Towers in the Mist

  Faithful sat on the extreme edge of the oak chest where Philip Sidney kept his worldly possessions and stared as unblinkingly as an owl at the object of his adoration. Some friendships develop gradually, putting out a leaf here or a shoot there, attaining their full strength only after years of growth, but others arrive with a crash and a bang, a fanfare of trumpets and a streaming of banners, and a day that dawned in the usual poverty closes in the possession of great riches. . . . It had been like that when Faithful first set eyes on Philip Sidney. . . . All the loveliness of his new life, the sun-drenched beauty of the town where he lived and the woods and streams that surrounded it, the warmth of his new relationships and the joy of his work, seemed to him to be summed up in the human being in front of him. He could not say thank-you to the woods and streams, he could not pay his debt to the sunshine, but personified in Philip he could serve them and do them reverence. This sense of symbolism was both the joy and the bane of human beauty, he had discovered. Those who are beautiful stand to their lovers for more than they are; and when their beauty has waned that which it stood for seems dead too, and the whole world darkened.

  Philip was about Faithful’s own age. He had a slender body with long, narrow hands and feet and a small head finely poised. His hair was fair and smooth and shining and his eyes hazel in a luminously pale oval-shaped face. His beauty and delicacy were those of a girl but there was nothing effeminate in the set of his lips or in his proudly braced shoulders. His dark green doublet was of the finest cloth and his ruff and cuff of spotless lawn. He wore a tiny golden dagger and shoes of Spanish leather, and his hose fitted without a wrinkle and were gartered at the knee with scarlet. . . . Not that these outward symbols of haberdashery were needed to show that Philip was a person of importance; his breeding was expressed in every one of his fine bones and in what his friend Frank Greville called “his staidness of mind, his lovely and familiar gravity.”

  “Listen to this,” he adjured Faithful, swinging round and flourishing his pen in the air. “It’s a sonnet to the moon. Did you notice the moon last night? She’s the midsummer moon that brings back the fairies and the ghosts of dead lovers. But she is sad because love is a cruel thing, and when she wanes again she and her ghosts and her fairies will be forgotten.”

  Faithful, his mouth wide open owing to the greatness of his love which made him feel as though his chest was full of wind, listened with half his mind, while with the other half he was wishing that Philip would not write about the midsummer moon that waxes and wanes like the life of a man, but about the sun that is always constant in the heavens as God Himself. He did not wish to be reminded again of that moment of unreasonable panic on the stairs.

  With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies!

  How silently, and with how wan a face!

  What! May it be that even in heavenly place

  That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?

  Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes

  Can judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case;

  I read it in thy looks; thy languished grace

  To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.

  Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,

  Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?

  Are beauties there as proud as here they be?

  Do they above love to be loved, and yet

  Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?

  Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?

  “It’s wonderful,” breathed Faithful. . . . It was a marvel to him that Philip, who to his certain knowledge had no lady love and who at this stage of his career had a profound contempt for the opposite sex, could be so eloquent on the subject of love. He was not aware that experience is unnecessary to your true poet, who can feel any and every emotion simply by sighing, sticking his tongue out at the side of his mouth and dipping his pen in the ink.

  Philip performed these rites and turned back to re-read his poem. It was good, he thought. It was good enough to be kept and added to the book of poems that he would publish when he was a man. But was he really a great poet? He found it difficult to be sure. While he was actually writing a poem he knew for certain that it was the most marvelous thing ever written, but when he had finished it he found himself assailed by heavy doubts.

  “Master Bodley’s lecture?” suggested Faithful tentatively.

  Philip jumped up, swearing softly. . . . He had learned a lot of new oaths since he came up to Christ Church and they were a great pleasure to him. . . . Then he put his manuscript down his back—he always kept his literary works there so that he could go on with them in odd moments—stowed away his writing materials in the leather wallet at his waist, smilingly handed Faithful his books to carry and preceded him courteously through the door.

  3.

  Giles was prancing impatiently up and down when Philip and Faithful joined him and Nicolas.

