They were playing an old Nativity play tonight, followed by the story of Saint Nicolas, and he was no sooner in his place than the trumpeter stepped down, the lights in the gallery were hidden, and in a sudden silence, that fell upon the noisy crowd as though the shadow of an angel’s wing passed over them, the first figures of the Christmas story stepped upon the stage.
It was very crude and at some other time Nicolas might have been moved to mirth, but he was not so moved tonight, neither he nor a single man, woman or child in that densely packed throng. It was Christmas Eve, and the same stars shone above them as had shone upon the fields of Palestine some fifteen hundred years ago. They sat in a deep and lovely silence, their eyes riveted upon the rough wooden stage where the figures of shepherds moved, and angels whose dresses had shrunk in the wash and whose wings and haloes had become a little battered by so much packing and unpacking, and a Virgin Mary whose blue cloak was torn and whose voice was that of a young English peasant boy who had not so long ago been taken from the plow.
Wedged against the balustrade of the gallery Nicholas watched and listened in that state of heavenly concentration that leaves the human creature oblivious of himself. He was not conscious any more of the apprentices who pressed upon him, or of the smell of unwashed human bodies, or of his own empty stomach that had been presented with no supper this evening. He was only dimly aware of the crowd as a great multitude that he could not number, watchers in the shadows who had been watching there for fifteen hundred years. The Christmas story itself absorbed him. Though it was so old a story, one that he had known as soon as he was capable of knowing anything, it seemed tonight quite new to him. “Glory to God in the highest. . . . A child is born.” The old words that he had heard a hundred times over seemed cried out with the triumph of new and startling news. The figures that moved before him, Mary with the child in her arms, Joseph and the shepherds, Gabriel and the angels, Herod and the Wise Men, that he had seen so many times pictured in stained glass windows and on the leaves of missals, moved now in this tiny space at the heart of the crowd as though they had come there for the first time. . . . The love of God is with man. . . . That, Nicolas knew suddenly, is the news of the far country, the mystery like a nugget of gold that men travel so far to seek, the fact that is stated but not explained by all the pictures that have been painted and by all the music and the poetry that has been written since the dawn of the world. It was as easy as that, and as difficult.
The Nativity play ended with a flash and a bang as the devil in black tights appeared to fetch away Herod to where he belonged. No one considered this an anticlimax; on the contrary they were all suitably impressed; this might happen to them if they were not careful. They groaned and shivered and were glad when the lanterns that had been hidden beneath cloaks were uncovered and the auditorium shone out into brilliance again. This was the interval between the two performances and a roar of voices broke out as though a river in spate had been let loose. Nicolas found that he too was shivering, not with fear but with the very intensity of his feeling, and looked round upon the noisy crowd with sensations that were entirely new. He felt so at one with them. A feeling of superiority had always been one of the most familiar of his pleasures, but now it had entirely gone from him. These burly perspiring merchants, fat matrons, laughing girls and jolly apprentices, these rogues and vagabonds that pressed about him, seemed as much a part of him as his own body. He did not care that a beery citizen was breathing heavily down the back of his neck or that two filthy little boys were holding themselves steady in a kneeling posture by clinging to his legs. In fact it was a pleasure. He loved them. All of them together were the men whom God was with. He wondered vaguely what he would be feeling like in a few days’ time, whether he would be again the old superior skeptical Nicolas. . . . Perhaps. . . . Yet he would never be able to forget what he had felt tonight. He prayed God that he would never forget.
The trumpet sounded once more to give warning that the second part of the performance was about to begin. The lanterns in the galleries were hidden again and the roaring voices dropped away to an indistinct murmur, then to silence, and Saint Nicolas stepped upon the stage in a red robe, a long while beard, and a most genial, fatherly expression.
