Imaginary LIves Read online

  Gabriel Spencer’s best friends were William Bird, Edward Juby and the two Jeffs. One summer they toured the countryside with a company of vagabond actors, traveling in a tilt-covered wagon that served them also as a shelter when they halted for the night. On the way to Hammersmith one evening, a man stepped out of the roadside ditch and showed them the muzzle of a pistol.

  “Your money!” he demanded. “I am Gamaliel Ratsey, highwayman, by the grace of God... and I don’t like to wait.”

  The two Jeffs responded with a wail: “Money we have not, your grace . only a few brass spangles and tinted rags. We are poor wayside actors, like your patron lady herself.”

  “Actors!” said Gamaliel. “Now this is well met. No rogue nor gamester I, but a good friend of these spectacles. Had I not a certain respect for Old Derrick, waiting to drag me up the ladder and stretch my neck for me, I’d never quit the river banks and happy taverns where you, my sirs, are customed to display such spirit. Welcome ye are this fine night, so up with your stage and give me your best... Gamaliel Ratsey listens. That’s not a common thing and you can tell it in the towns.”

  “But it will cost us money,” ventured the two Jeffs timidly.

  “Money!” exclaimed Gamaliel. “Who speaks to me of money? I am king here as Elizabeth is queen in the city, and I’ll pay you royally. Forty shillings for you.”

  Trembling, the actors came down from their wagon.

  “Please your majesty,” asked Bird, “what would you have us play?”

  With his eyes on Gabriel Spencer, Gamaliel Ratsey reflected.

  “Faith,” he said at last, “a pretty piece for this missy, and damn well melancholy. She’ll make me an Ophelia with those flower fingers... true fingers of death, she has. ‘Hamlet,’ that’s what ye’ll do, for well I like the humours of that composition. Were I not Gamaliel I might be Hamlet himself.” They lighted the lanterns. Gamaliel watched the performance attentively. When it was over he said to Gabriel Spencer:

  “Sweet Ophelia, I will excuse you from further compliment. You are free, actors of King Gamaliel. His majesty is satisfied.”

  Whereupon he disappeared into the darkness.

  As the wagon started off at dawn they found him again barring the way, pistol in hand.

  “Gamaliel Ratsey, highwayman,” he said,

  “has come for King Gamaliel’s forty shillings.” The two Jeffs promptly gave it over.

  “Now get on with you!” ordered Gamaliel.

  “My thanks for the play; decidedly the humours of Hamlet please me infinitely. All courtesies to Ophelia.” And with that he galloped away.

  Following this adventure the troupe returned to London, where they told a great tale of a mistaken robber stealing their Ophelia, skirts, wig and all. A girl named Pat King, who often came to the Green Curtain, declared she was not a bit surprised. She had a plump face and a round body.

  When Flum invited her home to meet Gabriel she found him pretty and kissed him sweetly. After that she came back frequently. Pat was the mistress of a brick-maker who disliked his trade, having an ambition to become an actor at the Green Curtain.

  His name was Ben Jonson and he was very proud of his education, being a clerk with some knowledge of Latin. He was a big square man, scarred by scrofula; his right eye was higher than his left and he had a loud harsh voice. This colossus had seen service as a soldier in the Low Countries. One day he followed Pat King, seized Gabriel by the scruff of the neck and dragged him out to Hoxton field, where he made him stand up and face him, sword in hand. Flum managed to slip Gabriel a blade ten inches the longer, and this passed through Ben Jonson’s arm.

  Stabbed through the lung, Gabriel died there on the grass. Flum ran for the constables, who carried Ben Jonson off swearing to Newgate. Flum hoped they would hang him but he recited his Latin poems to show he was a clerk, so they only branded him on the hand with a red hot iron.

  POCAHONTAS

  Princess

  Pocahontas was the daughter of King Powhatan who ruled from a couch-like throne draped in coon-skin robes with all the tails hanging down. She was raised in a house made of plaited reeds, among priests and women whose faces and shoulders were painted vivid red, and who amused her with leather toys and snake rattles. Namontak, a faithful old servant, watched over the princess while she played; sometimes they took her into the woods beside the wide Rappahannock River where thirty young girls would dance for her. They would be tinted bright colours and girdled with green leaves, having goats’ horns on their heads and otter skins in their belts as they shook their clubs, leaping around a crackling fire. The dance over, they would stamp out the fire and return with the princess in the glowing light of smouldering embers.

  During the year 1607 the land of Pocahontas was troubled by Europeans. Ruined gentlemen, criminals and gold-seekers came down the Potomac and built log cabins. To this scattered group of huts they gave the name Jamestown and they called their colony Virginia. In those first years Virginia was no more than a small impoverished fort on Chesapeake Bay, surrounded by the domains of the great King Powhatan. For their leader the colonists chose Captain John Smith, who earlier had sought adventure in the East among the Turks. Under his command they wandered along the rocks, living on shellfish together with what little grain they were able to secure through traffic with the Indians.

  At first they were received with great ceremony. A native priest came to them playing a reed flute, his braided locks crowned by a diadem of elk hair tinted red and arranged in rosettes. His body was painted crimson, his face blue, and he glittered from head to foot with ornaments of native silver. Straight and grim, he squatted on a carpet of mats, smoking a pipe filled with tobacco.

  Then others came, forming a solid square around the white men. Some were painted black, others red or white or in variegated colors. They sang and danced before their idol, which they called Oki – an image made of snake skins stuffed with mosses and hung with copper chains.

