Читать книгу Maid No More - Helen Simpson - Страница 3

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E. K.: Here is Madimi.

DEE: Blessed be the God of Heaven and Earth, who regardeth the sincere intent of his silly ones.

A True and Faithful Relation of what passed for many years between Dr. John Dee and some Spirits.

The young gentlemen of Magdalen College, going about their lawful occasions, halted to observe a sensible-looking woman talking to herself below their outdoor pulpit. The academic life offered many opportunities for baiting, none of which they were apt to neglect; poor scholars, professors, and nonconformists of various kinds were mischief's daily bread. But women, apart from complaisant persons in taverns, did not often offer. The undergraduates therefore gave some attention to this creature's words, as they were wont to give attention to the mannerisms of those who instructed them, with a view to reproducing in caricature what was meant to edify. To their displeasure, the woman was sermonizing.

She was saying that each man and woman must be visited personally by God. Each must know God in his heart of hearts and acknowledge him there in the spirit; without this, no ceremony under vaulted stone could avail. The young gentlemen found it dry stuff, and were drifting away after a few conventional catcalls, when they heard words which swung them like weathercocks. The woman, when naming them Antichrists, a statement received with ironical cheers and some yelping in Latin from the elders, went on to assail them as a corporate body and more particularly to blacken by comparison the College of which they were members.

They had no objection to being told that they were sinners; indeed, the complaint had a flattering ring to those who were hardly old or rich enough to be able to do much sinning save in a general unspecialized way. They had no quarrel with anyone who told them that they were wasting their time at the University learning things that were not of God. They were amused to hear their chapel called a steeple-house when it had in fact no steeple. But that the College to which they owed loyalty should be denominated a cage of unclean birds and the synagogue of Satan was a prick beyond ordinary symptoms of impatience. They began throwing whatever came first to hand, apples, books; those who were near enough launched spittle; all were certain of righteousness.

The women—there were two of them, but one had done all the talking—did not budge, or avoid what was flung at them. Thus the affair went on longer than it ought to have done, long enough to attract the attention of a young Master of Arts who found his translation of Horace's Art of Poetry difficult to pursue owing to the din. He had written:—

"Wise sober folk a frantic poet fear

And shun to touch him, as a man that were

Infected with the leprosy, or had

The yellow jaundice, or were furious mad

According to the moon—"

His nodding head approved the version thus far, and the pen began once more to skirmish:—

"But then the boys

They vex and follow him with shouts and noise,

The while he—"

It was perhaps the coincidence of his matter with the evidence of his senses that made him aware at last of the riot and brought him to his window. Indulgently, for he was young, he called down to the youths to cease their riot. They replied, with the identical din observed by Horace centuries before, that it was the women who were causing disturbance. The Master of Arts, on the tip of whose tongue an airy grammatical construction complete with needed rhymes was trembling, answered briefly that women were not matters to which even the junior members of any university should devote attention, and recommended the constable and the bride-well. A spokesman, above the laughter of the rest, cleared away this misapprehension. The women had no notion of leading into temptation (yells of mock disappointment) but rather sought to deliver from evil; were, in fact, trying to convert their hearers.

"Convert the Grand Turk!" replied the Master of Arts in a phrase which combined mistrust of female powers with recognition of the futility of the task, and withdrew his head. Banging his window and snibbing it, he paused an instant to hear if the noise would ebb, though it was none of his affair to check it if it should continue. It seemed, however, to dwindle satisfactorily in the course of the next couple of minutes, leaving him to measures more polished, and the proper allocation of stresses. He was a young man not unusual in that University at that time, one who had fought for his King, and lost his patrimony, but in so doing had discovered how to command both words and men. No man was better fitted than he to bring order out of confusion of sense, to discipline rebel meanings. In the peace which ensued he worked well. And in the benevolence which flows from knowledge of labour well accomplished, he had nothing but disgust for the news which later in the day a servant brought him.

"Strip Christian women and whip them through the streets! Why, the Jews, the Turks are less barbarous than that."

"It's preachers, master. They don't deserve no better. The Mayor, he's very strong on the subject."

"Is toleration, then, also a lost cause? What women are these?

"Why, you saw them, they were here breaking the peace. You gave the order to commit; so the gentlemen say."

"I did?" The voice of the Master of Arts, which had lifted indignantly, sank. "I do now recollect something. I told them to let the constable deal with the matter. Whips! Yet the Mayor goes to sermon, I suppose."

With his eye upon the fair copy of his verses, he began to argue the immediate issue into a larger one. If, in the peaceful hours brought at the price of these strangers' pain, he had caught up for a moment the torch of the centuries, was not that, considered sub specie aeternitatis, a fair exchange? And if, through what he had that day written, some English boy yet unborn were brought to the knowledge and love of the Roman poets, was not this in effect to make pain bear good fruit? That pain could be fruitful in men he, a soldier, had not often observed. It seemed, indeed, to tumble them down from man's estate and make children or madmen of them. But that pain might be fruitful in women he need not deny, God having declared this penalty upon them for Eve's fault, besides making them tender, weakly, and obstinate, snares set to catch pain. The spell of the place being upon him he stood thus splitting hairs awhile, finding a sort of pleasure in detachment from that world into which he was soon once more to venture. To consider pain in the abstract; to consider women in the abstract; to be free of the senses for a week or two, and to view action as an aspect of thought was delightful. He stretched his arms wide.

But an image of the whipped women intruded; he was obliged, this being one of the penalties of imagination, the other side of being half a poet, to see their poor bodies striped with blows, to hear them cry out. He shook the vision away impatiently, and took up his soldier-scholar argument once more. The women must sooner or later, if they persisted in their preaching, come to be whipped. This was the law; only thus, in a time of religious uneasiness, could that peace be preserved which enabled true preachers of the word, poets and Masters of Arts, to continue their labours. Was it not better, then, that these torn bodies should serve a holier purpose than such bodies were wont to do, bringing to birth spirit rather than flesh?

He took his pen and, standing, scrawled above the first lines of his version of the Art of Poetry a Latin dedication: To one unknown who has trodden the press, this draught of Falernian wine.