“Sit down, gentlemen,” said Raleigh, motioning them with an imperial gesture to take their places round the festal board. “There is venison here, lark pie, marchpane, pasties, ale, wines of all sorts. Take your choice. Make yourselves at home. All that I have is yours.” Laughing, they pulled their stools up to the table and fell upon the feast with the appetite of hungry lions.
The other three had fallen before beneath the spell of Walter Raleigh, they knew of old how his superb gestures could create an illusion of grandeur that dazzled the eyes for just as long as he chose that it should, but Faithful was coming into close contact with Raleigh for the first time and was utterly bewildered. . . . This room where they sat was no longer a dirty little lock-up but a room in a palace, the cold meat and bread that they ate off cracked platters was venison and pasties upon golden dishes, the water was the nectar of the gods and the flickering tallow candles burned as though all the stars of heaven had come trooping in to light them. They forgot their aches and pains and bruises, they forgot the dreary uncomfortable imprisonment that stretched out before them, they forgot everything but the figure of Raleigh sitting at the head of the table, waving his knife in the air and telling them exciting tales in glorious language and a strong Devonshire accent.
In sober moments Raleigh’s friends had no faith in his stories, but tonight he held them spellbound. “In America,” he said, “vines laden with grapes cling to tall cedar trees, and sitting beneath them the natives drink the powdered bones of their chieftains in pineapple wine.”
“Why?” asked Nicolas. . . . The customs of these people seemed to him odd.
“That they may have their courage in them, of course,” cried Raleigh, bringing his knife-hilt down with a crash on the table. “Don’t you know that we all of us feed on the courage of the dead? If there had been no valiant men in the past to show us the way to live would we be anything today but spineless idiots? If we are spineless idiots in this generation will the men of the future have any chance of winning an Empire for England? No!” he shouted, taking a long pull of water from the jug. “It is now or never, gentlemen, now or never.”
“Tell us some more,” said Philip with kindling eyes. “Is it very beautiful, that land?”
“There are great mountains there,” said Raleigh, “crowned with snow, higher than you can conceive, and cataracts fall from them, every one as high as a church tower, thundering to the ground with the reverberation of a thousand great bells clanging together. The waters run in many channels through fair grassy plains, and there are paths there for the deer, paved with stones of gold and silver. The birds towards evening sing on every tree with a thousand several tunes, and cranes and herons of white, crimson and carnation perch beside the rivers. . . . Do you wonder, gentlemen, that I should wish to win this land of beauty for the Queen? I would give my life that she might have a better Indies than the King of Spain has any.”
“I do not think,” said Philip softly, “that any land could be fairer than this land. I would rather give my life to keep the beauty of this one unpolluted.”
Faithful looked from Raleigh to Philip Sidney and marveled at them both. Utterly unlike as they were they had something in common, some powerful attraction that would surely bring men tumbling at their heels wherever they might lead. Faithful, belonging to an age that attributed the unexplainable to the stars, told himself that no clouds had veiled the sky when they were born. They had more star-shine in their souls than most men. It shone out of them like the light of another country, expressing itself quite differently in their two personalities but the same in essence. In Philip it was a luminous beauty of character, in Raleigh it was an arresting combination of recklessness and intellectual power. He had the scholar’s mind and the adventurer’s temperament and the two together were as startling as a thunderstorm. Philip’s leadership through the darkness of life would be like a lighted lantern going on ahead, but Raleigh’s would be like lightning, more exciting, and revealing more of the surrounding country, but not so steady.
“What a liar you are, Raleigh,” said Giles with admiration. . . . They were beginning to sink down now from the high level of excitement to which Raleigh had whirled them, and criticism, albeit admiring, was creeping in.
Raleigh grinned. He knew himself to be a consummate liar, and knew too that his inspired inability to draw the line between solid fact and the creations of his own fantasy was one of his most valuable gifts as a propagandist. He laughed as he realized that though they might be critical now he had yet been able to sweep them off their feet. He knew, and none better, “how to tell the world.”
“But what I tell you now,” he said, once more pounding his knife-hilt on the table, “is true. I have at last discovered the Great Cordial and Elixir of Life.”
“Moonshine!” said Giles.
“You’ll blow the roof off Oriel with your abominable stinks,” Philip cautioned him.
Faithful, his head still whirling, realized that the talk had turned to Raleigh’s chemical experiments. “Will the Great Cordial really make money enough for all you want to do?” he asked breathlessly.
Raleigh turned his shining eyes upon him. “It turns base metals into gold,” he said, “and taken internally as a medicine it prolongs the life for no one knows how long. Alchemists have been experimenting to find the formula for generations but it has been left to me, Walter Raleigh, to succeed.”
“And you’ve actually used the Elixir?” whispered Faithful. “You’ve turned something into gold?”
“Not yet,” said Raleigh, “but as soon as I’ve paid my debts and am out of here you shall all come to Oriel and see me do it. . . . And then you shall drink of it yourselves and live forever.”
No one but Faithful seemed keen.
“The roof would come off,” Philip objected again.