Nicolas de Worde knew the history of his patron saint well—too well—for it had been dinned into his ears by every nurse he had ever had, so it was with a certain detachment that he listened to Saint Nicolas telling the audience the story of his own early piety; as a new-born baby plunged into his first bath he had frightened everyone into fits by standing upright in the basin in an attitude of ecstatic adoration. Having thus early shown his aptitude for spiritual things it was but to be expected, so he informed the listening audience, that he should now have attained to his present position of Archbishop of Myra under Constantine the Great. And now, he said, he was upon this cold winter’s night waiting to receive a visit from three little boys, children of a friend of his, who were traveling to Athens to school and were to stop at Myra on their way to receive his blessing; for he loved children and cared for their happiness and their welfare more than anything else upon earth. Then he hitched up his red robe, adjusted his white beard, which was slipping a little sideways, waved a hand to the children in the audience and stepped down from the stage. His place was taken by a most villainous looking red-headed man, accompanied by the devil bearing a large wooden tub, who announced in flowing couplets that the stage was now an inn and the red-headed villain the innkeeper, and the rub was intended for the storing of murdered guests to the inn, whom it was the innkeeper’s habit to slay for their valuables and later to sell at a profit as pickled pork; children, he said, being juicy and tender, pickled best. A shiver of horror shook the audience, and the children in it squeaked aloud, their squeaks rising to cries of warning as three little boys were seen to he moving out of the shadows towards the lighted stage, two older boys with dark hair and one minute little fair-haired boy clasping a woolly lamb with tin legs in his arms. But the three doomed children took no notice of the warning cries, and failed to see the devil hiding behind the tub. Confidingly they mounted the steps to the stage, and confidingly they piped out, “Innkeeper, Innkeeper, please will you give us lodging for the night? It is too late now to disturb the good Archbishop. Innkeeper, Innkeeper, is there room for us in the inn?”
“Come in, my little dears,” cried the innkeeper, rubbing his hands together in horrid glee, and suddenly seizing the foremost boy by the scruff of his neck he whipped out a huge long knife and waved it in the air so that it flashed about his head like lightning. The audience moaned and cowered, and afterwards they were all ready to swear that they had actually seen those three shrieking little boys cut up into small pieces and stowed away in the tub; the fair little boy being cut up last and his lamb pitched in after him as a final tit-bit.
Having thus bestowed the little boys to his satisfaction the innkeeper sprinkled salt over them, stirred them about with a wooden spoon, and then settled himself on the floor with his back propped against one side of the tub, the devil being upon the other, for a well-earned night’s rest.
But no sooner were their snores ringing out triumphantly upon the frosty air than Saint Nicolas came hurrying along to the scene of action. He had had a nightmare, so he told the audience in breathless couplets as he climbed the steps to the stage, in which the fate of the little boys had been revealed to him by Almighty God with such a wealth of detail that every separate hair upon his white head had stood completely up on end. At this point he reached the innkeeper, fell upon him and shook him with a violence surprising in one so aged. “Villain!” he shouted. “Awake! Repent! The day of judgment is at hand!” It is a well-known fact that a criminal startled out of sleep will, if charged with his crime, acknowledge it, and the innkeeper was no exception to the rule. He awoke, yelped at finding himself shaken by an Archbishop, fell upon his knees and made a full confession. Seeing him so penitent the saintly Archbishop pray
ed loudly for his forgiveness, banished the now awakened and peevish devil with a wave of the hand, and concentrated upon the tub. He made the sign of the cross over it, he prayed over it, he wept over it, he stirred its contents with the wooden spoon and prayed again.
Up popped a small dark head. “Oh, I have had a beautiful sleep,” it said.
Up popped a second. “So have I,” it said.
Then up popped a golden head and a tiny bell-like voice piped, “And as for me, I have been in Paradise.”
The audience rocked and roared and cheered, and their cheering did not cease until the opening of the second scene, when the three little boys, dressed now as three little girls, sat at the feet of a sorrowing father—the red-headed villain only thinly disguised by the addition of a black wig—and were told that because of his poverty they could have no dowries. . . . They would in all probability have to be old maids. . . . At this awful threat the three little girls wept most pitifully, with their fists thrust into their eyes so that they did not see Saint Nicolas peeping over the edge of the stage, and did not see him take three little parcels from his red robe, throw them in, and then creep away chuckling to himself. . . . But they heard the thud as the parcels fell at their feet; they opened their eyes and picked them up; and they were three purses of gold.
