THE ARENA
It was in the evening of a warm May day that the Prior and Chris arrived
at the hostelry in Southwark, which belonged to Lewes Priory.
It was on the south side of Kater Lane, opposite St. Olave’s church, a
great house built of stone with arched gates, with a large porch opening
straight into the hall, which was high and vaulted with a frieze of
grotesque animals and foliage running round it. There were a few
servants there, and one or two friends of the Prior waiting at the porch
as they arrived; and one of them, a monk himself from the cell at
Farley, stepped up to the Prior’s stirrup and whispered to him.
Chris heard an exclamation and a sharp indrawing of breath, but was too
well trained to ask; so he too dismounted and followed the others into
the hall, leaving his beast in the hands of a servant.
The Prior was already standing by the monk at the upper end, questioning
him closely, and glancing nervously this way and that.
“To-day?” he asked sharply, and looked at the other horrified.
The monk nodded, pale-faced and anxious, his lower lip sucked in.
The Prior turned to Chris.
“They have suffered to-day,” he said.
News had reached Lewes nearly a week before that the Carthusians had
been condemned, for refusing to acknowledge the King as head of the
English Church, but it had been scarcely possible to believe that the
sentence would be carried out, and Chris felt the blood beat in his
temples and his lips turn suddenly dry as he heard the news.
“I was there, my Lord Prior,” said the monk.
He was a middle-aged man, genial and plump, but his face was white and
anxious now, and his mouth worked. “They were hanged in their habits,”
he went on. “Prior Houghton was the first despatched;” and he added a
terrible detail or two.
“Will you see the place, my Lord Prior?” he said, “You can ride there.
Your palfrey is still at the door.”
Prior Robert Crowham looked at him a moment with pursed lips; and then
shook his head violently.
“No, no,” he said. “I--I must see to the house.” The monk looked at
Chris.
“May I go, my Lord Prior?” he asked.
The Prior stared at him a moment, in a desperate effort to fix his
attention; then nodded sharply and wheeled round to the door that led to
the upper rooms.
“Mother of God!” he said. “Mother of God!” and went out.
Chris went through with the strange priest, down the hall and out into
the porch again. The others were standing there, fearful and whispering,
and opened out to let the two monks pass through.
Chris had been tired and hot when he arrived, but he was conscious now
of no sensation but of an overmastering desire to see the place; he
passed straight by his horse that still stood with a servant at his
head, and turned up instinctively toward the river.
The monk called after him.
“There, there,” he cried, “not so fast--we have plenty of time.”
They took a wherry at the stairs and pushed out with the stream. The
waterman was a merry-looking man who spoke no word but whistled to
himself cheerfully as he laid himself to the oars, and the boat began to
move slantingly across the flowing tide. He looked at the monks now and
again; but Chris was seated, staring out with eyes that saw nothing down
the broad stream away to where the cathedral rose gigantic and graceful
on the other side. It was the first time he had been in London since a
couple of years before his profession, but the splendour and strength of
the city was nothing to him now. It only had one significance to his
mind, and that that it had been this day the scene of a martyrdom. His
mind that had so long lived in the inner world, moving among
supernatural things, was struggling desperately to adjust itself.
Once or twice his lips moved, and his hands clenched themselves under
his scapular; but he saw and heard nothing; and did not even turn his
head when a barge swept past them, and a richly dressed man leaned from
the stern and shouted something mockingly. The other monk looked
nervously and deprecatingly up, for he heard the taunting threat across
the water that the Carthusians were a good riddance, and that there
would be more to follow.
They landed at the Blackfriars stairs, paid the man, who was still
whistling as he took the money, and passed up by the little stream that
flowed into the river, striking off to the left presently, and leaving
the city behind them. They were soon out again on the long straight road
that led to Tyburn, for Chris walked desperately fast, paying little
heed to his companion except at the corners when he had to wait to know
the way; and presently Tyburn-gate began to raise its head high against
the sky.
Once the strange monk, whose name Chris had not even troubled to ask,
plucked him by his hanging sleeve.
“The hurdles came along here,” he said; and Chris looked at him vacantly
as if he did not understand.
Then they were under Tyburn-gate, and the clump of elms stood before
them.
* * * * *
It was a wide open space, dusty now and trampled.
What grass there had been in patches by the two little streams that
flowed together here, was crushed and flat under foot. The elms cast
long shadows from the west, and birds were chirping in the branches;
there was a group or two of people here and there looking curiously
about them. A man’s voice came across the open space, explaining; and
his arm rose and wheeled and pointed and paused--three or four children
hung together, frightened and interested.
But Chris saw little of all this. He had no eyes for the passing
details; they were fixed on the low mound that rose fifty yards away,
and the three tall posts, placed in a triangle and united by
cross-beams, that stood on it, gaunt against the sky.