“If we drank your muck we certainly should live forever,” said Giles grimly, jerking his thumb towards the dirty floor. “Down there.”
Raleigh’s own enthusiasm was quite unquenched by their lack of it. “Do you write verse?” he asked Faithful.
Faithful shook his large head sadly. Everyone up at the University seemed a poet. They all wrote verse, whether they could or not, and Faithful was ashamed to be among the few in this city of laughter who lacked the singing voice.
“That’s a pity,” said Raleigh, “because I have a verse reading in my rooms every Sunday afternoon and at the next one I shall, before reading my verses, make a demonstration with my Elixir. . . . Never mind,” he said generously, “you shall come all the same, even if you don’t write verse, and help me clear up the mess.”
“There’ll be one,” said Nicolas gloomily. “Bones and blood and the ruins of Oriel.”
But Raleigh was still undamped. He took some papers scratched over with strange diagrams out of his wallet, spread them on the table among the remains of the feast and the drippings from the candles, and began to explain and argue and persuade, his eyes blazing in the candlelight, his voice growing rich and soft as a cat’s purr as he cajoled them, mocked at their unbelief, and once more laid siege to their imaginations.
“No more poverty,” he cried excitedly. “My Elixir will make gold as common as the cobbles in the street. We shall pave this city of Oxford with gold, I tell you, like the streets of the New Jerusalem. Away with the children of poverty, sickness and thieving and envy and hate, down with them into hell! As well as building a new Empire beyond the sea we shall build a new world in England. It will be the Golden Age at last.”
“I wonder how many times men have said that before?” commented the skeptical Giles. “It’s all very well to lay the foundations of a new world, it’s often been done, but as soon as the walls are built up a little way something pushes them over.”
“Death,” said Raleigh. “The death of the men of vision who were the builders. . . . But with my Elixir the life of the great will be prolonged
indefinitely. Those whom the gods love will live, not die. The earth will be peopled by upright kings, poets, dreamers, who will see their life’s work through to the end.”
“The rogues and vagabonds might want to have their lives indefinitely prolonged too,” suggested Faithful. Enthusiastic as he was he could foresee a lot of difficulties.
“Croakers!” said Raleigh scornfully. “Oh ye of little faith, finish up the food and let’s have some singing. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow, without my Elixir, the likes of you will die.”
They finished the bread and water and began to sing, roaring out song after song, thumping the table with the handles of their knives, until the whole of Bocardo rang with their singing. Other prisoners in their cells heard and sang too, and the old deaf jailer, sitting on the stone steps outside enjoying a little meal of his own, stopped eating to cup his hand behind his ear to listen. . . . Times were changing, he thought, times were changing. These were good days. He could remember other days, and not so long ago either, when there had been no singing in Bocardo. Men had spent their last days on earth in Bocardo. Archbishop Cranmer had been led out to die at the stake from that very room where those boys were feasting. The Archbishop had eaten his last meal there and he, John Bretchegyrdle, had served it to him. . . . He hadn’t fancied it. . . . Well, times were changing, he thanked God, and a new world being built by these youngsters. He wished good luck to their building; he, an old man, who would not live to see what they had built. . . . He removed his hand from his ear, for the singing had died away, nodded once or twice and was asleep.
5.
In the prisoners’ room they had spread their pallets and all but Faithful had fallen asleep too. They were so drugged by weariness and Raleigh’s dreams that they had forgotten their cuts and bruises, the discomfort of their beds and the hardness of their lot. All night they would sleep blissfully, without moving, undisturbed by each other’s grunts and snores, presented by fickle sleep with that blessed gift of oblivion that in her favoritism she bestows only upon the healthy and happy who do not need it.
But it did not come all at once to Faithful. The other four were sleeping side by side on the further side of the table but Faithful, being only a servitor, had thought it right to lay his pallet at a respectable distance, under the window that looked on Cornmarket.
But he could not get comfortable on it. He began to feel very itchy. He scratched himself on his back and he scratched himself on his chest, and he scratched himself up and down his thighs, and then he realized with horror that there were other people besides himself on, and in, this straw pallet. . . . The last prisoner to lie on it must have left them behind as a donation to Bocardo.
Faithful had become fastidious since he came up to Oxford, and he didn’t like it. He rolled hastily off the pallet, scurried to the table and climbed upon it. The creatures would find him in time, of course, for they were intelligent creatures; they would climb up the walls, stroll across the ceiling and drop upon him from above; but he had a little while before they thought of that.
He sat cross-legged on the table, his body cold and tired and itching but his mind burning with excitement. What a day he had had! A glorious day of eating, drinking, learning, dreaming and fighting. Picture after picture flashed across his mind: the tower of the Cathedral clear-cut against the sky in the morning light; a racing sea, frilled with white-capped waves, over which a ship carried him to the Isles of Greece; the laughing colored crowd at Carfax lit up by the sunset; the mystic land of the west where carnation colored birds perch beside the rivers; and last of all Raleigh’s dream of a city paved with gold where there was no more sin.
