The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (32 page)

‘Why,' quoth I, ‘myself that am but a poor childish well-willer of yours, with the very thought that a man of your desert and state by a number of peasants and varlets should be so injuriously abused in hugger-mugger,
²²
have wept all my urine upward. The wheel under our city bridge carries not so much water over the city as my brain hath welled forth gushing streams of sorrow. I have wept so immoderately and lavishly that I thought verily my palate had been turned to Pissing Conduit
²³
in London. My eyes have been drunk, outrageously drunk, with giving but ordinary intercourse
course through their sea-circled islands to my distilling dreariment. What shall I say? That which malice hath said is the mere overthrow and murther of your days. Change not your colour: none can slander a clear conscience to itself. Receive all your fraught of misfortune in at once.

‘It is buzzed in the King's head that you are a secret friend to the enemy, and, under pretence of getting a licence to furnish the camp with cider and suchlike provant, you have furnished the enemy, and in empty barrels sent letters of discovery and corn innumerable.'

I might well have left here, for by this time his white liver had mixed itself with the white of his eye, and both were turned upwards as if they had offered themselves a fair white for death to shoot at. The truth was, I was very loth mine host and I should part with dry lips. Wherefore the best means that I could imagine to wake him out of his trance was to cry loud in his ear: ‘Ho, host, what's to pay? Will no man look to the reckoning here?' And in plain verity it took expected effect for, with the noise, he started and bustled, like a man that had been scared with fire out of his sleep, and ran hastily to his tapster and all-to-belaboured him about the ears for letting gentlemen call so long and not look in to them. Presently he remembered himself, and had like to fall into his memento
²⁴
again but that I met him half-ways and asked his Lordship what he meant to slip his neck out of the collar so suddenly and, being revived, strike his tapster so hastily.

‘Oh,' quoth he, ‘I am bought and sold for doing my country such good service as I have done! They are afraid of me because my good deeds have brought me into such estimation with the commonalty. I see, I see, it is not for the lamb to live with the wolf.'

The world is well amended, thought I, with your Cidership: such another forty years' nap together as Epeminedes
²⁵
had would make you a perfect wise man.

‘Answer me,' quoth he, ‘my wise young Wilton. Is it true
that I am thus underhand dead and buried by these bad tongues?'

‘Nay,' quoth I, ‘you shall pardon me, for I have spoken too much already. No definitive sentence of death shall march out of my well-meaning lips. They have but lately sucked milk, and shall they so suddenly change their food and seek after blood?'

‘Oh, but,' quoth he, ‘a man's friend is his friend. Fill the other pint, tapster. What said the King? Did he believe it when he heard it? I pray thee say. I swear by my nobility, none in the world shall ever be made privy that I received any light of this matter by thee.'

‘That firm affiance,' quoth I, ‘had I in you before, or else I would never have gone so far over shoes to pluck you out of the mire. Not to make many words, since you will needs know, the King says flatly you are a miser and a snudge,
²⁶
and he never hoped better of you.'

‘Nay then,' quoth he, ‘questionless some planet that loves not cider hath conspired against me.'

‘Moreover, which is worse, the King hath vowed to give Turwin one hot breakfast only with the bungs that he will pluck out of your barrels. I cannot stay at this time to report each circumstance that passed, but the only counsel that my long-cherished, kind inclination can possibly contrive, is now in your old days to be liberal. Such victuals or provision as you have, presently distribute it frankly amongst poor soldiers. I would let them burst their bellies with cider and bathe in it, before I would run into my Prince's ill opinion for a whole sea of it. The hunter pursuing the beaver for his stones, he bites them off and leaves them behind for him to gather up, whereby he lives quiet. If greedy hunters and hungry tale-tellers pursue you, it is for a little pelf that you have. Cast it behind you, neglect it, let them have it, lest it breed a farther inconvenience. Credit my advice; you shall find it prophetical. And thus have I discharged the part of a poor friend.'

With some few like phrases of ceremony (‘Your Honour's
poor suppliant' and so forth, and ‘Farewell, my good youth, I thank thee and will remember thee') we parted.

But the next day I think we had a deal of cider, cider in bowls, in scuppets,
²⁷
in helmets. And, to conclude, if a man would have filled his boots full, there he might have had it. Provant thrust itself into poor soldiers' pockets whether they would or no. We made five peals of shot into the town together of nothing but spigots and faucets
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of discarded empty barrels. Every under-foot soldier had a distenanted tun, as Diogenes had his tub to sleep in. I myself got as many confiscated tapsters' aprons as made me a tent as big as any ordinary commander's in the field. But, in conclusion, my well-beloved Baron of double-beer got him humbly on his mary-bones
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to the King, and complained he was old and stricken in years, and had never an heir to cast at a dog, wherefore if it might please His Majesty to take his lands into his hands, and allow him some reasonable pension to live on, he should be marvellously well pleased. As for wars, he was weary of them; yet, as long as his Highness ventured his own person, he would not flinch a foot, but make his withered body a buckler to bear off any blow advanced against him.