As he came nearer to it, walking as one in a dream across the dusty
ground and trampled grass, and paying no heed to the priest behind him
who whispered with an angry nervousness, he was aware of the ends of
three or four ropes that hung motionless from the beams in the still
evening air; and with his eyes fixed on these in exaltation and terror
he stumbled up the sloping ground and came beneath them.
There was a great peace round him as he stood there, stroking one of
the uprights with a kind of mechanical tenderness; the men were silent
as they saw the two monks there, and watched to see what they would do.
The towers of Tyburn-gate rose a hundred yards away, empty now, but
crowded this morning; and behind them the long road with the fields and
great mansions on this side and that, leading down to the city in front
and Westminster on the right, those two dens of the tiger that had
snarled so fiercely a few hours before, as she licked her lips red with
martyrs’ blood. It was indescribably peaceful now; there was no sound
but the birds overhead, and the soft breeze in the young leaves, and the
trickle of the streams defiled to-day, but running clean and guiltless
now; and the level sunlight lay across the wide flat ground and threw
the shadow of the mound and gallows nearly to the foot of the gate.
But to Chris the place was alive with phantoms; the empty space had
vanished, and a sea of faces seemed turned up to him; he fancied that
there were figures about him, watching him too, brushing his sleeve,
faces looking into his eyes, waiting for some action or word from him.
For a moment his sense of identity was lost; the violence of the
associations, and perhaps even the power of the emotions that had been
wrought there that day, crushed out his personality; it was surely he
who was here to suffer; all else was a dream and an illusion. From his
very effort of living in eternity, a habit had been formed that now
asserted itself; the laws of time and space and circumstance for the
moment ceased to exist; and he found himself for an eternal instant
facing his own agony and death.
* * * * *
Then with a rush facts re-asserted themselves, and he started and
looked round as the monk touched him on the arm.
“You have seen it,” he said in a sharp undertone, “it is enough. We
shall be attacked.” Chris paid him no heed beyond a look, and turned
once more.
It was here that they had suffered, these gallant knights of God; they
had stood below these beams, their feet on the cart that was their
chariot of glory, their necks in the rope that would be their heavenly
badge; they had looked out where he was looking as they made their
little speeches, over the faces to Tyburn-gate, with the same sun that
was now behind him, shining into their eyes.
He still stroked the rough beam; and as the details came home, and he
remembered that it was this that had borne their weight, he leaned and
kissed it; and a flood of tears blinded him.
Again the priest pulled his sleeve sharply.
“For God’s sake, brother!” he said.
Chris turned to him.
“The cauldron,” he said; “where was that?”
The priest made an impatient movement, but pointed to one side, away
from where the men were standing still watching them; and Chris saw
below, by the side of one of the streams a great blackened patch of
ground, and a heap of ashes.
The two went down there, for the other monk was thankful to get to any
less conspicuous place; and Chris presently found himself standing on
the edge of the black patch, with the trampled mud and grass beyond it
beside the stream. The grey wood ashes had drifted by now far across the
ground, but the heavy logs still lay there, charred and smoked, that had
blazed beneath the cauldron where the limbs of the monks had been
seethed; and he stared down at them, numbed and fascinated by the
horror of the thought. His mind, now in a violent reaction, seemed
unable to cope with its own knowledge, crushed beneath its weight; and
his friend heard him repeating with a low monotonous insistence--
“Here it was,” he said, “here; here was the cauldron; it was here.”
Then he turned and looked into his friend’s eyes.
“It was here,” he said; “are you sure it was here?”
The other made an impatient sound.
“Where else?” he said sharply. “Come, brother, you have seen enough.”
* * * * *
He told him more details as they walked home; as to what each had said,
and how each had borne himself. Father Reynolds, the Syon monk, had
looked gaily about him, it seemed, as he walked up from the hurdle; the
secular priest had turned pale and shut his eyes more than once; the
three Carthusian priors had been unmoved throughout, showing neither
carelessness nor fear; Prior Houghton’s arm had been taken off to the
London Charterhouse as a terror to the others; their heads, he had
heard, were on London Bridge.
Chris walked slowly as he listened, holding tight under his scapular the
scrap of rough white cloth he had picked up near the cauldron, drinking
in every detail, and painting it into the mental picture that was
forming in his mind; but there was much more in the picture than the
other guessed.
The priest was a plain man, with a talent for the practical, and knew
nothing of the vision that the young monk beside him was seeing--of the
air about the gallows crowded with the angels of the Agony and Passion,
waiting to bear off the straggling souls in their tender experienced
hands; of the celestial faces looking down, the scarred and glorious
arms stretched out in welcome; of Mary with her mother’s eyes, and her
virgins about her--all ring above ring in deepening splendour up to the
white blinding light above, where the Everlasting Trinity lay poised in
love and glory to receive and crown the stalwart soldiers of God.