One Dagger For Two Page 3

  “Do you remember Greene?” said Marlowe that night in the Boar’s Head with Nashe and Frizer, after leaving the gaming-house. “He always had bad luck at the tables.”

  “Bad luck in everything,” said Nashe. “Why do you speak of Greene?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t get him out of my mind.”

  “Wash him out,” said Frizer, and passed the bottle.

  But even Rhenish could not wash Greene out of Marlowe’s mind. Why! hadn’t the rogue died of drinking this very Rhenish wine and eating pickled herrings? “…how in the end thou shalt be visited…” How? Like Greene himself? Pray God not!

  Never had Marlowe had so much money to waste. He had good steady luck, on the whole; but such a win as this had never happened to him in his life before. And he resented it. With money in his purse, he must spend it, and that would mean no work; would mean, for a time at least, an end to all his New Year oaths.

  Sitting in that large airy tavern in Great Eastcheap, with the coals flaring in the grate under the spit and bursting into spouts of yellow, snarling venom as the fat dripped on them; with two merry friends on the settle opposite, with unlimited drinks within call, with laughter, song and music on all sides, Marlowe was not happy. It was the money that made him unhappy, the coins were a drag in his purse, weighing him towards earth, away from the halcyon of poetry. Hero and Leander seemed a long, long way away; and suddenly he realized that he had left his characters beginning an embrace, and it made him laugh.

  “I left my lovers clutching each other,” he explained to his friends. “Listen:

  ‘Therefore unto him hastily she goes,

  And, like Salmacis, her body throws

  Upon his bosomy where with yielding eyes

  She offers up herself a sacrifice…’

  They’ve been like that for days and days now!”

  “Let them stay like that,” said Frizer, “for ever and for ever, and thus be kinder than God.”

  “Nay,” said Nashe, “kill him before he wakes up to disillusion and finds his Hero a mewling brach like my Lucy.”

  “How is Lucy?” asked Marlowe. He had forgotten Nashe’s love.

  “Never ask me,” said Nashe, hiding his face behind the pewter-pot. “Ask the butcher-boy or the collier. I haven’t seen her for weeks.”

  “Women,” said Frizer, “aren’t as bad as you damn’ poets make ’em out to be. Now, listen here…”

  “I won’t!” said Nashe; “they’re worse than us men, and that’s saying even more than Greene could have.”

  “Aw, not as bad as that,” said Frizer.

  “I’m sick of this tavern,” said Marlowe, “it’s too well lit. Let’s stroll.”

  But strolling could not shake those bells out of his mind, that madcap rhythm that opened heaven to him; he had felt as the old saints must have, he thought. He had been happy that moment, and always he longed to recover the ecstasy. Walking made no difference; as well sit still as walk. The bells pursued him. He could see as well as hear them, could see them swinging their long clappers at him, laughing; then they changed to flowers, soft-petalled lisping flowers, from flowers to women’s rosy faces, to Awdrey’s face. Suddenly, he wanted to talk about Awdrey. He felt that he could trust Frizer, yet knew perfectly well that he couldn’t. Only with the greatest effort did he hold his tongue.

  Down dark narrow streets they went, avoiding the garbage stinking in heaps on the cobble-stones; at one corner they passed the watch jumping under a tavern penthouse in an effort to get warm, their bills and lanthorns laid against a frozen pump. They saw few other people in the dangerous winter night, except the wenches shivering on doorsteps and trying to twist their cracked lips into pleasant grins, wenches walking in the snow, cloaks, in defiance of the cold, flung back to show their breasts and painted faces, fantastic periwigs on their little heads, their chins held up by monstrous ruffs as stiff with blue starch as if frozen like their bodies; or standing in the light outside a shuttered tavern, blowing on their hands to keep them warm.

  Into taverns went Marlowe and his friends, and they met others — Chomley bayed at them, dead-drunk on a bench in the Swan in Crooked Lane, where the Rhenish was so good: he was too drunk to move, so they left him to his doxy; Will Shakespeare and two other players in the Beauchamp’s Head in St. Martin’s Lane: they were too sober, so they left them also; Skeres and Poley whispering together in the Tanner’s Arms in Elbow Lane; they had important business, they said, so they left them; Tom Kyd, the playwright, lanky, morose and, at the time, maudlin drunk, explaining to a pretty wench in the Three Cranes, near Vintry Wharf, the horrors of her sinful life. She ogled him over her glass, hiccupped and looked mightily solemn as he wagged a finger at her.

