F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tarquin of Cheapside

 

a Danse Macabre supplémentaires classique

 

Running footsteps--light, soft-soled shoes made of curious leathery

cloth brought from Ceylon setting the pace; thick flowing boots, two

pairs, dark blue and gilt, reflecting the moonlight in blunt gleams

and splotches, following a stone's throw behind.

 

Soft Shoes flashes through a patch of moonlight, then darts into a

blind labyrinth of alleys and becomes only an intermittent scuffle

ahead somewhere in the enfolding darkness. In go Flowing Boots, with

short swords lurching and long plumes awry, finding a breath to curse

God and the black lanes of London.

 

Soft Shoes leaps a shadowy gate and crackles through a hedgerow.

Flowing Boots leap the gate and crackles through the hedgerow--and

there, startlingly, is the watch ahead--two murderous pikemen of

ferocious cast of mouth acquired in Holland and the Spanish marches.

But there is no cry for help. The pursued does not fall panting at the

feet of the watch, clutching a purse; neither do the pursuers raise a

hue and cry. Soft Shoes goes by in a rush of swift air. The watch

curse and hesitate, glance after the fugitive, and then spread their

pikes grimly across the road and wait for Flowing Boots. Darkness,

like a great hand, cuts off the even flow the moon.

 

The hand moves off the moon whose pale caress finds again the eaves

and lintels, and the watch, wounded and tumbled in the dust. Up the

street one of Flowing Boots leaves a black trail of spots until he

binds himself, clumsily as he runs, with fine lace caught from his

throat.

 

It was no affair for the watch: Satan was at large tonight and Satan

seemed to be he who appeared dimly in front, heel over gate, knee over

fence. Moreover, the adversary was obviously travelling near home or

at least in that section of London consecrated to his coarser whims,

for the street narrowed like a road in a picture and the houses bent

over further and further, cooping in natural ambushes suitable for

murder and its histrionic sister, sudden death.

 

Down long and sinuous lanes twisted the hunted and the harriers,

always in and out of the moon in a perpetual queen's move over a

checker-board of glints and patches. Ahead, the quarry, minus his

leather jerkin now and half blinded by drips of sweat, had taken to

scanning his ground desperately on both sides. As a result he suddenly

slowed short, and retracing his steps a bit scooted up an alley so

dark that it seemed that here sun and moon had been in eclipse since

the last glacier slipped roaring over the earth. Two hundred yards

down he stopped and crammed himself into a niche in the wall where he

huddled and panted silently, a grotesque god without bulk or outline

in the gloom.

 

Flowing Boots, two pairs, drew near, came up, went by, halted twenty

yards beyond him, and spoke in deep-lunged, scanty whispers:

 

"I was attune to that scuffle; it stopped."

 

"Within twenty paces."

 

"He's hid."

 

"Stay together now and we'll cut him up."

 

The voice faded into a low crunch of a boot, nor did Soft Shoes wait

to hear more--he sprang in three leaps across the alley, where he

bounded up, flapped for a moment on the top of the wall like a huge

bird, and disappeared, gulped down by the hungry night at a mouthful.

 

 

II

 

   "He read at wine, he read in bed,

     He read aloud, had he the breath,

     His every thought was with the dead,

     And so he read himself to death."

 

Any visitor to the old James the First graveyard near Peat's Hill may

spell out this bit of doggerel, undoubtedly one of the worst recorded

of an Elizabethan, on the tomb of Wessel Caster.

 

This death of his, says the antiquary, occurred when he was

thirty-seven, but as this story is concerned with the night of a

certain chase through darkness, we find him still alive, still

reading. His eyes were somewhat dim, his stomach somewhat obvious-he

was a mis-built man and indolent--oh, Heavens! But an era is an era,

and in the reign of Elizabeth, by the grace of Luther, Queen of

England, no man could help but catch the spirit of enthusiasm. Every

loft in Cheapside published its _Magnum Folium_ (or magazine)--of

its new blank verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything on

sight as long as it "got away from those reactionary miracle plays,"

and the English Bible had run through seven "very large" printings in,

as many months.

 

So Wessel Caxter (who in his youth had gone to sea) was now a reader

of all on which he could lay his hands--he read manuscripts In holy

friendship; he dined rotten poets; he loitered about the shops where

the Magna Folia were printed, and he listened tolerantly while

the young playwrights wrangled and bickered among them-selves, and

behind each other's backs made bitter and malicious charges of

plagiarism or anything else they could think of.

