room, severely practical furnishings that yet seemed fine to Faithful because they were bathed in the glamour of his new life.
There were the two narrow truckle beds in the further corners of the room, each with “bedding sufficient and meet for one man,” with the chest between them where Giles and Faithful kept “the honest apparel and comely for a scholar” insisted upon by authority. The room had two windows and in each of them stood a combined bookshelf and desk. At them Faithful and Giles would work for hours on end, straining to catch the last hours of daylight. There were a couple of stools in the room and a second chest containing bows and arrows, lanterns, snuffers and bellows. . . . That was all. . . . And Faithful, whose business it was to do the housework, but who as a scholar of Christ Church was more interested in the things of the mind, thought it quite enough.
It had not been so difficult, after all, to give him his heart’s desire. For a week after his arrival he and Canon Leigh spent every free moment locked in the latter’s study hammering at the classics, very often late into the night, so that Joyeuce thought they would kill each other with overwork, and protested through the keyhole with loud protestations that were taken no notice of. Faithful had an amazing memory and Canon Leigh was astonished at all he had remembered from his early days at Westminster; it made a very considerable foundation stone on which to erect new knowledge. At the end of the week Faithful had an extra good wash, rubbed himself all over with civet so that he should smell nice, arrayed himself in the new clothes purchased out of his crock of gold and was hailed by Canon Leigh before the Dean to show what he could do. Standing in Dean Godwin’s study, with his legs planted far apart and his hands behind his back, quite unabashed and unafraid, he had shown what he could do to some purpose. Set to dispute in Latin he went on so long that the panting Dean raised an imploring hand and begged him to stop. His Greek seemed to the Dean to be better than his own and what he didn’t know about astronomy was not worth knowing. His arithmetic made one dizzy and his rhetoric was without blemish. . . . Only about music he knew nothing at all; his singing voice being like a donkey’s and his ear, in spite of its physical size, being non-existent in the musical sense. . . . Nevertheless it was clear that the boy was a genius.
“Take him away, for the love of heaven,” said the Dean to Canon Leigh, wiping his brow, “he makes me positively ill. Had it not been for his ignorance of music I should have died.”
So that was the first difficulty surmounted.
Then came the question of ways and means, for though the crock of gold went far it did not go the whole way. This was got over by making Faithful Giles’ servitor. It was usual for a well-to-do scholar, a nobleman or squire’s son, to come up to the University accompanied by a poorer friend, the son of his village parson perhaps, who would act as his servitor and share his room, his food and his work, and so live almost free of charge. So Faithful became Giles’ servitor: kept his room in order, ran his errands, delivered his clothes to the washer-woman at the Fair Gate, dusted his books, saw that his bows and arrows were in good condition and concocted frightful medicines for him when his food disagreed with him. All this Faithful, a born hero-worshiper, found very agreeable, and Giles, born to be worshiped, found it agreeable too.
At the moment there was nothing to be seen of Giles but a confused heap of arms and legs under the bedclothes and the back of his dark head on the pillow. Giles, who did everything with thoroughness, slept so deeply that he might have been dead, but Faithful, looking at him and thinking of him, saw in imagination his paragon parading the room in all his princely beauty and arrogance.
He was the most strictly beautiful of all the Leighs. He had Joyeuce’s grace and height, his father’s perfect features and Grace’s dark hair and blue eyes. But in everything he progressed a little further in beauty than they did. He was taller than Joyeuce and far more graceful, being without that stiff bracing of the figure that marred Joyeuce’s carriage, for, unlike her, he met the shocks and jars of life with a strong will rather than taut nerves. His features, though the same as his father’s, were more sharply cut, flawless yet without a soft line anywhere, for hesitancy was unknown to him. He was acutely sensitive yet his sensitiveness was of a different kind from his father’s and Joyeuce’s, being entirely of the mind and not of the imagination. He could detect any smallest undercurrent of meaning in the printed argument or the spoken disputation but he had not the slightest idea when he was, or was not, trampling upon a person’s feelings. His intellect had developed far in advance of the rest of him. It was like a flame in which every desire but the desire for learning was burned to ashes. A brilliant future was foretold for him. He worked in a way that caused the adoring Faithful to shake his huge head in considerable concern, for Faithful in his multifarious experiences had acquired a sense of proportion. Giles worked nearly all night sometimes. Anyone would have
thought he had heard, from several centuries ahead, the advice given by Cyril Jackson, Dean of Christ Church: “Work very hard and unremittingly. Work like a tiger or like a dragon, if dragons work more and harder than tigers. Don’t be afraid of killing yourself.” . . . And Giles wasn’t. . . . But yet with all this he was not so fine a scholar as Faithful for he lacked Faithful’s humility. Erasmus’s daily prayer, that God would give to him a sense of ignorance, would have seemed wisdom to Faithful but tomfoolery to the arrogant Giles.