  “Tommy Kyd!” cried Frizer, darting forward. “’Sblood, man, but we were just talking of you.”

  “Liar!” said Nashe, who always grew quarrelsome when drunk. “We were talking of the moon and haven’t mentioned Kyd this hour.”

  Kyd rose unsteadily from his chair, pulled at his black straggly beard, smoothed his crushed ruff, tapped his sword, and fell heavily against the girl beside him.

  “Because your name like mine is Tom, Thomas Nashe,” said he in a sinister fashion, “that will not stop me from running my sword to your midriff.”

  “Nay,” said Nashe, “steel is the only buckler against steel,” and he half-drew his sword from its sheath, the candlelight seeming to bubble on the blade.

  Marlowe pushed the sword back. “Fool!” he said, “why will you always quarrel! Take no notice of him, Kyd; he’s lost his wench, his Lucy.”

  Kyd bowed his head. “My heart goes with you,” said he, “and with her too.” He slumped back on to his stool. “I have been telling this little lady here the punishment that Christ reserves for her kin. Why is there evil in the world?”

  “Because man is in it,” said Nashe, “and woman to betray him to Satan.”

  “My drinks,” said Marlowe, drawing up a stool. “Shout for the tapster, Nashe, you’ve got the loudest voice.”

  “Tapster, pot-boy, rascal, here!” shouted Nashe in a sudden roar that drowned the fiddler in his corner and made the dancing couples turn and stare. “Five quarts of Rhenish, and be quick!”

  “Quarts?” said Frizer. “I’m getting full already.”

  “Ay, quarts!” snarled Nashe. “Let’s finish it quick. Why waste time drinking when you can get drunk in a few gulps?”

  “And quite true,” said the girl, with a hiccup.

  “Shut up!” said Nashe, “while your betters talk…”

  *

  These were Marlowe’s friends, his chief friends, for he had many others, many acquaintances in all grades of life. Nashe first; then Peele, now in the country, and after Peele, Kyd. They appealed to different parts of Marlowe’s mind: Nashe to his brutal side, to his hatred of life; Peele to his merry side; Kyd to his sentiment. Four fine minds, they drank day by day because they had nothing else to do. What did life hold for these men? A little comfort drawn out to a quiet death, or a swift and roaring flood tide of drink rushing them to a sudden grave? They had no other alternative. Money made suddenly is never kept. If they had had incomes, they might have worked, have married and lived quietly. As it was, kept by patrons, going for weeks without food, working to order at the whims of stage-manager and bookseller, living upon their wits — what else was there for them to do other than to fling themselves into debauch? They were of no class, neither of the labourers who worked all day for a few pence, nor of the merchants who looked aghast upon their dangerous knowledge. They had no women for friends, save serving-maids and women of the streets; what other women could they know? They were wanderers in a dirty world, surrounded by all the filth and the wealth of Elizabethan London; on one side of them, the gay and richly costumed Court life, to which neither birth nor money gave them entrance; on the other, the crude lusts of the underworld. They had no choice but the underworld.

  It was
to this side, to this reactionary side of Marlowe, that Nashe appealed, to the side that revolted from a social order in which the poet was a hack held in contemptuous poverty. Kyd appealed differently to him, he appealed to the sentimental childish half of Marlowe, the dream-half in which all women were kind goddesses and where the world was a garden. He hated that side of himself, but could not conquer it. He knew that life was vile, that there was no noble end possible to his existence, no hope of his ever climbing out of poverty and wretchedness; yet, curiously, he loved humanity, he loved the very street-women whom, consciously, he looked upon with horror; he loved the merchants whom he boasted of ripping open; he loved the courtiers with their easy manners and splendid clothes.