  “We shall be late,” he moaned.

  “All the better,” said Nicolas. He had been up at Christ Church for years, always putting off the accumulation of a little learning to a later and more convenient date, and was by now sick of lectures; even Thomas Bodley’s.

  They set off at a good pace, Philip, Nicolas and Giles going on ahead and Faithful trundling after, burdened with the books of all three of them. Yet wherever he went in this city, no matter how burdened, every step of the way was a delight to him. The miracle of the spring was now passed and the hawthorn that Joyeuce had looked out upon from her window was tarnished, dropping little white moons of blossom on Faithful’s thatch of hair as he passed beneath it; the June sun had burned up the fresh scents of April and the song of the birds had lost its ecstatic note of surprise and was taking the return of warmth and beauty entirely for granted. Yet Faithful thought this full summer season had something precious that the spring had lacked, a richness and pride in the warmth of the sun and the deep color of the flaunting summer flowers that promised a continuance of good things. In the keen joy of the spring there was a sadness, because it went so fast, but the beauty of the summer stole away slowly, no pace perceived; one could cheat oneself into a certainty of possession and know content.

  They hurried along between the old buildings of Peckwater Inn and Canterbury College and then turning to their left ran breathlessly up Shidyard Street into the High Street.

  In spite of their hurry Faithful lingered a moment to look up the street to his left to the Tower of All Saints’ church behind the pig market, and then in front of him at Saint Mary’s, the University church. High above his head the glorious spire crowned the tower below it like a king seated upon his throne, while round about the throne the life-size figures of kings and queens and saints stood like courtiers. Of all these figures the one that Faithful loved best was Edmund Rich, the saint of whom Master Campion had told him, the father of all Oxford scholars and the first M.A. of whom Oxford has any record.

  He had been born at Abingdon, in those very early days of the University when lecture rooms were street corners and narrow alleys, and the scholars merely a handful of ragged scarecrows whom the wealthy merchants elbowed out of their way as they trod the streets of the city. Yet their fame had already spread beyond the city wall and reached Edmund at Abingdon. He loved two things with a burning love: learning and holiness, and it seemed to him that he would surely find them both in that city where the spires of great churches rose to heaven and bells rang all day long to call men to worship God, and where men were not afraid of starvation for their bodies if only they could find food for their minds. So he said good-by to his outraged family and with his bundle on his back, and his staff in his hand, he set out to tramp through the dark and terrible forest of Bagley to Oxford. It was a wonder he was not killed by the wild boars and the vagabonds in the forest, but he survived, for round his neck, as protection, his mother had hung a gold ring with engraved upon it “that
sweet Ave with which the angel at the Annunciation had hailed the Virgin.” And so at last, footsore and weary and dreadfully hungry, he crossed the river and reached the South Gate of the city.

  He attached himself to a band of scholars who had built themselves a rough school, with clay walls and thatched roof, in the churchyard of Saint Mary’s, and with them he studied and worshiped.

  He was very devout, and the glorious music of the mass, as it echoed through Saint Mary’s church, thrilled his very soul. Yet he was not without his carnal temptations, and one of them was games. He had a strong, straight body, and he could run hard and aim straight and jump like a frog. . . . He adored jumping like a frog. . . . One day in the very middle of the sermon his legs ached and his back itched him and the Devil tempted him to go and jump like a frog outside, and yielding to the temptation he got up and slipped surreptitiously out of his place. But at the north door a divine apparition suddenly appeared and told him what it thought of him, and he was so ashamed that he went back and heard out the sermon to the end. And from that moment his devotion grew more fervent.

