Voices from the Past Part 127

I put away her letters and closed the shutters and lit the candles and the rush lamp, and, settling in my chair, I read of another past, to palliate myself, Virgil's.

Stratford

I have been thinking of Merlin and his magic ways, the thrall of his immense dabbling: this island should have been named Clas Myrddin: Merlin's Enclosure. Perhaps Gawain and Lancelot would have enclosed us and the grail might not have become the great illusion among illusions.

I am reading Spenser's Amoretti now: now I read what Raleigh read in prison; the coincidence is appropriate enough. There are not too many coincidences in life but there are many kinds of prisons. Perhaps the worst is the prison imprisoning the prisoner against his will; the other prison, self-germinated, self-maintained, can be as ascetic, as impa.s.sioned in its tortures, and yet it has its rush lamp for the outcast state:

Pour soul, the center of my sinful earth,

Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array.

Why dost thou pine...such a mistaken canister

Of words that I would not put them down once more.

January 15, 1616

Stratford-Henley Street

Viola bows rasped and recorders piped and rain hit the door and windows at Hall's, the quartet playing before his fireplace, the men sitting with their backs to the blaze, instruments fired.

"More ale?"

"How about canary?"

"Cake, eh, Will?"

Cakes and rain perpetually, the strings for a throat, garroting the night...the rain, it raineth every night.

Admit no impediments, listen:

Never say that I was false of heart...the poison left her stunned, as if beneath an avalanche of men. Mad slanderers, no, Ann deserved the slander but what could slander accomplish? Like incessant rain, or that repeated low note on the fiddle, what good? A flooding melancholy, and Ann unchanged.

Love was my sin but now my sin is breathing. And tonight it is a multiple sin for I am listening, hoping these instruments and players have a message for my soul.

The shattered rain on windows is everyman's storm, the gutter thief, the pimp, the king-all of us hunkered under pain.

The good Dr. Hall bends over me:

"Feeling better tonight, Will? I hope so."

I chuckle and say I am.

Put on your cloak and hurry, Hall. There's someone sicker than I who needs you. Eat a crocodile. I'll be going home soon. I should be there now, going over my accounts.

Music has unstopped my ears but no grapple of sound holds tonight, not with the scrofula of rain, the wink of time on cavernous faces beefed by the fire.

See that wizened face, that's Hall, tall and thin, and next to him my frump, belly puddinged, hair screwed at angles, lines and then more lines lining the half-open mouth, the missing teeth... Ann, dear Ann, was it to you I wrote the sonnet beginning? Ah, no, the errors snare us, bare us to the quick of lime. The arithmetic of memory multiplies fantasy.

Poetry, succor me in this hour of need, help me as you have: I have given you my life; now, you must lend argument to my folly. Dry the rain on my skull! Be youth: be Ellen, outcast, incast, what is your substance, whereof you are made, that millions of strange shadows on you tend? Is this my memory? Or do the lines remember me?

The notes of the quartet confuse the shadows, the fire's instrument, the tankards on the table, one for you, Marlowe...

I am to wait, though waiting be as h.e.l.l-

And we walked home together through the rain, she who has never met Touchstone or Polonius or Oth.e.l.lo...

And so to a cold bed.

S

On some of Dr. Hall's visits, he urged me to discontinue my journal, wanting me to rest. I told him that the language I used was hardly playwriting, requiring the barest effort on my part. I explained that I need something. He huffed and rumbled, with professional sincerity, like the good neighbor he is, and I understand now that my resurrected fears may, like a Greek chorus, pervade and annul. But what do they pervade and annul, this corner, precharnel, prepaid house in h.e.l.l? Am I to talk with trees? Am I to forget manhood? Am I to cheer old age? Infirmity? Hall is such a knotted creature I wonder my Susanna married him: such a sultry woman for such a cadaver! His contorted body, pinched here, pinched there, sewed here, unsewed there, his starvation face, with zealot eyes in bald skull, leaves me lacking in confidence; yet, I listen and he prescribes and we talk and play chess. I am his medical p.a.w.n, gulping doses for him, bleeding for him: is the final move his or mine?

Home

January 18, 1616

Dr. Hall, when you found your woman in my Susanna, you found bed-woman, kitchen wench and apothecary girl. Your shop, shelved, bottled, ointmented, reeks of balm and poison. Long before you married my Susanna, I got to know that smell when I came to you to help me battle pain. You were never too ill or busy to help me check pain's unkindness.

But underneath your skin you are another Timon, another hater of mankind, concocting health to make more health to make more pain to make money. Pestel in hand, you measure alleviants, the richer your patient, the cleverer your compound. How you worry on behalf of the young countess. How you thumb your books for the Lord Chamberlain's gout.

Drum bottles-

Beat shelves-

Smash gla.s.s-

See, his shingle in the wind, JOHN HALL PHYSICIAN, weeps rain, and I sit waiting, with vapors, losses, pangs, venoms in my blood, antic.i.p.ating prescriptions-or epitaph.

His face grimaces his thanks, his hand extended, his pox is to "rob one another. There's more gold! Cut throats...all that you meet are thieves!" All this is patiently and subtly withheld by the good doctor since frightening the patient frightens money. Only dear friends discover the true Timon...

Oh, G.o.d, how pain strangles me today! It paves my skull! I am on fire! Such useless misery! Pain is the greatest cheat. Pain, your friendship is much too cov- etous! Pain-you old prost.i.tute-swallow your own hemlock for a change!

Henley Street, Stratford