The King, marvelling at this alteration of his cider-merchant (for so he often pleasantly termed him), with a little further talk bolted out the whole complotment. Then was I pitifully whipped for my holiday lie, though they made themselves merry with it many a winter's evening after.

For all this, his good ass-headed Honour, mine host, persevered in his former request to the King to accept his lands and allow him a beadsmanry
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or out-brothership of brachet;
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which through his vehement instancy took effect, and the King jestingly said, since he would needs have it so,
he would distrain on part of his land for impost of cider, which he was behind with.

This was one of my famous achievements, insomuch as I never light upon the like famous fool. But I have done a thousand better jests, if they had been booked in order as they were begotten. It is pity posterity should be deprived of such precious records; and yet there is no remedy; and yet there is too, for when all fails, well fare a good memory. Gentle readers (look you be gentle now, since I have called you so), as freely as my knavery was mine own, it shall be yours to use in the way of honesty.

Even in this expedition of Turwin (for the King stood not long a-thrumming of buttons there) it happened me fall in (I would it had fallen out otherwise for his sake) with an ugly mechanical
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Captain. You must think in an army, where truncheons are in their state-house, it is a flat stab once to name a Captain without cap in hand. Well, suppose he was a Captain, and had never a good cap of his own, but I was fain to lend him one of my lord's cast velvet caps and a weather-beaten feather wherewith he threatened his soldiers afar off, as Jupiter is said with the shaking of his hair to make heaven and earth to quake. Suppose out of the parings
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of a pair of false dice I apparelled both him and myself many a time and oft. And surely, not to slander the devil, if any man ever deserved the golden dice
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the King of the Parthians sent to Demetrius, it was I: I had the right vein of sucking up a die twixt the dints of my fingers; not a crevice in my hand but could swallow a quater trey
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for a need; in the line of life many a dead lift did there lurk, but it was nothing towards the maintenance of a
family. This Monsieur Capitano ate up the cream of my earnings, and
Crede mihi, res est ingeniosa dare
:
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‘Any man is a fine fellow as long as he hath any money in his purse.' That money is like the marigold, which opens and shuts with the sun: if fortune smileth or one be in favour, it floweth; if the evening of age comes on, or he falls into disgrace, it fadeth and is not to be found. I was my craft's master though I were but young, and could as soon decline
Nominativo hic asinus
³⁷
as a greater clerk. Wherefore I thought it not convenient my soldado should have my purse any longer for his drum to play upon, but I would give him Jack Drum's entertainment
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and send him packing.

This was my plot. I knew a piece of service of intelligence which was presently to be done, that required a man with all his five senses to effect it, and would overthrow any fool that should undertake it. To this service did I animate and egg my foresaid costs and charges, alias Senior Velvet-cap, whose head was not encumbered with too much forecast. And coming to him in his cabin about dinner-time, where I found him very devoutly paring of his nails for want of other repast, I entertained him with this solemn oration.

‘Captain, you perceive how near both of us are driven. The dice of late are grown as melancholy as a dog; high men and low men both prosper alike; langrets,
³⁹
fulhams
⁴⁰
and all the whole fellowship of them will not afford a man his dinner. Some other means must be invented to prevent imminent extremity. My state, you are not ignorant, depends on trencher service. Your advancement must be derived from the valour of your arm. In the delays of siege, desert hardly gets a day of hearing: ‘tis gowns must direct and guns enact all the wars that is to be made against walls. Resteth no way for you to climb suddenly, but by doing
some rare stratagem, the like not before heard of; and fitly at this time occasion is offered.

‘There is a feat the King is desirous to have wrought on some great man of the enemy's side. Marry, it requireth not so much resolution as discretion to bring it to pass; and yet resolution enough should be shown in it too, being so full of hazardous jeopardy as it is. Hark in your ear. Thus it is: without more drumbling
⁴¹
or pausing, if you will undertake it and work it through-stitch
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(as you may, ere the King hath determined which way to go about it), I warrant you are made while you live; you need not care which way your staff falls. If it prove not so, then cut off my head.'

