“Prithee, Kit, pay me the pound you owe me.”
Mr. Christopher Marlowe, Master of Arts, playwright and rakehell,
sprawled his arms upon the tavern table, and leered inebriously across
it at the speaker. Behind him an open red lattice gave upon a sunny
street alive with swarthy gold-ear-ringed mariners; before his sleepy
eyes glowed, framed in the end of a black passage, like a picture in a
diorama, a square of green banks and flashing waters webbed with
rigging. The waters were the waters of Deptford Creek, and the tackle,
or at least part of it, belonged to Drake’s ship, the _Golden Hind_,
already, in this June of the year 1593, laid by for perpetuity at her
Majesty’s command, as a memorial of her nation’s characteristic
prowess.
Marlowe tinkled with his fingers an empty flagon on the table.
“A pound, Frank Archer?” quoth he in a slurred derisive voice. “Listen
here--as empty as my pocket or your head. An I had a pound, I should
know better what to do with it.”
The man he addressed, a fellow-actor in Lord Strange’s company, stood
up sulkily before him. He was a neurotic player of women’s parts, and
somehow uncleanly attractive to the sex he paraphrased. Perhaps he
understood it enough to be feared by it--a lithe vicious creature, as
white-faced as a girl, and subject to feminine spites and hysterics.
He hated the playwright just now, not only because the latter owed him
money, but because the two were rival suitors for the favour of some
riverside Thaïs. It was a pitiful association, as who, regarding that
other figure of bright genius, could not but feel. Not yet thirty,
with blue eyes and honey hair, the face of an angel, the forehead of a
sage, the indulgence of insatiable appetites had already marked down
this Christopher Marlowe for death or insanity. He seemed to find no
adequate satisfaction for his passions’ hunger short of feeding their
ravenous fires, as Cellini fed the molten arteries of his Perseus,
with dishes and quart measures.
“An you had one?” protested the player. “What! with your _Edward_
still mouthing it at the ‘Rose’?--a damned play.”
“A damned play lines no purses,” said Marlowe.
“Pay me my pound, I say.”
“For what? To frank you to the stews? A man were a fool so to
accommodate his rival.”
“Ah! You fear my rivalry.”
“I fear the woman’s cupidity, sir. If Kit with gold, the better; but
gold at any price, says she. So they compound. Will you take a
post-obit?”
“I want my money, Kit Marlowe.”
“How the parrot repeats! No, on my honour, Frank, on my honour. I am
drunk out. Should I not otherwise have been before you with the girl?
I cannot pay.”
A shadow darkened the lattice, and Archer, on the point of retorting,
paused with his mouth open. Some stranger, attracted by the colloquy,
had stopped to listen. He came round now by the open porch and entered
the room.
“By your favour, sirs,” he said, “I overheard a name to whose
possessor methought I owed a duty. Was not it Master Marlowe’s, the
playwright’s.”
Christopher nodded, without rising.
“Duty’s a dry debt,” said he. “I would you had ought the name that cup
of burnt sack which my present poverty denies me.”
The new-comer was a young man--little more than his own age--of a very
fine and distinguished appearance. His face was delicate and handsome,
but a little irregular in its contour, as if its commanding
intelligence were easily at the mercy of its humour. A chestnut
moustache and beard, small but already strong, clothed a jaw a thought
underhung. The eyes above were wonderful--brown vivacious lights of
sagacity that seemed to take all observation for their province. A
comely compact figure, of the average height, clothed sombrely but
richly in purple velvet, a snowy ruff, a flexible black hat with a
rolled band of silk above its brim--such completed a personality which
was as attractive as it was compelling.
“Is that so?” said the stranger. “Genius insolvent? ‘_Ingenium res
adversæ nudare solent, celare secundæ._’ Your poverty should be your
gain, sir.”
“As with the Horace you quote?” answered the playwright. “I ask for
nothing better, sir, nor for a more enlightened Mæcenas than her
Majesty’s Counsel-Extraordinary.”
Mr. Francis Bacon--for it was he, indeed--laughed, knowing himself
detected, as if pleased.
“I am well answered,” he said. He was already, young as he was, in
advance of his amazing promise--a Bencher and Reader of his Inn, a
Member of Parliament, my Lord of Essex’s loved client. And his vast
imagination had been the first to grasp the full significance of the
dramatic revolution inaugurated by this scapegrace genius who sat
revealed before him. “And by a scholar,” he added.
“An exhibitioner, an it please your worship,” cried the other.
