Part 2

_Where many a barge doth sail aund row with are_--

Gr-r-r! Did I not warn thee beware, master wagoner, of the kerbstones at the corners? We had done better by water, what though it be dark.... Lights of Bankside on the water ... no such sight in Europe, they tell me.... My Lord of Surrey took boat one night from Westminster and fired into their windows with a stone-bow, breaking much glass ... drove all the long-shore queans screaming into the streets in their night-rails.... He went to the Fleet for it ... a Privy Council matter.... I forgive the lad, for my part: for only think of it--all those windows aflame on the river, and no such river in Europe!--

_Where many a barge doth sail and row with are; Where many a ship doth rest with top-royall. O towne of townes! patrone and not compare, London, thou art the flow'r of Cities all!_

Who-oop!"

"In the name of----" stammered Nashe, as he listened, Burbage all the while clutching his arm.

"He dropped from the top gallery, I tell you--clean into the pit from the top gallery--and he weighs eighteen stone if an ounce. 'Your servant, Sir, and of all the Muses,' he says, picking himself up; and with that takes the hammer from my hand and plays Pyrrhus in Troy--Pyrrhus with all the ravening Danai behind him: for those hired scoundrels of mine took fire, and started ripping out the bowels of the poor old theatre as though it had been the Fleet and lodged all their cronies within! It went down before my eyes like a sand-castle before the tide. Within three hours they had wiped the earth of it. The Lord be praised that Philip Gosson had ne'er such an arm, nor could command such! Oh, but he's a portent! Troy's horse and Bankes's bay gelding together are a fool to him: he would harness them as Samson did the little foxes, and fire brushwood under their tails...."

"Of a certainty you are drunk, Dick."

"Drunk? I?" Burbage gripped the other's thin arm hysterically. "If you want to see a man drunk come to the gate. Nay, then, stay where you are: for there's no escaping him."

Nor was there. Between them and the wagoners' lanterns at the gate a huge shadow thrust itself, the owner of it rolling like a ship in a sea-way, while he yet recited--

"_Strong be thy wallis that about thee standis_,

(meaning the Clink, my son),

_Wise be the people that within thee dwellis_,

(which you may take for the inhabitants thereof),

_Fresh is thy ryver with his lusty strandis, Blith be thy chirches, wele sowning be thy bellis._"

"Well sounding is my belly, master, any way," put in a high, thin voice; "and it calls on a gentleman of Warwickshire to redeem his promise."

"He shall, he shall, lad--in the fullness of time: 'but before dining ring at the bell,' says the proverb. Grope, lad, feel along the gate-posts if this yard, this courtlage, this base-court, hath any such thing as bell or knocker.

_And when they came to mery Carleile All in the mornyng tyde-a, They found the gates shut them until About on every syde-a._

_Then Adam Bell bete on the gates With strokes great and stronge-a_

Step warely, lad. Plague of this forest! Have we brought timber to Sherwood?

_With strokes great and stronge-a The porter marveiled who was thereat, And to the gates he thronge-a._

_They called the porter to counsell, And wrange his necke in two-a, And caste him in a depe dungeon, And took hys keys hym fro-a._

Within! You rascal, there, with the lantern!... Eh? but these be two gentlemen, it appears? I cry your mercy, Sirs."

"For calling us rascals?" Nashe stepped forward. "'T hath been done to me before now, in print, upon as good evidence; and to my friend here by Act of Parliament."

"But seeing you with a common stable-lantern----"

"Yet Diogenes was a gentleman. Put it that, like him, I am searching for an honest man."

"Then we are well met. I' faith we are very well met," responded the countryman, recognising Burbage's grave face and plum-coloured doublet.

"Or, as one might better say, well overtaken," said Burbage.

"Marry, and with a suit. I have some acquaintance, Sir, with members of your honourable calling, as in detail and at large I could prove to you. Either I have made poor use of it or I guess aright, as I guess with confidence, that after the triumph will come the speech-making, and the supper's already bespoken."

"At Nance Witwold's, by the corner of Paris Garden, Sir, where you shall be welcome."

"I thank you, Sir. But my suit is rather for this young friend of mine, to whom I have pledged my word."

"He shall be welcome, too."

"He tells me, Sir, that you are Richard Burbage. I knew your father well, Sir--an honest Warwickshire man: he condescended to my roof and tasted my poor hospitality many a time; and belike you, too, Sir, being then a child, may have done the same: for I talk of prosperous days long since past--nay, so long since that 'twould be a wonder indeed had you remembered me. The more pleasure it gives me, Sir, to find James Burbage's sappy virtues flourishing in the young wood, and by the branch be reminded of the noble stock."