A well aimed shoe hit Faithful on the head and sent him bounding from bed like a jack-in-the-box. He had been almost asleep again and Giles was the first to be out of bed and standing in the sunshine, his lean brown body perfect as that of a young god but his temper entirely human.
“You sleep like a pig, Faithful,” he growled. “You ought to be up first. You’re the servitor, aren’t you? Anybody’d think I was, the way I have to waste my time hurling shoes at your head. Where are my clothes? Do we wash this morning?”
“There’s no need,” said Faithful. “We washed last Wednesday and we’re still quite clean.” He spoke with relief for when Giles took it into his head to want to wash Faithful had to go all the way downstairs to the well on the floor below and heave up a bucketful of ice-cold water with much labor and sloppiness. . . . And then Giles made such a mess all over the room that it took him twenty minutes to get it all mopped up.
“We don’t wash, then,” said Giles. “Good. Here, give me my clothes. There’s the bell going for prayers.”
They struggled rather feverishly into doublets, trunks, hose and ruffs while the unhurried bell tolled solemnly from the Cathedral. They were still smoothing their tousled hair with their fingers, and struggling into their gowns, as they raced down the wide oak staircase and through the doorway carved with the pomegranate of Catherine of Aragon, set there to commemorate the visit that she had paid to Oxford years ago, dashed across the quadrangle and through the cloisters to the Cathedral door.
Kneeling in the Cathedral, listening to the monotonous drone of the Latin prayers, Faithful found himself watching the sunshine streaming over the shrine of Saint Frideswide, that had been destroyed by Henry and restored again when Queen Mary came to the throne, and thinking not so much of the Saint as of Queen Catherine of Aragon, Mary’s mother, whose pomegranate ornamented his own doorway.
She had come to Christ Church in 1518 when the court was at Abingdon, to worship at the shrine, and she had been personally conducted by Cardinal Wolsey who wanted to show her the site where he had planned to build his Cardinal College. Faithful pictured her riding up Fish Street with her courtiers clattering behind her and her trumpeters going before, and the proud Cardinal riding beside her dilating on the glories of his College that was to be. She would have listened politely and courteously, Faithful thought, reining in her horse when they came to the site marked out for the Fair Gate, and in her pretty low voice with its foreign inflection she would have said how clever it was of him to have planned it all out himself, and how wonderful the Cathedral looked against the blue sky, but did he really think he ought to pull down the nave to make room for his quadrangle? But at this my Lord Cardinal would have turned a little huffy and she would have hastily changed the subject to the glories of the proposed College kitchen. It was to be a marvelous kitchen, he had told her, and was to be begun before any of the other College buildings, my Lord Cardinal understanding almost as well as a woman the relative importance of the different departments of life. How many oxen had he told her would be roasted in it at once? No, not really! His huffiness would by now have been dispersed and chatting amicably of culinary affairs they would have walked their horses in and out between the hovels of the common people that now cluttered up the ground where the Cardinal proposed to build his College quadrangle. . . . These hovels, the Cardinal would have explained to the Queen’s Grace, would of course be swept away. . . . Catherine would have wondered what would happen to the common people when their hovels were pulled down, but she was a little frightened of my Lord Cardinal and she wouldn’t have liked to ask. She was glad, perhaps, to get off her horse and go into the cool Cathedral, for it had been hot and dusty riding from Abingdon, and she was not very strong, and the Cardinal had talked a lot. Kneeling before the shrine of the saint, with the tapers burning and the choir chanting and the incense rising into the musty-smelling air, she would have covered her face with her hands, so that the crowd kneeling round her should not see her tears, and prayed with the desperation that informed all her prayers; that God would not let her babies die one after the other in the way they did; that she might keep just one little living son, only one; that Henry might not leave off loving her because her sons died; that it might not be true, as Henry was beginning to fear, that God had cursed their marriage. Surely, surely it couldn’t be true! Was their marriage a sin? She had not meant to sin. This saint, this Frideswide, had been a king’s daughter who had refused to marry a king. He had courted her hotly, as Henry had courted Catherine, but she had run away and hidden in the woods until his ardor cooled, and then she had come back and lived in a nunnery upon this very spot. Ah, she had been a wise woman! It was not very happy to be married to a king. Holy Saint Frideswide, pray for me! Mother of God, pray for me! Deus, propitius esto mihi peccatori! Well, it would be over sometime. The misery of her life would be over sometime and she would die and be forgotten of men.
