Shakespeare's Christmas and Other Stories. Arthur Quiller-Couch
of their talk and between the soft thrumming of strings. He remarked, too, that his companions had fallen silent.
Mother Witwold's door, when they reached it, stood open like the rest. Her house overhung a corner where from the main street a short alley ran down to Paris Garden stairs. Nashe, who had been leading along the narrow pavement, halted outside the threshold to extinguish his lantern; and at the same moment jerked his face upward. Aloft, in one of the houses across the way, a lattice had flown open with a crash of glass.
"Jesu! help!"
The cry ended in a strangling sob. The hands that had thrust the lattice open projected over the sill. By the faint foggy light of Mother Witwold's doorway our apprentice saw them out-stretched for a moment; saw them disappear, the wrists still rigid, as some one drew them back into the room. But what sent the horror crawling through the roots of his hair was the shape of these hands.
"You there!" called Nashe, snatching the second lantern from Burbage's hand and holding it aloft towards the dim house-front. "What's wrong within?"
A woman's hand came around the curtain and felt for the lattice stealthily, to close it. There was no other answer.
"What's wrong there?" demanded Nashe again.
"Go your ways!" The voice was a woman's, hoarse and angry, yet frightened withal. The curtain still hid her. "Haven't I trouble enough with these tetchy dwarfs, but you must add to it by waking the streets?"
"Dwarfs?" Nashe swung the lantern so that its rays fell on the house-door below: a closed door and stout, studded with iron nails. "Dwarfs?" he repeated.
"Let her be," said Burbage, taking his arm. "I know the woman. She keeps a brace of misbegotten monsters she picked up at Wapping off a ship's captain. He brought 'em home from the Isle of Serendib, or Cathay, or some such outlandish coast, or so she swears his word was."
"Swears, doth she? Didst hear the poor thing cry out?"
"Ay, like any Christian; as, for aught I know, it may be. There's another tale that she found 'em down in Gloucestershire, at a country fair, and keeps 'em pickled in walnut juice. But monsters they be, whether of Gloucester or Cathay, for I have seen 'em; and so hath the Queen, who sent for them the other day to be brought to Westminster, and there took much delight in their oddity."
While the others hesitated, William Shakespeare turned on his heel and walked past them into Mother Witwold's lighted doorway.
His father glanced after him. "Well, to be sure, the poor thing cried out like a Christian," he said. "But dwarfs and monsters be kittle cattle to handle, I am told." As the lattice closed on their debate he linked his arm in the apprentice's, and they too passed into the doorway.
From it a narrow passage led straight to a narrow staircase; and at the stairs' foot the apprentice had another glimpse into the life of this Bankside. A door stood wide there upon an ill-lighted room, and close within the door sat two men—foreigners by their black-avised faces—casting dice upon a drumhead. In a chair, beyond, a girl, low-bodiced, with naked gleaming shoulders, leaned back half asleep; and yet she did not seem to sleep, but to regard the gamesters with a lazy scorn from under her dropped lashes. A tambourine tied with bright ribbons rested in the lap of her striped petticoat, kept from sliding to the floor by the careless crook—you could see it was habitual—of her jewelled fingers. The two men looked up sharply, almost furtively, at the company mounting the stairs. The girl scarcely lifted her eyes. Scornful she looked, and sullen and infinitely weary, yet she was beautiful withal. The apprentice wondered while he climbed.
"Yes," his patron was saying, "'tis the very mart and factory of pleasure. Ne'er a want hath London in that way but the Bankside can supply it, from immortal poetry down to—to——"
"—Down to misshapen children. Need'st try no lower, my master."
"There be abuses, my son: and there be degrees of pleasure, the lowest of which (I grant you) be vile, sensual, devilish. Marry, I defend not such. But what I say is that a great city should have delights proportionate to her greatness; rich shows and pageants and processions by land and water; plays and masques and banquets with music; and the men who cater for these are citizens as worthy as the rest. Take away Bankside, and London would be the cleaner of much wickedness: yet by how much the duller of cheer, the poorer in all that colour, that movement which together be to cities the spirit of life! Where would be gone that glee of her that lifts a man's lungs and swells his port when his feet feel London stones? Is't of her money the country nurses think when to wondering children they fable of streets all paved with gold? Nay, lad: and this your decent, virtuous folk know well enough—your clergy, your aldermen—and use the poor players while abusing them. Doth the parish priest need a miracle-play for his church? Doth my Lord Mayor intend a show? To the Bankside they hie with money in their purses: and if his purse be long enough, my Lord Mayor shall have a fountain running with real wine, and Mass Thomas a Hell with flames of real cloth-in-grain, or at least a Lazarus with real sores. Doth the Court require a masque, the Queen a bull-baiting, the City a good roaring tragedy, full of blood and impugned innocence——Will! Will, I say! Tarry a moment!"
They had reached the landing, and looked down a corridor at the end of which, where a lamp hung, Shakespeare waited with his hand on a door-latch. From behind the door came a buzz of many voices.
"Lad, lad, let us go in together! Though the world's applause weary thee, 'tis sweet to thine old father."
As he pressed down the latch the great man turned for an instant with a quick smile, marvellously tender.
"He can smile, then?" thought the apprentice to himself. "And I was doubting that he kept it for his writing!"
Within the room, as it were with one shout, a great company leapt to its feet, cheering and lifting glasses. Shakespeare, pausing on the threshold, smiled again, but more reservedly, bowing to the homage as might a king.
V
Three hours the feast had lasted: and the apprentice had listened to many songs, many speeches, but scarcely to the promised talk of gods. The poets, maybe, reserved such talk for the Mermaid. Here they were outnumbered by the players and by such ladies as the Bankside (which provided everything) furnished to grace the entertainment; and doubtless they subdued their discourse to the company. The Burbages, Dick and Cuthbert, John Heminge, Will Kempe—some half-a-dozen of the crew perhaps—might love good literature: but even these were pardonably more elate over the epilogue than over the play. For months they, the Lord Chamberlain's servants, had felt the eyes of London upon them: to-night they had triumphed, and to-morrow London would ring with appreciative laughter. It is not every day that your child of pleasure outwits your man of business at his own game: it is not once in a generation that he scores such a hit as had been scored to-day. The ladies, indeed, yawned without dissembling, while Master Jonson—an ungainly youth with a pimply face, a rasping accent, and a hard pedantic manner—proposed success to the new comedy and long life to its author; which he did at interminable length; spicing his discourse with quotations from Aristotle, Longinus, Quintilian, the Ars Poetica, Persius, and Seneca, authors less studied than the Aretine along Bankside. He loved Will Shakespeare.... A comedy of his own (as the company might remember) owed not a little to his friend Will Shakespeare's acting.... Here was a case in which love and esteem—yes, and worship—might hardly be dissociated.... In short, speaking as modestly as a young man might of his senior, Will Shakespeare was the age's ornament and, but for lack of an early gruelling in the classics, might easily have been an ornament for any age. Cuthbert Burbage—it is always your quiet man who first succumbs on these occasions—slid beneath the table with a vacuous laugh and lay in slumber. Dick Burbage sat and drummed his toes impatiently. Nashe puffed at a pipe of tobacco. Kempe, his elbows on the board, his chin resting on his palms, watched the orator with amused interest, mischief lurking in every crease of his wrinkled face. Will Shakespeare leaned back in his chair and scanned the rafters, smiling gently the while. His speech, when his turn came to respond, was brief, almost curt. He would pass by (he said) his young friend's learned encomiums, and come to that which lay nearer to their thoughts than either the new play or the new