"The happier am I, Sir, to have given you welcome or ever I heard your claim."

"Faith!" said the apprentice to himself, "compliments begin to fly when gentlefolks meet." But he had not bargained to sup in this high company, and the prospect thrilled him with delicious terror. He glanced nervously across the yard, where some one was approaching with another lantern.

"My claim?" the countryman answered Burbage. "You have heard but a part of it as yet. Nay, you have heard none of it, since I use not past hospitalities with old friends to claim a return from their children. My claim, Sir, is a livelier one----"

"Tom Nashe! Tom Nashe!" called a voice, clear and strong and masculine, from the darkness behind the advancing lantern.

"Anon, anon, Sir," quoted Nashe, swinging his own lantern about and mimicking.

"Don't tell me there be yet more wagons arrived?" asked the voice.

"Six, lad--six, as I hope for mercy: and outside the gate at this moment."

"There they must tarry, then, till our fellows take breath to unload 'em. But--six? How is it managed, think you? Has Dick Burbage called out the train-bands to help him? Why, hullo, Dick! What means----" The newcomer's eyes, round with wonder as they rested a moment on Burbage, grew rounder yet as they travelled past him to the countryman. "Father?" he stammered, incredulous.

"Good evening, Will! Give ye good evening, my son! Set down that lantern and embrace me, like a good boy: a good boy, albeit a man of fame. Didst not see me, then, in the theatre this afternoon? Yet was I to the fore there, methinks, and proud to be called John Shakespeare."

"Nay, I was not there; having other fish to fry."

"Shouldst have heard the applause, lad; it warmed your old father's heart. Yet 'twas no more than the play deserved. A very neat, pretty drollery--upon my faith, no man's son could have written a neater!"

"But what hath fetched you to London?"

"Business, business: a touch, too, maybe, of the old homesickness: but business first. Dick Quiney----But pass me the lantern, my son, that I may take a look at thee. Ay, thou hast sobered, thou hast solidified: thy beard hath ta'en the right citizen's cut--'twould ha' been a cordial to thy poor mother to see thee wear so staid a beard. Rest her soul! There's nothing like property for filling out a man's frame, firming his eye, his frame, bearing, footstep. Talking of property, I have been none so idle a steward for thee. New Place I have made habitable--the house at least; patched up the roof, taken down and rebuilt the west chimney that was overleaning the road, repaired the launders, enlarged the parlour-window, run out the kitchen passage to a new back-entrance. The garden I cropped with peas this summer, and have set lettuce and winter-kale between the young apple-trees, whereof the whole are doing well, and the mulberry likewise I look for to thrive. Well, as I was saying, Dick Quiney----"

"--Is in trouble again, you need not tell."

"None so bad but it could be mended by the thirty pounds whereof I wrote. Mytton will be security with him, now that Bushell draws back. He offers better than those few acres at Shottery you dealt upon in January."

"Land is land."

"And ale is ale: you may take up a mortgage on the brewhouse. Hast ever heard, Mr. Burbage"--John Shakespeare swung about--"of a proverb we have down in our Warwickshire? It goes--

_Who buys land buys stones, Who buys meat buys bones, Who buys eggs buys shells, But who buys ale buys nothing else._

And that sets me in mind, Will, that these friends of yours have bidden me to supper: and their throats will be dry an we keep 'em gaping at our country discourse. Here come I with Thespis, riding on a wagon: but where tarries the vintage feast? Where be the spigots? Where be the roasted geese, capons, sucking-pigs? Where the hogs-puddings, the trifles, the custards, the frumenties? Where the minstrels? Where the dancing girls? I have in these three hours swallowed as many pecks of dust. I am for the bucket before the manger and for good talk after both--high, brave translunary talk with wine in the veins of it--Hippocras with hippocrene: with music too--some little kickshaw whatnots of the theorbo or viol da gamba pleasantly thrown in for interludes. 'Tis a fog-pated land I come from, with a pestilent rheumy drip from the trees and the country scarce recovered from last year's dearth----"

"Dick Quiney should have made the better prices for that dearth," put in his son, knitting his great brow thoughtfully. "With wheat at fifty shillings, and oats----"

"The malt, lad, the malt! His brewhouse swallowed malt at twenty-eight or nine which a short two years before had cost him twelve-and-threepence the quarter. A year of dearth, I say. It took poor Dick at unawares. But give him time: he will pull round. Sure, we be slow in the country, but you have some in this town that will beat us. How many years, lad, have I been battering the doors of Heralds' College for that grant of arms, promised ere my beard was grey and yours fully grown?"