The crowd cheered again and Saint Nicolas reappeared and came to the front of the stage, his genial white-bearded face beaming like the rising sun and his red robe shining gloriously in the lantern light. “Go home, all you little girls and boys,” he said, “and before you go to sleep tonight put out your little shoes beside your beds, and it may be that Saint Nicolas, who loves little children as dearly today as he did all those hundreds of years ago, will come in the night and put presents for you in them.” Then Saint Nicolas beamed and bowed again, and the performance was over.
Nicolas thought afterwards that it had been his detachment that had made him so acutely conscious of the little fair-haired boy with the woolly lamb with the tin legs. He had been one of the principal actors from the beginning. He had trotted at the heels of the shepherds as a little shepherd boy, clasping his lamb. He had knelt at the foot of the manger in Bethlehem as a little cherub, with his halo slipping a little sideways and the lamb still clasped to his bosom. He had been one of the innocents slaughtered by Herod and had died beautifully in the middle of the stage with the lamb still clasped to his chest. And then, with the lamb still apparently an inseparable part of his person, he had been one of the little boys saved by Saint Nicolas.
And in this story the other Nicolas had noticed him as a person for the first time. Before he had been part of the Christmas story, one of the gleaming facets of this jewel at the heart of the world, but in this he had been a little boy acting in a play and as such Nicolas had not been able to take his eyes off him; and was surprised at himself, for as a rule he took not the slightest interest in children. The little boy’s hair was smooth and fair, and shone in the lantern light as though his shapely little head were encased in a cap of gold. His face, grave and absorbed as he performed to the best of his ability the task that had been set him, was small and delicately heart-shaped, and the little bare feet that pattered so obediently over the hard boards of the stage were shapely and slender as those of a fairy’s child. Nicolas could not see his eyes, but he was sure that they were blue, a deep violet blue that would turn to the color of rain when sorrow clouded them. Surely this was no child of a strolling player. . . . If Joyeuce were to have a son, thought Nicolas, with a sudden constriction of the throat that hurt him, he would have just such a smooth fair head, just such a flower-like delicacy and grave absorption in his duty. . . . To possess such a son, thought Nicolas, the cares of fatherhood would not seem heavy.
3.
The play had ended and the actors and their stage had disappeared as though by magic. The lights shone out again and the chattering multi-colored crowd flowed down the steps from the galleries and out from the benches beneath them, filling the well of the courtyard as though wine had been poured into a dark cup. The stars were still blazing in the square of sky that rested on the gabled roofs and the Christmas bells were ringing. Nicolas found himself caught up in the singing crowd and carried bodily towards the archway that led back into Cornmarket, and the normal world that he had left behind him when he had stepped into the porch of Saint Michael at the North Gate. He pushed his way towards one of the wooden supports of the gallery, seized it and clung there and let the crowd surge past him, for the time had not come to return to the normal world. His star had not finished with him. He knew that as certainly as he had ever known anything.
“Will you come inside and take a tankard of ale, pretty master?”
The crowd was thinning and Nicolas looked down into the face of a pert little serving wench, with lips as red as holly berries and a snowy apron tied over a flowered gown. Since he had known Joyeuce he had rather lost his taste for serving wenches, but he smiled and chucked her under the chin and followed willingly enough. He was waiting upon events and her invitation seemed the next one in the sequence.