Oh my auditors, had you seen him how he stretched out his limbs, scratched his scabbed elbows at this speech, how he set his cap over his eyebrows like a politician, and then folded his arms one in another and nodded with the head, as who would say ‘Let the French beware, for they shall find me a devil.… ' If, I say, you had seen but half the action that he used, of shrucking up his shoulders, smiling scornfully, playing with his fingers on his buttons and biting the lip, you would have laughed your face and your knees together. The iron being hot, I thought to lay on load, for in any case I would not have his humour cool. As before I laid open unto him the brief sum of the service, so now I began to urge the honourableness of it and what a rare thing it was to be a right politician, how much esteemed of kings and princes, and how divers of mean parentage have come to be monarchs by it. Then I discoursed of the qualities and properties of him in every respect; how, like the wolf, he must draw the breath from a man long before he be seen; how, like a hare, he must sleep with his eyes open; how, as the eagle in his flying casts dust in the eyes of crows and other fowls for to blind them, so he must cast dust in the eyes of his enemies, delude their sight by one means or other, that they dive not into his subtleties; how he must be familiar with all and trust none; drink,
carouse and lecher with him out of whom he hopes to wring any matter; swear and forswear rather than be suspected; and, in a word, have the art of dissembling at his fingers' ends as perfect as any courtier.

‘Perhaps,' quoth I, ‘you may have some few greasy cavaliers that will seek to dissuade you from it, and they will not stick to stand on their three-halfpenny honour, swearing and staring that a man were better be a hangman than an intelligencer, and call him a sneaking eavesdropper, a scraping hedge-creeper, and a piperly pickthank.
⁴³
But you must not be discouraged by their talk, for the most part of these beggarly contemners of wit are huge burly-boned butchers like Ajax, good for nothing but to strike right-down blows on a wedge with a cleaving-beetle, or stand hammering all day upon bars of iron. The whelps of a bear never grow but sleeping, and these bear-wards, having big limbs, shall be preferred though they do nothing. You have read stories' (I'll be sworn he never looked in book in his life) ‘how many of the Roman worthies were there that have gone as spials into their enemy's camp? Ulysses, Nestor, Diomede went as spies together in the night into the tents of Rhesus, and intercepted Dolon, the spy of the Trojans. Never any discredited the trade of intelligencers bat Judas, and he hanged himself. Danger will put wit into any man. Architas made a wooden dove to fly; by which proportion I see no reason that the veriest block in the world should despair of anything. Though nature be contrary inclined, it may be altered; yet usually those whom she denies her ordinary gifts in one thing, she doubles them in another. That which the ass wants in wit, he hath in honesty: who ever saw him kick or winch,
⁴⁴
or use any jade's tricks? Though he live an hundred years you shall never hear that he breaks pasture. Amongst men, he that hath not a good wit lightly
⁴⁵
hath a good iron memory, and he that hath neither of both hath some bones to carry
burthens. Blind men have better noses than other men; the bull's horns serve him as well as hands to fight withal; the lion's paws are as good to him as a pole-axe to knock down any that resist him; the boar's tushes serve him in better stead than a sword and buckler; what need the snail care for eyes when he feels the way with his two horns as well as if he were as quick-sighted as a decipherer? There is a fish that having no wings supports herself in the air with her fins. Admit that you had neither wit nor capacity (as sure, in my judgment, there is none equal unto you in idiotism), yet if you have simplicity and secrecy, serpents themselves will think you a serpent; for what serpent is there but hides his sting? And yet, whatsoever be wanting, a good plausible tongue in such a man of employment can hardly be spared, which, as the fore-named serpent with his winding tail fetcheth in those that come near him, so with a ravishing tale it gathers all men's hearts unto him; which if he have not, let him never look to engender by the mouth, as ravens and doves do; that is, mount or be great by undermining. Sir, I am ascertained that all these imperfections I speak of in you have their natural resiance.
⁴⁶
I see in your face that you were born, with the swallow, to feed flying, to get much treasure and honour by travel. None so fit as you for so important an enterprise: our vulgar politicians are but flies swimming on the stream of subtlety superficially in comparison of your singularity. Their blind narrow eyes cannot pierce into the profundity of hypocrisy. You alone, with Palamede,
⁴⁷
can pry into Ulysses' mad counterfeiting. You can discern Achilles from a chamber-maid,
⁴⁸
though he be decked with his spindle and distaff. As Jove dining with Lycaon could not be beguiled with human flesh dressed like meat,
⁴⁹
so no human brain may go beyond you, none beguile you. You gull all; all fear you, love you, stoop to you.
Therefore, good sir, be ruled by me: stoop your fortune so low as to bequeath yourself wholly to this business.'