  One evening he was kneeling in the church, praying by himself. It was growing dark, so that the distant places of the church were filled with purple shadows and the roof over his head was dim as the sky at midnight. The air was heavy and sweet with incense and he felt a little drowsy. Then something made him look up and his eyes were drawn to the one bright spot in the church, the place where light was burning before the statue of the Virgin. The candle flames shone on her rainbow-colored robe and her golden crown and the child held in the crook of her arm, and as Edmund looked at her she smiled at him. Slowly he got up from his knees and crept like a little mouse through the shadows to her feet. There he knelt down and said an Ave, and then he took from his neck the ring that his mother had given him and stretching up he slipped it on her finger. He was hers now, her liegeman, and he would serve her with a chaste body and a pure mind until he died.

  The years went on and Edmund became a Master of Arts. He was tremendously learned and scholars flocked to his lectures, but he never flagged in his devotion to the Virgin. He built her a chapel in the parish where he lived and he attended mass there every morning before his day’s work began. He cared nothing at all for the carnal pleasures of this world—he never played leapfrog now—but only for holiness and learning. “So study,” he said to his pupils, “as if you were to live forever; so live as if you were to die tomorrow.” If a rich pupil insisted upon bringing him the fees that were paid to popular masters—unpopular masters, it seems, were not paid anything, and how they lived is a mystery—he was so indignant that he flung the money down on the windowsill, where it stayed till it was stolen by an unpopular master. . . . How Edmund himself lived, under the circumstances, is a mystery too.

  But as in his boyhood the Devil had tempted him with games so now he tempted him with mathematics. Edmund’s mind, strong and vigorous as his body had been, delighted in the jumps and twists and turns of mathematics, and it spent far too much time leaping about in this fascinating science. One day, when he was in the very middle of a lecture on mathematics, the ghost of his dead mother appeared. “My son,” she said severely, “what art thou studying? What are these strange diagrams over which thou porest so intently?” Then she seized his right hand and in the palm drew three circles, within which she wrote the names of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. “Be these thy diagrams henceforth, my son,” she said. With that she vanished away and Edmund came to himself again; to the great relief of his pupils, who thought he had gone mad when they saw him standing there with his mouth wide open and the palm of his hand stretched out to nothing at all.

  But for the rest of his life Edmund’s eager mind leaped about in theology only, and with such success that in due course they made him an Archbishop.

  One day His Grace was preaching to a crowd of the devout in the churchyard of All Saints’ and a terrible storm came on. Over most of the city a sky like ink hung above the roofs and it rained cats and dogs; but over All Saints’ churchyard was a round patch of sky the color of bluebells, and the devout who sat at the feet of the Archbishop were as dry as a bone and as warm as toast. . . . After that they made the Archbishop a Saint for who but the holiest of the holy are able to oblige like this in the matter of weather?

  After his death Saint Edmund, as dead Saints should, went on being obliging. He took under his protection a certain well at Cowley Ford and if ill people crept through the evening shadows to the well, as he had once crept to the feet of the Virgin, and kneeling down said their prayers to her devoutly, as he had once said his, they were healed of their wounds and sickness. . . . And that Oxford might never forget him his statue looked down upon it from the tower of Saint Mary’s.

  4.

  Leaving it the boys turned to their left under the west window of Saint Mary’s and hurried up School Street into the quiet square beyond where Saint Mary’s churchyard dreamed under the sun. Crossing it they plunged under a gateway into the quadrangle of the Schools, ran past the empty University Library whose priceless collection of books had been destroyed and scattered during the Reformation, and disappeared into their lecture room like unpunctual rabbits leaping into their burrows.

  In it was a seething horde of scholars trying to find places on the few benches that were quite inadequate to their number or weight. Failure to find a seat meant sitting on the floor for two hours, or longer should Thomas Bodley get carried away by his own eloquence, which was unfortunately frequently the case. The battle was to the strong and those who, like Nicolas, could dislodge a whole benchful of smaller and weaker scholars with a sweep of the arm, were to be congratulated. . . . Although the last in it was only a matter of minutes before he and Giles and Philip were occupying the best seats, with Faithful sitting on the floor at their feet in a square inch of space, trampled upon and hemmed in on all sides by the perspiring bodies of a hundred pilgrims to the well of learning.

