Morality Play Read Free Page B

into flower. I made up my pack and walked out of his house. It was December when I met the players, the flowers of spring were long withered. Misfortunes had come to me. I had lost the holy relic that I had kept for several years and bought from a clerk newly come from
    Rome, a piece of the sail of St Peter's boat. I lost it at dice. And then, that same morning that I met them, I had lost my good cloak, leaving it behind in my coward's haste. I was chilled to the bone when I came upon them and hungry, and discouraged by these blows of fate. I wanted to be in community again, no longer alone. The community of the players offered shelter to me, though they were poor and half-starved themselves. This was my true reason. The badge of livery was only an argument I used for myself.
    To make my transformation complete I had to wear Brendan's stained and malodorous jerkin and tunic and he had to be dressed in my clerical habit, there being no alternative to this exchange except the outlandish scraps of costume on the cart. It was the woman who undressed Brendan and put my habit on him. The others would not do it, nor would they watch it done, though men for whom travesty was common enough. But I watched, and she was deft and tender with him and there was kindness in her face.
    When it was finished Brendan lay in his priest's garb, a man who in life had been impious and full of profane jest. And there stood I in the garb of a dead player. But now an argument sprang up among us. Martin was for taking the dead man with us on the cart. 'Brendan died unshriven,' he said. 'We must bury him in hallowed ground.'
    'The horse is slow enough as it is,' Stephen said. 'The roads are bad and there is snow coming. We have lost time already, with the broken wheel. We are sent to Durham for Christmas to play there before our lady's cousin. We cannot fail in it and still keep favour. The first day of Christmas is- eight days from this one. By my reckoning we are still five days' journey from Durham. Shall we travel with a dead man for five days?'
    'The priest will ask for money,' Straw said. He looked round at our faces with that strange, febrile eagerness of expression. As I was to learn, he never stayed long in one state of mind but was led always by some vein of fancy all his own, gloomy and exuberant by turns. 'We can bury him in the forest,' he said. 'Here in the dark wood. Brendan will sleep well here.'
    'The dead sleep well enough anywhere,' Margaret said. She looked at me and there was provocation in her look but no malice. 'Our priestling can say the words over him,' she said.
    'Margaret has no voice in this,' Martin said. 'She is not of the company.' He said these words directly to Stephen, whose woman she was, and I heard - and surely the others did also - the tremor in his voice of feeling barely held in check. His right hand was clenched and the knuckles had whitened. 'You would leave him here?' he said. For me, who did not know him then, this passion was strangely sudden and strong, as if not only his plan for Brendan was being questioned but with it some cherished vision of the world.
    No one answered at once, such was the fierceness in him. I think Stephen was making to answer but Martin spoke again, in a voice that had deepened. 'He was like all of us,' he said. 'While he lived he never sat at his own hearth or ate at his own table. Pot and jar he needs no longer, but he will have a home properly made in the earth for him, deep enough, and a roof over his head at last.'
    'Brendan had his habits, he would not have denied it himself, and too much ale was one of them,' Tobias said. 'But drunk or sober he played the Devil's Fool better than anyone you ever saw.'
    'To make his grave what would you use?' There was contempt now in Martin's voice. 'Adam's spade and Eve's rake that are made of wire and lath-wood? The ground is hard with the frosts of these last days. We will labour till dark to make a grave and it will not be deep enough to