"Malt at twenty-eight, you say?"

"Last year, lad--a year of dearth. Call it a good twenty in these bettering times, and wheat anything under forty-five shillings."

"Well, we will talk it over." His son seemed to come out of a brown study. "We will talk it over," he repeated briskly, and added, "How? The chimney overleaning the road? 'Twas a stout enough chimney, as I remember, and might have lasted another twenty years. Where did you draw the bricks?"

Nashe glanced at his friend with a puzzled smile. Burbage--better used, no doubt, to the businesslike ways of authors--betrayed no surprise. The apprentice stared, scarcely believing his ears. Was this the talk of Shakespeare? Nay, rather the talk of Justice Shallow himself--"How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford Fair?" "How a score of ewes now?"

A heavy tread approached from the gateway.

"Are we to bide here all night, and on Christmas morn, too?" a gruff voice demanded. "Unpack, and pay us our wage, or we tip the whole load of it into Thames." Here the wagoner's shin encountered in the darkness with a plank, and he cursed violently.

"Go you back to your horses, my friend," answered Burbage. "The unloading shall begin anon. As for your wage, your master will tell you I settled it at the time I bargained for his wagons--ay, and paid. I hold his receipt."

"For tenpence a man--mowers' wages," growled the wagoner.

"I asked him his price and he fixed it. 'Tis the current rate, I understand, and a trifle over."

"Depends on the job. I've been talkin' with my mates, and we don't like it. We're decent labouring men, and shifting a lot of play-actors' baggage don't come in our day's work. I'd as lief wash dirty linen for my part. Therefore," the fellow wound up lucidly, "you'll make it twelvepence a head, master. We don't take a groat less."

"I see," said Burbage blandly: "twopence for salving your conscience, hey? And so, being a decent man, you don't stomach players?"

"No, nor the Bankside at this hour o' night. I live clean, I tell you."

"'Tis a godless neighbourhood and a violent." Burbage drew a silver whistle from his doublet and eyed it. "Listen a moment, master wagoner, and tell me what you hear."

"I hear music o' sorts. No Christmas carols, I warrant."

"Aught else?"

"Ay: a sound like a noise of dogs baying over yonder."

"Right again: it comes from the kennels by the Bear-Pit. Have you a wish, my friend, to make nearer acquaintance with these dogs? No? With the bears, then? Say the word, and inside of a minute I can whistle up your two-pennyworth."

The wagoner with a dropping jaw stared from one to another of the ring of faces in the lantern-light. They were quiet, determined. Only the apprentice stood with ears pricked, as it were, and shivered at the distant baying.

"No offence, Sir; I meant no offence, you'll understand," the wagoner stammered.

"Nay, call your mates, man!" spoke up William Shakespeare, sudden and sharp, and with a scornful ring in his voice which caused our apprentice to jump. "Call them in and let us hear you expound Master Burbage's proposal. I am curious to see how they treat you--having an opinion of my own on crowds and their leaders."

But the wagoner had swung about surlily on his heel.

"I'll not risk disputing it," he growled. "'Tis your own dung-hill, and I must e'en take your word that 'tis worse than e'er a man thought. But one thing I'll not take back. You're a muck of play-actors, and a man that touches ye should charge for his washing. Gr-r!" he spat--"ye're worse than Patty Ward's sow, and _she_ was no lavender!"

IV

The Bankside was demure. But for the distant baying of dogs which kept him shivering, our apprentice had been disappointed in the wickedness of it.

He had looked to meet with roisterers, to pass amid a riot of taverns, to happen, belike, upon a street scuffle, to see swords drawn or perchance to come upon a body stretched across the roadway and hear the murderers' footsteps in the darkness, running. These were the pictures his imagination had drawn and shuddered at: for he was a youth of small courage.

But the Bankside was demure; demure as Chepe. The waterside lanes leading to Mistress Witwold's at the corner of Paris Gardens differed only from Chepe in this--that though the hour was past midnight, every other door stood open or at least ajar, showing a light through the fog. Through some of these doorways came the buzz and murmur of voices, the tinkling of stringed instrument. Others seemed to await their guests. But the lanes themselves were deserted.

From the overhanging upper storeys lights showed here and there through the chinks of shutters or curtains. Once or twice in the shadows beneath, our apprentice saw, or thought he saw, darker shadows draw back and disappear: and gradually a feeling grew upon him that all these shadows, all these lidded upper windows, were watching, following him with curious eyes. Again, though the open doorways were bright as for a fête, a something seemed to subdue the voices within--a constraint, perhaps an expectancy--as though the inmates whispered together in the pauses 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