Marlowe
“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.