Voices from the Past Part 132

I must speak to Jonson and Alleyn. I must write to them at once!

Fog lay about in pieces like pieces of my life. Ground fog.

In the starlight I glared at my hands and saw that they were swollen, as they have often been lately.

Wasn't that snow falling, flakes of morning?

I tried to remember Ellen's face, tried to feel her presence.

When Ann brought me breakfast I could not look at her though she spoke to me kindly.

I write with costly effort-hands worse. I am cold. My mind staggers.

To the oriel-to look outside.

Thinking makes poverty.

Religion as we came to regard it in London was a glib and soiled art.

Eclipses of our mental sun and moon betray us; so I beseech you, brain, do not regress as time shows time's ending: old and reverend, think straight.

Eater of broken meats I seem to be: knave, rascal, ruffian. Reverence to self...

Perhaps this cold world will turn us all to fools and madmen...

Stratford

Why is it I grimace so much? Alone I mug, pull my beard, rub flat of hand over my eyes, crack knuckles, shrug, sigh. Is this my sane monologue with self? What's its purpose? Perhaps I must convince myself that I am alive and battling: grimace at the window, grimace on the pot, grimace at bed. Grimace is my hornbook. For the best of self-conviction I prefer knuckle cracking-such skeletal speech.

Stratford

February 26, 1616

So I'll never know who attacked Ellen?

Is it because I am sick that I care?

Could it be that someone stepped from his stage of bitterness and struck her that night the fog drowned her carriage? Did he resent my luck? The harder poverty knocked the keener he felt my good luck: was that how it was? Was hunger a knife in his belly? Did he run away from London afterward? His hungry, motherless kids asked him to kill for money? Was that how it was?

"Your brother Fred is here, bending over you..."

"Was that Ann, who said that yesterday? Or was it Hall, bending over me, who said that Fred had come by?"

Ellen, could you come? Or Hamlet? Oth.e.l.lo? Marlowe?

Stratford

March 5, 1616

Years ago I wrote this:

Can honor set a leg? Or set an arm? Or take away the pain of a wound? What is honor? A word? What is that word? Air? What has it? The fellow who died on Wednesday, does he feel it? Does he hear it?

But I still hear it...honor lives for me, in my memories of my father, for all those who have worked before I came into being, for the cathedral spire, the s.h.i.+p, the cut gem, the book, the play, the figure standing in sun and snow...

13th

Very sick for three days. Dr. Hall. Others.

Pain.

Can't get to the oriel.

Wouldn't know a hawk from a handsaw.

15th

I go before my darling,

I go before...

Follow to the bower in the close alley,

There we will together sweetly kiss

And like two wantons, dally-dally-dally...

Sing it again-sing to me before I die-the candles are dying-the wind is dying-I suffocate in my room-I want to be with you-sing our song-oh, to dally once more-sing-