 

To-night he had a book, a piece of work which, though inordinately

versed, contained, he thought, some rather excellent political satire.

"The Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser lay before him under the

tremulous candle-light. He had ploughed through a canto; he was

beginning another:

 

THE LEGEND OF BRITOMARTIS OR OF CHASTITY

 

   It falls me here to write of Chastity.

   The fayrest vertue, far above the rest...

 

A sudden rush of feet on the stairs, a rusty swing-open of the thin

door, and a man thrust himself into the room, a man without a jerkin,

panting, sobbing, on the verge of collapse.

 

"Wessel," words choked him, "stick me away somewhere, love of Our

Lady!"

 

Caxter rose, carefully closing his book, and bolted the door in some

concern.

 

"I'm pursued," cried out Soft Shoes. "I vow there's two short-witted

blades trying to make me into mincemeat and near succeeding. They saw

me hop the back wall!"

 

"It would need," said Wessel, looking at him curiously, "several

battalions armed with blunderbusses, and two or three Armadas, to keep

you reasonably secure from the revenges of the world."

 

Soft Shoes smiled with satisfaction. His sobbing gasps were giving way

to quick, precise breathing; his hunted air had faded to a faintly

perturbed irony.

 

"I feel little surprise," continued Wessel.

 

"They were two such dreary apes."

 

"Making a total of three."

 

"Only two unless you stick me away. Man, man, come alive, they'll be

on the stairs in a spark's age."

 

Wessel took a dismantled pike-staff from the corner, and raising it to

the high ceiling, dislodged a rough trap-door opening into a garret

above.

 

"There's no ladder."

 

He moved a bench under the trap, upon which Soft Shoes mounted,

crouched, hesitated, crouched again, and then leaped amazingly upward.

He caught at the edge of the aperture and swung back and forth, for a

moment, shifting his hold; finally doubled up and disappeared into the

darkness above. There was a scurry, a migration of rats, as the

trap-door was replaced;... silence.

 

Wessel returned to his reading-table, opened to the Legend of

Britomartis or of Chastity--and waited. Almost a minute later there

was a scramble on the stairs and an intolerable hammering at the door.

Wessel sighed and, picking up his candle, rose.

 

"Who's there?"

 

"Open the door!"

 

"Who's there?"

 

An aching blow frightened the frail wood, splintered it around the

edge. Wessel opened it a scarce three inches, and held the candle

high. His was to play the timorous, the super-respectable citizen,

disgracefully disturbed.

 

"One small hour of the night for rest. Is that too much to ask from

every brawler and--"

 

"Quiet, gossip! Have you seen a perspiring fellow?"

 

The shadows of two gallants fell in immense wavering outlines over the

narrow stairs; by the light Wessel scrutinized them closely.

Gentlemen, they were, hastily but richly dressed--one of them wounded

severely in the hand, both radiating a sort of furious horror. Waving

aside Wessel's ready miscomprehension, they pushed by him into the

room and with their swords went through the business of poking

carefully into all suspected dark spots in the room, further extending

their search to Wessel's bedchamber.

 

"Is he hid here?" demanded the wounded man fiercely.

 

"Is who here?"

 

"Any man but you."

 

"Only two others that I know of."

 

For a second Wessel feared that he had been too damned funny, for the

gallants made as though to prick him through.

 

"I heard a man on the stairs," he said hastily, "full five minutes

ago, it was. He most certainly failed to come up."

 

He went on to explain his absorption in "The Faerie Queene" but, for

the moment at least, his visitors, like the great saints, were

anaesthetic to culture.

 

"What's been done?" inquired Wessel.

 

"Violence!" said the man with the wounded hand. Wessel noticed that

his eyes were quite wild. "My own sister. Oh, Christ in heaven, give

us this man!"

 

Wessel winced.

 

"Who is the man?"

 

"God's word! We know not even that. What's that trap up there?" he

added suddenly.

 

"It's nailed down. It's not been used for years." He thought of the

pole in the corner and quailed in his belly, but the utter despair of

the two men dulled their astuteness.

 

"It would take a ladder for any one not a tumbler," said the wounded

man listlessly.

 

His companion broke into hysterical laughter.

