University of Virginia Library

TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE

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 of 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 deeplunged,
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

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 Caxter.

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 misbuilt
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 the 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 themselves,
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:

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 trapdoor
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 anæsthetic 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 chank 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 clump 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: