It was now that Dean Godwin showed the stuff of which he was made. Mounted on his black horse, still attired in his black gown and white ruff, and with his riding whip in his hand, he issued out of the Fair Gate. Forcing his terrified horse through the crowd, and slashing with his whip to right and left, he gained the summit of Carfax. As he sat there, reining in his horse but still using his whip, a little oasis of calm formed about him, the crowd falling momentarily back. . . . For Dean Godwin in a rage was an awesome sight and his whip, with the full force of his arm behind it, could sting. . . . But there was no possibility of making himself heard beyond the little circle immediately round him that contained, he saw to his astonishment, Philip Sidney the Poet and Faithful Crocker the Scholar, torn and disheveled and bloodstained and shouting as loudly as any there. . . . Really, thought the Dean in a moment of depression, if our scholars and poets can be corrupted into yelling hooligans in the space of a mere half hour the hope for civilization is small. . . . Stretching out his riding whip he hooked them towards him and looked upon them with disfavor.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded of Faithful.
Faithful removed a broken tooth from his mouth, spat out some blood, and shook his huge head in complete ignorance. . . . He didn’t know why he was here; he only knew that he was enjoying himself hugely.
“And you, Philip Sidney,” said the Dean sternly, “you can, I hope, at least tell me the cause of this disgraceful riot in which you, a man of birth and breeding, are behaving like one of the lower animals.”
Philip had no idea what they were fighting about but, wiping blood from his nose, he had the grace to look ashamed of himself. He hadn’t really wanted to come, for he imagined that he loathed riots; he had come because he hadn’t been able to help himself. But now that he was actually in it he found to his surprise that even to the poets of this world physical combat has its joys.
“If you two are here to show the stuff of which you are made,” said the Dean with sarcasm, “you will kindly show it by fighting your way to Saint Martin’s and ringing the bell to get me a hearing.”
The culprits bowed and accepted the task. Faithful with all his experience of London streets knew well how to get through crowds. Covering his eyes with his arm and lowering his head he butted his way through, kicking and pummeling when necessary, Philip joyously following. The crowd opposed them for all it was worth but they fought their way on, fighting now with an added joy because it was a Holy War, the cause of law and order for which they kicked draping a veil of seemliness over their primitive methods of attack.
But it was a relief, all the same, to reach the great gray rock of Saint Martin’s, and they clung to it for a moment, panting, before they opened the door and went inside, stumbled up the dark spiral staircase to the cobwebbed belfry and fell upon the bellrope.
In another moment a tocsin was booming out over the clamorous city, as it had done in moments of stress since Oxford was first a town; when the Northmen had come up the river in their terrible longboats to pillage and burn, during the days of the civil war when the city stood for Queen Matilda and the army of Stephen was sighted coming up out of the mist, or again during the great riot of Saint Scholastica’s Day, when Town and Gown fought each other for three days and nights and sixty scholars were killed. These memories and many others were present in the corporate memory of the crowd as the bell of Saint Martin’s tolled out; a strange hush fell, full of only half-understood little undercurrents of fear, and the oasis of calm that had already gathered about Dean Godwin grew and spread, like oil poured on a turbulent sea, so that in a little while he found himself speaking into a dead silence.
It puzzled him. The sea of faces raised to his wore the stamp of fear; the crowd seemed turning to him as though he were there to save them from some awful danger; the stillness was deep with the pain of the silent poor who must suffer for the sins of the mighty. . . . For a moment he himself did not quite know where in time he was. He felt uncertain of his own personality, knowing only that he had sat his horse at the center of a Carfax crowd a hundred times before. The scene about him seemed to flicker and change, the buildings blocked against the sky took now one shape, now another, a hundred different crowds seemed to surge against him, one melting into mist as another was superimposed upon it, and he himself was by turn Soldier, Priest and King. Only the earth beneath his horses feet, the little hill of Quadrefurcus that had always been here, remained firm and unchanging and brought him back to reality. . . . The bell ceased tolling and he remembered that this occasion was quite a trivial one; he look a grip of himself and of the crowd.
What was the matter this time, he demanded. Why was this peaceful, God-fearing city turned into a bedlam? This was the sixteenth century, he shouted at them. This was the Present Day, not the Dark Ages. Anyone would think, from the fuss they were making, that the Danes were upon them again, or an invading army clamoring at West Gate. What was the matter with them?
The bell had stopped ringing and the spell was broken. The fear had gone and the silence had gone. The crowd was itself again and eager to give information.
“Alderman Burridge is murdered!” yelled a dozen voices.
“Murdered?” said the Dean. “I think not.” he pointed with his whip to the Constable of the watch, propped panting against the wall of Saint Martin’s. “Constable, go instantly to the house of Alderman Burridge and bring us word of his true state.”
Nothing loth the Constable made off, for Alderman Burridge lived only just round the corner by Great Baily, and the Dean meanwhile harangued the crowd, his fine, sonorous voice rolling over them in a perfect tornado of chastisement. He had the gift of the gab, had the Dean, and he had not half finished what he wanted to say by the time the Constable came hurrying back.
“Well?” demanded the Dean. “Stand up here on my stirrup.”
“Alderman Burridge,” roared the Constable, mounting beside the Dean, “is very little injured, praise be to Almighty God, and has, so says his worship, enjoyed this evening’s entertainment mightily.”
A little gust of laughter blew up at the center of Carfax, gathered and spread, running through the crowd like fire, and soon the whole of it was rocking in a great gale of laughter. Those on the outskirts, who had not been able to hear what went on in the center, had not an idea what they were laughing at, any more than a great many of them knew what they had been fighting for, but hands on hips they roared with the rest.
Faithful and Philip, kneeling on the dirty belfry floor, peered through the narrow slits of windows at the scene around and below them.
It was a marvelous sight.
Sunset lay over the city. The sky above was a heavenly blue, unutterably peaceful and of a depth that seemed to reach to eternity, but to the west, behind the gray mass of the Castle, it was a molten streaming gold, as though a great furnace blazed beyond the rim of the world. The towers and spires of the city, quietly watchful, rose dazzlingly fair against the blue sky, and caught the reflection of that streaming gold on their comely crests, but down below them the huddled roofs of the city were bathed in tawny shadows. Beyond the town the meadows and the winding streams and the willow trees had drawn damp blue mists over their beauty, but beyond them the hills, like the towers, had light on their crests. And right at the heart of that beauty, a strange center for such peace, was the laughing, jostling, rowdy crowd, the city folk in their jerkins, caps and doublets of red and yellow and green, bright splashes of color among the sober-hued scholars. Their laughing faces, upturned to the stately figure on the black horse, caught the last of the sun and seemed alight with it, burning with an everlasting vitality. . . . No, there is no death, thought Philip, only a perpetual readjustment of the garment of life. . . . And how lovely, and how endlessly various, is this garment. The beauty of what he saw now caught at his breath and quick, broken little phrases of description came winging their way like butterflies into his opened
mind. Swinging away from the window he put an arm over his eyes, trying to close his mind’s door, to shut it fast on those phrases. They must lie there, dormant as an artist’s tubes of colors, till he had time to take them out and fasten them together into a poem. . . . But would they stay there? . . . The loveliest phrases are winged, and when the poet opens the door of the place where he put them he finds that the tiresome creatures have flown away.
“Here!” shouted Faithful from his window. “They’re taking Nicolas and Giles to Bocardo!”
It was too true. Dean Godwin, before running his horse and riding back to Christ Church, had indicated with his whip those who, in his opinion, had been ringleaders in the riot, and Nicolas and Giles were among them. Faithful and Philip could see them, Giles white with fury and Nicolas crimson with it, standing below the tower in the firm grasp of the Constable of the Watch.
Faithful and Philip were good friends and it was the work but of a moment to race down the steps of the tower and assault the Constable in the back. It did no good, however, for a couple of apprentices, self-appointed assistants of the Constable, seized them and cuffed them and in a moment all four were being marched down Cornmarket. It was a humiliating progress, for groups of uproarious townsfolk, reeling off to their houses and taverns with arms linked, mocked and jeered.
Giles was in a cold fury. . . . Here he was, wasting his time again. . . . It had not been his fault that he had joined in the riot, he had been lifted off his feet and planted down in the middle of it without being able to help himself, but it had been his fault that he had got himself arrested. In spite of himself he had got carried away by the excitement of the thing. He had had no weapon but his Greek Testament but he flattered himself that with that he had knocked out as many of the enemy teeth as other scholars had done with clubs and sticks.
“You’ll have plenty of time to work in Bocardo,” replied Nicolas sullenly, to Giles’s complaints of his lot.
“No good without my books, you owl,” snapped Giles. “Even my Testament’s gone now. Some brute tore it out of my hand.”
“You did a lot with it first,” comforted Faithful.
“Never mind,” said Philip sweetly from the rear. “Walter Raleigh will be so pleased to see us.”
3.
But Raleigh had not spent an unhappy evening. At first, when the sounds of battle reached his ears, he had looked out of the window, clutching the bars and bitterly cursing his fate. . . . It was always the same. . . . Whenever there was something really exciting going on in the city, something, moreover, that could be enjoyed without any financial outlay, he was always locked up in Bocardo, and when University life pursued the even tenor of its way, and there was nothing cheap to do but work, he was free as air. He continued cursing, with vigor and an extraordinary flow of language, for several minutes, and then turned abruptly back to the stool and the rough table where he had been working. Well, let the solvent enjoy themselves without him. Insolvent though he might be he had that to think of which was worth all the street fights in the world.
Raleigh, like Faithful, went through life with his library attached to his person, but his gods were not Virgil and the Martyrs but Baldassare Castiglione and his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert. Castiglione’s Cortegiano was always in his hand and Humphrey’s collection of sea-charts buttoned up inside his doublet. He read the first to fit himself for the adventure to which the second called him.
In the Cortegiano Castiglione portrayed the perfect gentleman; well-born, well-dressed, free and forceful in speech, learned, accomplished, magnificent and charming, courageous in battle, a leader and captain of men. Raleigh studied this portrait, modeling himself upon it line for line, preparing himself for the day when his speech must light men’s imaginations and his courage fire theirs, when his wisdom and knowledge must seem to them trustworthy and his personality one to be followed to the death.
His dream, to win for England an Empire beyond the sea, never seemed to him a dream too great to realize. He had a colossal pride. What he wanted to do he believed he ultimately could do. He was descended from the Plantagenets, he had the blood of kings in his veins, he had beauty and courage and vision, he had only to command men and surely they would follow. And his dream had been bred in him, it was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. It had been his in childhood when the chief excitement in his west country home, built among the moors above the river Dart, was the return of sailors from the sea. Many a bronzed mariner found his way to the manor house and sat before the fire with the Raleigh and Gilbert boys, telling mythical tales of the mystic west that set their minds on fire. Those were the days when Humphrey Gilbert, with little Walter to help, began to draw his sea-charts, half in joke and half in earnest. Some of them lay on the table before Raleigh now, inscribed with names that set his blood tingling. . . . America. Cathay. The Indies. . . . Strange fantastic coastlines had Humphrey given to these countries, and strange sea monsters had he drawn swimming the seas; and fine ships with bellying sails, not so big as the sea monsters but bigger than America, made their way unerringly to the place where they would be. There was an element of fun in these maps but there was gravity too. In the corner of one of them Humphrey had written words that Raleigh knew by heart. “Give me leave always to live and die in this mind, that he is not worthy to live at all that for fear or danger of death shunneth his country’s service and his own honor, seeing death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal. Wherefore in this behalf, mutare vel timer sperno.”
Raleigh shut his eyes, that no material sight might creep between him and the stately passing of the pictures that his fancy painted. The riot in the town came to him only dimly, like the beating of waves on the shore or the sound of the wind on the moors at home. America, he whispered to himself, Cathay. The Indies. And then again, America. Only the fringe of it was known. Beyond that lay a great no-man’s land that held one knew not what, a land where they might yet be a great nation of English-speaking men and women. He beat his fists upon the table. God in heaven, what a time to be alive! It was like living in a fairy tale. It was like living in a hall with a hundred doors; you might choose which one you opened but behind them all there was mystery. He wondered if there would ever come an age when all the world would be known. If so, he thanked God that he did not live in that age. He thanked God that he lived now, at this moment of time when chinks of mysterious light shone from beneath closed doors, now when it was still possible for a man to sail out into the blue and build a new Empire for his country. Would he do it while he lived, or would he do it after death? Though he never doubted ultimate victory he sometimes thought that his dream was too big to be realized in this life. He knew that he was sometimes now hated for his pride. Other men’s hatred might yet be the rock that would wreck him. Yet, he thought, though he might not realize his dreams he might die for them, and it only needed a small acquaintance with history to tell him that it is the dreams that are died for that live. Blood had a mystic quality. The life of a man was in it. Poured upon the hard earth it brought new things to birth. What did he care if he died? “Death is inevitable but the fame of virtue immortal.” One day not only England but that great nation beyond the sunset, so far removed from him that he could not even picture the cities they would build or the glorious shaping of their history, would hold his memory in perpetual honor. He knew that they would. Arrogantly he placed himself among the immortal gods, drinking his fill of fame. Words formed themselves in his mind.
My soul will be a-dry before,
But after it will thirst no more.
4.
Steps stumbling up the stone stairs disturbed him, and he raised his head angrily. Who was coming here to break in upon his dreams? Drunken brawlers from that riot in the town? He sprang up, meaning to push the table across the door, to keep them out at all costs. Then suddenly he changed his mind. Whoever they were he would try his power over them; see if he could fire them with his own ent
husiasm; see if it were true that he was a born leader of men. There was an altercation going on on the stairs and he had a little time. With long cat-like leaps he bounded about the room, tidying his possessions out of sight, bringing out his supply of candles, lighting them and wedging them firmly in their own grease on table and windowsill, placing a loaf of moldy bread and a jug of water on the table, and then, as the door burst open and four battered, disreputable scholars were pushed in by the old jailer, standing with one hand at his hip and the other sweeping an imaginary hat from his head as he bowed and bowed again. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he cried, “good evening. . . . By cock and pie, it’s the four bugs!”
He burst into a great roar of laughter and Nicolas, Giles, Philip and Faithful, who a moment ago had been feeling sore, dispirited and weary, suddenly felt as though they had been picked up by a great wind and set down in the one place where they wanted to be. They roared too, holding their sides, staggering as Raleigh hit them on the back, going into gale upon gale of mirth as though they had just been told the most exquisite joke in all the world. The old jailer, bringing in four more straw pallets, four more stools, some cracked platters and a villainous looking bit of cold meat, laughed too, tears of mirth running out of his old eyes and his toothless gums showing in a wide grin. . . . There was some magic in this young cockerel with the bright blue eyes, he thought, as he took his final departure, some strange unexplainable magic for which, unlearned as he was, he could find no name.