 

"A tumbler. Oh, a tumbler. Oh--"

 

Wessel stared at them in wonder.

 

"That appeals to my most tragic humor," cried the man, "that no

one--oh, no one--could get up there but a tumbler."

 

The gallant with the wounded hand snapped his good fingers

impatiently.

 

"We must go next door--and then on--"

 

Helplessly they went as two walking under a dark and storm-swept sky.

 

Wessel closed and bolted the door and stood a moment by it, frowning

in pity.

 

A low-breathed "Ha!" made him look up. Soft Shoes had already raised

the trap and was looking down into the room, his rather elfish face

squeezed into a grimace, half of distaste, half of sardonic amusement.

 

"They take off their heads with their helmets," he remarked in a

whisper, "but as for you and me, Wessel, we are two cunning men."

 

"Now you be cursed," cried Wessel vehemently. "I knew you for a dog,

but when I hear even the half of a tale like this, I know you for such

a dirty cur that I am minded to club your skull."

 

Soft Shoes stared at him, blinking.

 

"At all events," he replied finally, "I find dignity impossible in

this position."

 

With this he let his body through the trap, hung for an instant, and

dropped the seven feet to the floor.

 

"There was a rat considered my ear with the air of a gourmet," he

continued, dusting his hands on his breeches. "I told him in the rat's

peculiar idiom that I was deadly poison, so he took himself off."

 

"Let's hear of this night's lechery!" insisted Wessel angrily.

 

Soft Shoes touched his thumb to his nose and wiggled the fingers

derisively at Wessel.

 

"Street gamin!" muttered Wessel.

 

"Have you any paper?" demanded Soft Shoes irrelevantly, and then

rudely added, "or can you write?"

 

"Why should I give you paper?"

 

"You wanted to hear of the night's entertainment. So you shall, an you

give me pen, ink, a sheaf of paper, and a room to myself."

 

Wessel hesitated.

 

"Get out!" he said finally.

 

"As you will. Yet you have missed a most intriguing story."

 

Wessel wavered--he was soft as taffy, that man--gave in. Soft Shoes

went into the adjoining room with the begrudged writing materials and

precisely closed the door. Wessel grunted and returned to "The Faerie

Queene"; so silence came once more upon the house.

 

 

III

 

Three o'clock went into four. The room paled, the dark outside was

shot through with damp and chill, and Wessel, cupping his brain in his

hands, bent low over his table, tracing through the pattern of knights

and fairies and the harrowing distresses of many girls. There were

dragons chortling along the narrow street outside; when the sleepy

armorer's boy began his work at half-past five the heavy clink and

clank of plate and linked mail swelled to the echo of a marching

cavalcade.

 

A fog shut down at the first flare of dawn, and the room was grayish

yellow at six when Wessel tiptoed to his cupboard bedchamber and

pulled open the door. His guest turned on him a face pale as parchment

in which two distraught eyes burned like great red letters. He had

drawn a chair close to Wessel's _prie-dieu_ which he was using as

a desk; and on it was an amazing stack of closely written pages. With

a long sigh Wessel withdrew and returned to his siren, calling himself

fool for not claiming his bed here at dawn.

 

The dump of boots outside, the croaking of old beldames from attic to

attic, the dull murmur of morning, unnerved him, and, dozing, he

slumped in his chair, his brain, overladen with sound and color,

working intolerably over the imagery that stacked it. In this restless

dream of his he was one of a thousand groaning bodies crushed near the

sun, a helpless bridge for the strong-eyed Apollo. The dream tore at

him, scraped along his mind like a ragged knife. When a hot hand

touched his shoulder, he awoke with what was nearly a scream to find

the fog thick in the room and his guest, a gray ghost of misty stuff,

beside him with a pile of paper in his hand.

 

"It should be a most intriguing tale, I believe, though it requires

some going over. May I ask you to lock it away, and in God's name let

me sleep?"

 

He waited for no answer, but thrust the pile at Wessel, and literally

poured himself like stuff from a suddenly inverted bottle upon a couch

in the corner, slept, with his breathing regular, but his brow

wrinkled in a curious and somewhat uncanny manner.

 

Wessel yawned sleepily and, glancing at the scrawled, uncertain first

page, he began reading aloud very softly:

 

   The Rape of Lucrece

 

   "From the besieged Ardea all in post,

   Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,

   Lust-breathing Tarquin leaves the Roman host - "