  There was a sudden lull in the uproar and Faithful, peering up through a forest of waving arms and legs, beheld Master Thomas Bodley pushing his way through the crowd towards his desk on the raised platform at the end of the room. As he passed the noise ebbed away, like a subsiding storm in the branches of the trees, and when he mounted the steps to the platform and looked down upon his pupils there was a dead silence.

  For Master Thomas Bodley was a personality, and such was his devotion to Oxford and to learning that it seemed that in him the spirit of Edmund Rich lived again. He was a young man, one of a group of young and brilliant men who were the most worthy descendants of those first teachers whose platforms had been a flight of broken steps leading up to the door of a hovel. Few men in Oxford were more beloved than Thomas Bodley, unless perhaps it was Faithful’s friend of the crock of gold, Edmund Campion of Saint John’s, and few could equal him in his power of capturing his pupils by the spell of his own attraction. And that done, holding in his hands their attentions like so many gossamer threads that passed from them to him and kept them tethered, it was an easy thing so to stir their imagination that learning seemed delightful to them and with one consent they handed him up their minds to be filled.

  Thomas Bodley was tall and upright, his height increased by the long M.A. gown that he wore, with a look of directness about him that was prophetic of the straight clean road he would drive for himself through life. People talked a lot about Bodley and his probable future. A brilliant career seemed certain, with high position in court and government, and in the course of time he was caught in the political spider’s web, dragged into it almost without his knowledge by the will of those in high places, and for some years he was a diplomatist, and a brilliant one. But the web could not hold him for long. He was haunted, as he made his brilliant way through the world, by the thought of that desolate library close to the room where he had lectured at Oxford, despoiled of its priceless treasures, its stalls and shelves sold for timber, created to be a
place where scholars might study far removed “from the noise of the world” and now empty and dusty and haunted by the ghosts of those dead books. It seemed always crying out to him, asking him to help it.

  So he came back to Oxford to fill it up again. It was an odd thing to do but that, he knew, was his vocation. “Whereupon,” he said, “examining exactly for the rest of my life what course I might take, and having sought, as I thought, all the ways to the wood, to select the most proper, I concluded at the last to set up my staff at the library door at Oxford.”

  He offered to restore the library at his own expense, and the University gratefully accepted the offer. Faced by such a staggering financial proposition, some men might have been nonplused but not Thomas Bodley; he married a rich widow. His “purse ability” was now great and he repaired the room and endowed the library. Everyone loved Thomas Bodley and all his friends gave him books for it. He was a Devonshire man and west countrymen particularly put themselves out to steal books for him. When the English fleet, under Essex, captured the Portuguese town of Faro, Walter Raleigh, a captain in the squadron, saw to it that the fine collection of books they stole from a bishop and brought home as a souvenir was given to Thomas.

  Generations later the empty room that Thomas Bodley filled was famous all over the world, and his name remembered with honor. . . . But no one ever gave a thought to Mistress Bodley.

  But at the moment Thomas Bodley was filling not empty bookshelves but empty minds. The newly discovered plays of Euripides had been published in Venice at the beginning of the century and the wonder of it was still alive. A lecture on Greek verse made the heart beat and the pulses throb with a sense of voyage and discovery. These boys who sat at the feet of Bodley were one in spirit with the boys who had sailed with Cabot to America and who were sailing at this moment under the flag of the Merchant Adventurers, carrying the trade of England out to the New World. It was a great moment to be alive, thought Faithful, this moment when the mists of man’s ignorance were lifting and worlds beyond worlds were opening out before his excited eyes, and of the two great adventures that offered themselves, Commerce and Learning, who could say which was the most wonderful? Commerce meant romance, danger, and a glory of dreams, and in those islands beyond the sea, those fairylands of coral and palm trees and screeching birds with plumy feathers all colors of the rainbow, men could have their fill of fighting and color and the heat of the sun; and come back with pockets full of gold, mouths full of strange oaths, and tales to tell in the tavern that would keep the company hanging breathless on their words from curfew to cockcrow.