  After Kyd, Chomley was next in Marlowe’s heart. But Chomley was no poet, he was a good-humoured, burly ruffian with a gang of fifty or sixty scoundrels at his back who stole and cheated and lived a swift life until Tyburn would strangle the lusts out of them. Marlowe’s love for him was different from his love for Nashe, Peele or Kyd. Amoral, tolerant, amusing, Chomley was one of those shrewd animals who have no consideration for to-morrow or yesterday, who accept what life gives them, whether good or bad. He was a government spy, an informer, a traitor and a thief.

  Frizer next, Walsingham’s bailiff and general factotum. Marlowe liked him, but did not trust him. He was, amongst many things, what was known as a cony-catcher — a scoundrel who caught human conies, or rabbits, and cheated them out of money and land in a hundred different ways.

  Through Frizer, Marlowe had met Bob Poley, a desperate rogue, who had acted as spy both for the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Government Secretary, and for the Catholics, and had exposed Babington’s plot to give Mary of Scotland the throne, thus causing the unfortunate Babington to lose his ambitious head; amongst other things, he had poisoned the Archbishop of Armagh in the Tower of London, and now made a good living by threatening Catholic gentlemen with the block unless they opened their pouches to him; he was a friend of Skeres, a particularly dangerous rascal who turned his murderous hand to anything.

  These, then, were Marlowe’s friends. He had, of course, many others: his patrons, Sir Walter Ralegh and Master Thomas Walsingham, Sir Francis’s cousin; the mathematician, Thomas Harriot; the poets, Chapman, Shakespeare, Royden and others; and actors, like Edward Alleyn; booksellers like Blount; but none of these were as close to him as Nashe, Peele, Kyd, Frizer, Chomley and Poley.

  *

  Again and again, Marlowe would ask Frizer when he was returning to Kent, to Walsingham’s home at Scadbury, Chislehurst; and again and again, Frizer would put him off, saying he would leave in a day or two. Marlowe longed for Scadbury; above all, he longed for a sight of Mistress Awdrey’s white face and big, pale eyes. Somehow, he knew, in the instinctive way of lovers, that she would not resist if he took her in his arms; yet he dared not do it. It was not that he feared Walsingham’s displeasure, or that he respected him too greatly to love his wife; Marlowe had no feelings whatever for Thomas, he was merely a patron to supply money, he was no real friend. What it was he feared he could not fully understand; but the thought of such an intrigue frightened him; there would be no end to it, and knowing his own violent temper, he felt that he might, by the fury of his own love, bring upon himself and her some terrible calamitous end.

  Yet the itch to see her was like fire in his blood, and he grew angry with Frizer for delaying the trip. He said little, however, for fear that Frizer might guess the reason for his impatience; he let the days go by, spending his gold in a feverish effort to be poor again so that he would have an excuse to work. Nashe gave him no excuse: every morning he trotted up to Marlowe’s door and dragged him out to St. Paul’s and thence from tavern to tavern.

  “I’m tired of drink,” said Marlowe one morning as they sat in a barber’s shop to have a wash. He put down the cittern he had been plucking mournfully as he awaited his turn: for musical instruments hung in every barber’s for the customers to play on. “I wish I could find something to do.”

  “What!” almost screamed Nashe, springing up and knocking aside the basin held by an apprentice. “What the devil else is there to do but drink?”

  “Sit still, sir,” said the barber, standing back, soap in one hand, flannel in the other.

  “I won’t sit still!” shouted Nashe. “How the hell do you expect me to sit still while my friend talks blasphemy? Besides, look at these towels! they’re dripping the water into my hose.”

  “If you will but keep still,” said the barber, and as Nashe, grumblingly, settled down again, he smoothed the wet flannel over his stomach and chest. “Lean forward, I would do your back,” said the barber.

  “They ought to have women doing this job,” said Nashe, bending forward and taking up the chap-book he had been reading. “I don’t like men mauling me about.”

  Even drink grew monotonous, and only in drink could Marlowe find true ecstasy; only when his eyes were dimmed and his belly hot and tight with wine could he recapture the peal of the bells and hear them ringing joyously with promise. The bells, the bells of New Year’s Eve,

  “Lend me five farthings,”

  Say the bells of St. Martin’s.

  “When will you pay me?”

  Say the bells of Old Bailey.

  “When I am rich,”

  Say the bells of Shoreditch.

  “When will that be?”

  Say the bells of Stepney.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,”

  Says the big bell of Bow.

