Morality Play Read Free

'He outdid the nightingale.'
    'He would sing like an angel,' the flax-haired one said, with that strange, infirm eagerness of expression that belonged to him. 'He would plant his feet and raise his head; it was as if a tree sang with its leaves.'
    'His song was like a rope of silk,' Stephen said. His voice was deep and had a drinker's hoarseness in it.
    This was the first instance I noted of a habit common with them, of speaking with one voice like a chorus, but yet in turn, so it resembled a scale in music. They had changed, they were sharing with me their knowledge of the dead man. But I could not easily think of sweet airs coming from the throat that was Brendan's now, nor of that poor crooked mouth moving with song. His face was turned to hog's lard in that cold weather. 'How did he come to his end?' I asked.
    'Yesterday, walking behind the cart, on a sudden he cried out and fell down,' the fourth man said, speaking now for the first time. This one was older, scant-haired and long-jawed, with bright blue eyes. 'He could not get up, he had to be lifted,' he said.
    'From that time he could not speak,' the boy said. 'He had to be taken on the cart.'
    'Sounds he could make but no words,' the leader said. 'He was ready of speech before and full of jokes.' He glanced at me and there was a fleeting horror in this glance. I saw that for him the dumbness that had befallen Brendan, singer and joker, was a thing of nightmare. 'Sing something, you,' he bade me.
    I should not have obeyed because he had something in mind for me not admissible and I suspected it by now. Playing on a public stage is forbidden to us by Council, first at Exeter and then at Chester, also by edict of our Father in Christ Boniface the Eighth, and so I knew I was placing myself in danger of degradation. But I was hungry and sick at heart.
    'Do you want a love-song,' I said, 'or a song of good works?'
    'A love-song, a love-song,' Stephen said. 'The Devil take good works.' He said this without smiling. In all the time I was with them I only once saw him smile.
    'Good works he will not take, brother, but he will take the rash of speech,' the old one said. The dog sat close to him and listened to his every word. He clapped his hands at me. 'Come, sing,' he said.
    So I gave them 'Lenten is come with love to town', singing alone in the clearing, unaccompanied at first, then the boy played the melody along with me on a reed pipe that he took from somewhere about him.
    At the end of it the leader nodded his head. Then he turned and went to the cart and found there two rag balls such as jugglers use, one red, one white, and he called me to catch and flung the red one, speaking and throwing at the same moment almost, and I caught it in my right hand and he threw the white one to the other side, high this time and a little wide so I had to take two steps, and this second ball also I caught and held. Someone behind blocked my left heel while I was still off balance and I stumbled but I did not fall.
    He nodded once again and said to the others, not looking at me, 'He is quick enough and neat in movement and he sees well to both sides and steps clean. The voice is good enough. He will not be another Brendan, but with teaching he might do.'
    This praise, though far from plenteous, gave me pleasure and that is to my shame. But there was something in him, some power of spirit, that made me want to please him. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, it was no more than the intensity of his wish. Men are distinguished by the power of their wanting. What this one wanted became his province and his meal, he governed it and fed on it from the first moment of desire. Besides, with the perversity of our nature, being tested had made me more desire to succeed, though knowing the enterprise to be sinful.
    He looked at them now and smiled a little, a smile that made his face young. 'We took Margaret because Stephen wanted her, and a stray dog for Tobias. Why not a runaway priest who may be of use