And suddenly the midsummer moon of Sidney’s poem had risen. She came out from behind a cloud, round and white as a moon-daisy, and Oxford was flooded with her light. Cornmarket was clear as daylight, and the tower of Saint Martin’s with a white cloud floating from it like a banner, and the Fair Gate of Christ Church with the stars above it. The rats were illumined too; dancing about in Cornmarket in rich happiness; for this was their hour and no man defrauded them of it.
This was his hour, too, thought Faithful. Today he had been happy, and neither the past nor the future could take today away from him. Suddenly he was so overwhelmingly sleepy that all discomfort vanished. He curled himself up on the hard table and went to sleep, to dream that he was king of the world.
Chapter 7: Midsummer Eve
Praised be Diana’s fair and harmless light,
Praised be the dews, wherewith she moists the ground,
Praised be her beams, the glory of the night,
Praised be her power, by which all powers abound.
Praised be her nymphs, with whom she decks the woods,
Praised be her knights, in whom true honour lives,
Praised be that force, by which she moves the floods;
Let that Diana shine, which all these gives.
In heaven Queen she is among the spheres,
In earth she Mistress-like makes all things pure,
Eternity in her oft change she bears,
She beauty is, by her the fair endure.
Time wears her not, she doth his chariot guide,
Mortality below her orb is placed,
By her the virtue of the stars down slide,
In her is virtue’s perfect image cast.
A knowledge pure it is her worth to know,
With Circes let them dwell that think not so.
WALTER RALEIGH.
1.
THE next day was the feast of Saint John the Baptist and the University authorities, very stately in cap and gown, progressed in a body to hear the University sermon preached from the open air pulpit in the quadrangle of Magdalen College. The pulpit was hung with green boughs and the ground was strewn with rushes, in memory of Saint John preaching in the wilderness, the sky was blue and the hearts of all sang for gladness because in honor of Saint John the morning was free from lectures. It was true the sermon lasted for over an hour, but the rushes were sweet and fragrant to sit upon, and if thoughts wandered they followed the birds through sunshine and blue air to the place where the dreams come true.
There was a spirit of leisure abroad in Oxford that day, a light-heartedness that belonged to Midsummer Eve. The color of the flowers in the gardens seemed richer than usual, and their scent sweeter. The day was made for love and laughter, for staring at the lilies and praising the deep vermilion of the rose, and everyone hastened to put it to its proper use.
Even the industrious and learned felt singularly disinclined for labor. After the early dinner in hall the Dean and Canon Leigh found themselves strolling backwards and forwards over the trampled flowers and grass of the quadrangle, enjoying the warmth and the soft south wind that brought with it the scent of the fields and hedgerows beyond South Gate, discussing with an air of great gravity trivial matters that would not have detained them in the quadrangle for a single moment had the wind been in the east.
A stone in the center of the quadrangle marked the site of an old preaching cross, where the friars had preached to the common folk whose hovels Cardinal Wolsey had pulled down, and here they paused a moment, their thoughts going backward over the history of their College and forward to its future.
“What we want here,” said the Dean, his foot upon the stone, “is a pond.”
“What for?” asked Canon Leigh.
“If our scholars, in their last night’s stampede from the hall to the Fair Gate, could have encountered a pond midway,” said the Dean, “Westminster could have ducked Ipswich in it and there would have been an end of the trouble.”
“It would be a bother to dig it,” mused Canon Leigh. “The ground is made up of old foundations here.”
“I shall leave it to posterity,” said Dean Godwin. “I have no doubt that posterity will see the need for a pond. There could be goldfish in it, to give an o
stensible reason for its existence and disguise its real purpose.”
“No lives lost last night, I hope?” said Canon Leigh.
“No, but some injuries and a good deal of damage done. That scoundrel Nicolas de Worde seems to have been at the bottom of it as usual. He’s in Bocardo.”
“And I’m afraid that Giles and Faithful, my adopted son, keep him company,” said Canon Leigh with shame.
“They but followed in the wake,” consoled the Dean. “One behind the other like a school of dolphins. It’ll do none of them any harm to stay in Bocardo till tomorrow morning. . . . Ah, look there! There’s a sight to console you for the sins of your sons!”
Canon Leigh looked and his face lit up with pride, for his four daughters, together with his son Diccon and his dogs Pippit, Posy and Spot, had issued out from their front door and were crossing the quadrangle with mincing steps. They were going shopping, apparently, for each girl carried a basket of plaited rushes in one hand and a nosegay of flowers to protect her nose from the smells of the town in the other. They had taken off their aprons and on their heads instead of their white caps they wore coifs of velvet to match their dark blue gowns. Diccon was attired today in fairy green, like a miniature Robin Hood, and on his head was a tiny cap with a long peacock’s feather in it, a new acquisition that he was wearing for the first time. The dogs were attached to the persons of the twins and Grace with substantial chains, for dogs, with the exception of Satan, were not allowed in College, and if the Canons kept them they must keep them under severe control and not allow them loose in the quadrangle. . . . The Leigh dogs largely spent their day lying just inside the door, waiting for an unsuspecting visitor or tradesman to open it, when they would immediately bound out, pursued by the entire household with lamentable cries.