  “Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

  And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!

  Chop-chop!”

  Why that brutal ending? Why chop-chop off your head?

  “Chop, chop, chop off your head,” said Marlowe suddenly.

  “Are you going mad?” asked Nashe. “Don’t talk of chopping off heads, it’s too common these days. You’ll have Poley after you.”

  “All men have got to die.”

  “Ay, but not murdered.” Nashe shifted uneasily. “Keep your vile humours to yourself.”

  But Marlowe could not keep his vile humours to himself. “Chop-chop-chop off your head,” sang the bells, and he could not drive their music away. He talked continually of death, of blowing up London.

  “Let’s lay a train of gunpowder near Paul’s!” he cried that night, with his friends in St. John the Baptist’s Head, near the fields in Holywell. “We’ll blow the drapers sky-high!”

  “And chop-chop will go the chopper!” laughed Shakespeare. “Count me out!”

  “And me,” said Kyd. “Don’t forget that many of those drapers are our patrons and watch our plays.”

  “And damn us for it,” snarled Nashe. “I’m with you, Kit. Here’s George who’s been pickled in liquor since he was a babe. Let’s roll him under the Burse and put a match to him.”

  George Chapman with the warty nose, a big amiable fellow, lounged against the mantelpiece, sucked his clay pipe, and spat into the flames. “First dry the rheum out of me,” he said. “I sweat water. Drink’s good for the liver, nobody ever gets the plague that drinks. Nobody ever plots that drinks, they talk too much. Here’s Kit and Tom talking treason enough to have us all bone-broken in the Star Chamber, but they’ll never do anything. They’re like me. They drink too much. It’s your sober men who do great things.”

  “There’s a greatness in life,” said Kyd, “that is greater than art.”

  “Ay,” said Marlowe, “I’m only noble when I’m drunk.”

  “I know I feel like death when I’m sober,” said Nashe. “You’re getting slow, Kit, with those angels of yours, give ’em more wings to dissolve into sack. I’m thirsty.”

  More angels, stamped with the good Queen’s profile, tossed glittering on to the bar; still, there were more angels to come, more golden-boys to turn to liquid; a pouch of inexhaustible gold, it seemed that Marlowe had — sovereigns, ryals, angels, angelets, crowns, Spanis
h ducats, French crowns. He kept no white money, he threw it all to the ragged beggars in the streets.

  Drink and food. He had never realized before how cheap food was. A man could have a meal for fourpence on a couple of pounds of beef. It wasn’t fair for him to have so much money, while labourers sweated the fat from their backs and strained their muscles for four or five pounds a year. Marlowe spent that in a day, and cursed the spending. But on other days, he had starved like a beggar. It wasn’t fair. When he walked amongst the shops in Cheapside and saw the smug mercers with their prinked-up wives and squalling over-fed brats, his heart seemed to contract with rage as he remembered the lean men who crept about the suburbs, and wandered at night into the city streets, like dogs, after a crust; the women in the ruins of old monasteries with flat dugs and crippled babies, who were hanged for stealing a loaf from a wealthy baker’s stall.

  It was a rotten world, and London was the rotten heart of the world, with that painted trollop on the throne eating her gutful while men starved. He must get out of London, he must get to Chislehurst…

  Always he came back to that determination, and always Frizer put him off with the most adroit excuses. He must see a case through the law-courts, he explained, a case for Walsingham. There was actually no case whatever to be seen through, for when Marlowe dragged Nashe down to Westminster Hall he found, as he had thought, that the sessions had not yet opened.

  “Did I say they had?” said Frizer truculently, when Marlowe taxed him with it that afternoon in St. Paul’s. “I’m seeing counsel about it. Hilary Term opens soon, a month after Christmas.”

  “And must I wait till then?” cried Marlowe, for the first week of January was just over.

  “I’ve got to wait,” said Frizer.

  “Then I go without you!”

  “Without me?” repeated Frizer in an absent tone, gazing with wide blue eyes at Marlowe as he leaned upon the baptismal font. “Just wait a day. I might arrange to go down and back before Hilary. The day after to-morrow, then. I’m at the Belle Sauvage in Ludgate, down the road. Have you a horse?”