“Bachelor and Master of Arts of Benet’s College of your own
University; translator of Helen’s Rape from Coluthus, and, since, a
humble reformer of the Miracles, and, as some aver, even a worker of
new ones.”
“I have been eye and ear-witness of your _Tambourlaine_,” said the
stranger; “of your _Faustus_, of your _Jew_; lastly of your _Edward
the King_; and I have no desire to traverse the statement. You have
done things; you have revealed; you have opened out worlds which
others, perchance, shall colonise. I doff my hat to that fine madness
of your Muse--the hot passion that tears the ‘unities’ to rags and
leaves her clothed in Nature. Withal, Master Marlowe, I have a bone or
two to pick with you.”
“Alack!” cried the playwright: “this arid mirthless feast!”
“Anon, anon, my gentleman! Grace before meat.”
“But sack before all. Have you never mastered, learned sir, the five
most excellent reasons for drinking?”
“I know them not.”
“Why, a friend’s visit, the thirst that is, the thirst that will be,
the flavour of the wine, and any other reason.”
“They are reasons for. There is one more potent against.”
“What’s that?”
“Why reason itself, which, being robbed by wine, hath no reason to
applaud it.”
He saw, indeed, that the man was irretrievably drunk, and that he was
wasting time on him. He prepared to go on his way--which was to
Greenwich, where the Court was being held.
“Not robbed, but transmuted,” cried Marlowe. “O liquid alchemy! So to
be traduced! Have I not ought to thee all the golden treasures of my
brain? And he prefers a bone! Well, sir, pick it, pick it.”
“It is german to the matter, I think. Thy golden treasures sink thee
even like the shipwrecked miser’s laden belt. Not reason exalted is
wine’s, but reason debased--so lowered in the mind’s balance that it
sees all the world lopsided, deformed. Such is my quarrel, sir, with
the author of the _Jew of Malta_. A man cannot lust with him but he
can do naught else; a Jew cannot be a Jew but he is an unredeemed
monster. It is not so in fact; we derive from the multitudinous
past--are compact of a thousand inconsistencies. There is more good
than ill in all men. The purpose of the drama should be to hold a
mirror up to Nature--to give us truth, not anamorphosis. There is no
truth in wine, despite the proverb.”
He moved to go, and the playwright sprang to his feet.
“No truth?” he cried. “Then let me swallow lies faster than Churchmen
can promulgate them. The world’s redeemed, they say--I see it not; we
are the children of a beneficent Providence, they say--It will not
even feed us, but sends the worm and storm to kill the grain It’s
given. My figments are the types of what I see--passion, black malice,
usury--selfishness unredeemed by God’s love, but tempered, brute-like,
by His terror. An arrant orb of reptiles, worshipping through fear.
And so I paint it--sober. Then--drink! Ah, it is my good angel, my
better half, my sweet gentle mate that woos me to the larger
temperance. I could show you things--but there! Not truth?--not sordid
truth? Give me the noble lie, then, that transports me to Elysium,
that lends me the wider vision, and I will rain benevolence on this
crawling sphere. I am no pessimist in wine.”
His eyes were flaming, his breast heaved, some real emotion strung
him.
The great lawyer smiled. “God forbid I should debar you Elysium,” he
said, and throwing a gold angel on the table, he left the room.
For some moments after he was gone Marlowe, his passion slowly
subsiding, stood eyeing the bright coin.
“A lackey’s vail,” he said at length, “yet the obolus to pay my
passage to Elysium. And did I not earn it? Answer, old sack; answer,
my rosy Thaïs of the leaping-house. Elysium, Elysium! O, it opens to
me!”
A hand came past him like a snake and nipped the coin.
“The debt you ought me,” gulped Archer, with a pallid snigger. “We are
quits at last, Christopher.”
With a snarl the playwright turned on the thief.
“Give me back mine own.”
“It is mine.” He hugged and cherished the piece convulsively. “You
ought it me. I have the first claim--to Doll and your Elysium.”
“To hell rather--I’ll send you there--be warned.”
“I’ll not yield it.”
He slithered aside, preparing to bolt. With a scream of rage Marlowe
drew a knife from his belt and sprang upon him. The actor, warding off
the assault, struck out blindly. His arm caught the vicious wrist with
a force that made it twist and recoil, driving back the blade full
into the eye of the assailant. There followed a gasp, a stagger, a
tearing fall--and then silence.
It was the prelude to that immortal music whose symphony had already
closed in Elysium.
And the lawyer, profoundly thoughtful, went unconscious on his way.