But Oxford, bewitched by Queen Catherine on that memorable visit, had never forgotten her. There had been furious indignation when Henry threatened to divorce her, the women of Oxford creating such a disturbance in the streets that thirty of them had had to be shut up in the town prison of Bocardo. . . . And Faithful, kneeling every morning before the shrine where she had knelt and running in and out under her pomegranate twenty times a day, remembered her always.
2.
The half hour after prayers was a busy one for servitors. Faithful fetched Giles’s breakfast of bread and ale from the kitchen, delivered it to him where he stood sunning himself with other lords of creation in the quadrangle, and raced upstairs to “do” their room and eat his own breakfast of one stale crust at the same time. Material things seemed to him unimportant compared with the things of the mind and he spent as little time as possible over both these activities. With his crust held in his left hand he straightened the top covers of their beds with his right. . . . The underneath covers he left as they were, for as he frequently remarked to Giles, and Giles quite agreed with him, what was the use of tidying bedclothes that were thrashed into disorder again ten minutes after one had got into bed?. . . . This done he bolted the rest of his crust, removed the dust from the furniture with the bellows and refreshed the floor by sweeping the rubbish out of sight under the beds. As he worked he whistled happily, for this was the day when they went to the Schools for Thomas Bodley’s lecture on Greek verse, and Thomas Bodley, Fellow of Merton, could lecture in a way that set your mind on fire to such an extent that the flame of it could burn up all boredom, dullness and inattention.
A shout from Giles in the quadrangle down below made him fling the bellows into a corner and fly down the stairs again. The scholars were breaking up into groups and dispersing to their various lectures and Nicolas de Worde, also bound for the Schools, was standing beside Giles.
“Where’s Philip Sidney?” demanded Giles. “Mooning over his verses as usual. Go and fetch him, Faithful.”
Faithful scurried off with the utmost cheerfulness, for of all Giles’s friends he liked Master Philip Sidney the best. There was no one in the world like him, he thought, and there never would be. . . . He was unique.
Philip’s rooms were in Broadgates Hall, a lodging-house for Christ Church scholars just across the way from the Fair Gate, and Faithful ran across to them so often with messages from Giles that he had come to know the cobbles and smells of Fish Street quite intimately; today he ran along with his nose nipped between finger and thumb, for it ha
d not rained lately and Fish Street had a certain aroma.
He clattered up the dark stairs to Philip’s room and stood in the shadows knocking at the door with a beating heart. It was odd, he thought, how the knowledge that he would see Philip again in a couple of minutes always set his heart thudding as at the approach of some danger. . . . For what danger can there be in loving a person? . . . The worst danger in the world, whispered the shadows, the danger of irreparable loss. . . . He knocked again, urgently, gripped by unreasonable panic, suddenly afraid of the darkness in which he stood and the silence beyond the door.
“Come in.”
In a sort of fury of relief he pushed open the door and precipitated himself like a young tornado into the sun-filled room.
Master Philip Sidney, seated at his desk in the window, writing a love song with a large squeaking quill pen, looked over his shoulder, mildly surprised. “Is anything the matter?” he asked.
“I beg your pardon, I just thought perhaps you’d gone,” said Faithful vaguely.
“Where to? Sit down a minute while I finish this. What rimes with case?”
“Grace,” said Faithful, after long and painful thought.
“Thank you!” said the poet ardently, and dipping his pen in the ink was immediately lost again in the fairyland of creation.