He followed her through a stout oak door into the main room of the inn, where a great fire of Christmas yule logs blazed on the hearth and was reflected in a ruddy glow in the faces of some two score of good citizens who were drinking ale, laughing, shouting and singing in an orgy of good fellowship well befitting the festive season. The air was thick with the fumes of the ale and the smoke from the fire and it was impossible for even the loudest-voiced to make himself heard under a shout. Yet through the haze there loomed the great bulk, and above the tumult there sounded the bellow, of Master Honeybun, mine host of the Crosse Inn, as he heaved himself this way and that refilling tankards, quelling disputes and getting the best of every argument with a playful blow upon the chest and a pat upon the head that were like to be the death of those so favored. But in spite of his multifarious duties he espied Nicolas and greeted him with a roar of welcome like to the roaring of a hundred bulls, for Nicolas was of the quality, and the quality were more likely to be found at the Tavern next door than at the humble Crosse.
Nicolas, his sense of unity with all mankind still powerfully with him, felt himself instantly at home. He seized the proffered tankard and was soon laughing and talking with these ruddy-faced gentlemen as though he had known them all his life. The players were among them, he discovered, no longer angels and shepherds but English vagabonds of the road with weather-tanned faces and worn jerkins. But they showed themselves to be artists, messengers of another country, by little eccentricities of dress and manner that aroused the mockery of the rollicking apprentices drinking beside the fire; one wore a gay yellow sash and his shabby jerkin, one, whose clothes were in rags, brandished a perfumed handkerchief of crimson silk, another wore heavy gold rings in his ears as though he were a seaman, and all of them had deeper voices than ordinary men, more graceful bodies, and gesticulating fingers and sparkling eyes that could convey in half a second the meaning or emotion that an ordinary man could not have expressed in twenty minutes of laborious speech; but Nicolas in his new mood found their unconscious striving for beauty and their lovely ease of communication matter for reverence rather than mirth.
“That is a lovely child of yours who played tonight,” he said to him of the rags and the perfumed handkerchief, a slim boy who had played the part of the angel Gabriel.
“Which child, master?” asked Gabriel.
“The fair child. The one with a woolly lamb.”
“Oh, that child. He’s not one of ours. He’s a gypsy’s child who is staying at the inn. Our boy is sick and this child took his place. A clever child; it took only a couple of hours to teach him his part.” A wicked grin spread over the face of the angel Gabriel and his slim fingers gripped Nicolas’s arm. “Come and let me introduce you to his father.”
The ruddy apprentices by the fire surrounded a group of older men, rough men from the poorer part of the town,
a traveling tinker and a few gypsies, and into this group the angel Gabriel propelled Nicolas. “Here, Sampson,” he cried, “here’s a gentleman would like to meet the father of the infant prodigy.”
Nicolas stared in amazement at the drunken giant of a creature who confronted him. He looked at the great broad shoulders, the dark matted beard, the coarse crimson features and the bloodshot green eyes that twinkled at him rather angrily, and in spite of himself he recoiled a little at the sight of the man’s great hairy chest showing through his torn jerkin, and the reek of drink and sweat that assailed his fastidious nose. The recoil and astonishment were momentary, but they were seen, and a huge red hand shot out and gripped Nicolas by the front of his exquisite leaf-green doublet.
“So my young cockerel thinks I can’t be the father of that damn child, does he?” bellowed Sampson in maudlin indignation, shaking Nicolas as a terrier a rat. “The little whey-faced puling brat! So I’m not capable of fathering it, eh?”
“I never said so,” remarked Nicolas breathlessly but with humor. “I consider your worship capable of fathering any number of brats.” His feet slipped on the floor, and his teeth clashed together as he rocked this way and that in the ruffian’s grip, but he managed to continue, his eyes merry in his empurpled face. “It is merely that in this case I do not consider the family likeness very remarkable.”
A great roar of laughter went up, for it seemed this was not the first time that the paternity of Sampson had been called in question, and it seemed this particular subject was a sore point with him, for he let go of Nicolas and hit out with blind rage at the circle of mocking faces that hedged him in.
“Eh, Sampson!” shouted the Tinker, a great bully of a man almost as vast as Sampson himself. “Can you give a name to the father of that boy? Can you give a name to the father of the child Sara’s brought to bed with at this moment! Cuckold! Cuckold!”