  In spite of this show of friendliness, Captain Smith was assailed a few days later while exploring the river, and was taken and bound. Amid wild war cries he was carried away to a long hut to be left there under a guard of forty savages. Priests with eyes made red and black faces crossed by broad white bands circled around the fire sprinkling grains of wheat on the ground. Then John Smith was conducted to the house of the King. Powhatan sat cloaked in his fur robes; near him were other chieftains, their locks filled with feathers. A woman brought water for John Smith to bathe his hands, and another dried them on a tuft of down.

  Meanwhile two red giants placed flat stones at Powhatan’s feet, and the King raised his hand in a sign for John Smith to kneel there and be beheaded.

  Advancing timidly through the circle of painted chiefs, Pocahontas threw herself before the Captain, her head against his cheek. She was only twelve years old. John Smith was twenty-nine. On his aquiline face he wore big straight mustaches and a fan-shaped beard. Pocahontas, they told him, was the name of the princess who had saved his life.

  But that was not her real name. Powhatan made peace with John Smith and set him free.

  A year later Captain Smith camped with his men in a dense woodland one night when a penetrating rain deadened all sound. Suddenly Pocahontas touched his shoulder. Alone she had come through the dark to warn him how her father planned an attack, intending to kill the English while they sat at supper. She begged him to go at once if he wished to live. Captain Smith offered her beads and ribbons but she only cried, telling him she did not want them. Then she went away alone into the forest.

  The following year found Smith in disgrace among the colonists and in 1609 he embarked for England. There he wrote books about Virginia, explained the colonial situation, recounted his adventures. About 1612 a certain Captain Argall, having gone to trade among the Potomacs (Powhatan’s tribe), took Pocahontas away as hostage. Her father was furious but she was not given back. She remained a prisoner until a gentleman of the court, one John Rolfe, became fascinated wit
h her and married her. They say Pocahontas confessed her love for John Smith to a priest who visited her in her prison. In June, 1616, she reached London where her advent aroused much curiosity at court. Good Queen Anne received her kindly, ordering her portrait engraved by a great artist.

  About to return to Virginia, Captain John Smith called to pay his respects before embarking.

  He had not seen Pocahontas since 1608; she was now twenty-two. When he entered she turned her face away, replying neither to the words of her husband nor her friends, remaining alone and silent for several hours. Then she called for Smith, and raising her eyes she said to him:

  “You promised Powhatan whatever belonged to you was his and he promised you the same. A stranger in his country, you called him father I am a stranger in your country and I shall call you that.” Captain Smith excused himself from the familiarity, for, he explained, she was the daughter of a king.

  She replied:

  “You were not afraid to come to my father’s country, and he dreaded you, he and all his people... excepting me. Here, do you think I shall not call you my father? I will say ‘my father’ and you shall say ‘my child’ and I will belong to your people always... They told me over there that you were dead.” Her name, she confided secretly to John Smith, was Matoaka. Fearing witchcraft, the Indians had falsely reported it to be Pocahontas.

  John Smith sailed for Virginia. He never saw Matoaka again. When she sickened at Gravesend shortly after the beginning of the following year, she soon grew pale and died. She was not quite twenty-three.

  Her portrait carries this inscription:

  “Matoaka alias Rebecca filia potentissimi principis Powhatani imperatoris Virginiæ.” It shows poor Matoaka in a high felt hat with two garlands of pearls, a ruffed collarette of lace and a plumed fan.

  Her face appears wan, her cheekbones are high and her large eyes are soft.

  CYRIL TOURNEUR

  Tragic Poet

  Cyril Tourneur was born out of the union of an unknown god with a prostitute. Proof enough of his divine origin has been found in the heroic atheism to which he succumbed. From his mother he inherited the instinct for revolt and luxury, the fear of death, the thrill of passion and the hate of kings. His father bequeathed him his desire for a crown, his pride of power and his joy of creating. To him both parents handed down their taste for nocturnal things, for a red glare in the night, and for blood.

  The exact date of his birth is not known, though we are told that he appeared one dark day during a pestilential year.

  No celestial protector watched over the woman whose body was swollen with this infant god, for the plague touched her several days before her confinement, and the door of her little house was marked with a red cross. At the moment when Cyril Tourneur was coming into the world the sexton at the cemetery began to toll the bell for the burial of the dead. Then, quite as his father had disappeared into that heaven common to all gods, so a green cart dragged his mother away to the common grave of men.

  That night is said to have been so dark that the sexton had to hold a torch by the pesthouse door while the grim carter gathered his load. Another historian tells us how the mists upon the river Thames (by Cyril Tourneur’s birthplace) were shot with scarlet rays while the sound of the bells was like the barking of cynocephales. There is little doubt but that a real star rose flaming over the house tops. The new born child shook his feeble fists as its fiery, malevolent gleams mottled his upturned face. So came Cyril Tourneur into the empty vastness of the Cimmerian night.

  It is impossible to discover what were his thoughts or habits before he reached the age of thirty. The signs of his latent divinity had no record, nor do we know how he first recognized his hidden sovereignty. An obscure list of his blasphemies has come to light. From this document we know that he declared Moses nothing more than a juggler, while one named Heriot, he said, was an infinitely cleverer juggler than Moses. The beginning of religion, according to Cyril, consisted in terrorizing man. Christ, he held, merited death more than Barabbas, though Barabbas were thief and murderer. Should he, Cyril Tourneur, write a new religion, he said, he could vow to establish it upon a finer, more admirable basis. He thought the style of the New Testament wholly repugnant. He declared that his right to coin money was as good as the queen of England’s, and furthermore, that he knew a man named Poole, a prisoner at Newgate, with whose aid he meant some day to strike gold pieces in his own image. A pious soul has erased the more terrible affirmations from this document.

  Cyril Tourneur’s words have been overheard and his gestures thought to indicate an atheism even more vindictive. He has been represented to us cloaked in a long black robe, a glorious twelve-starred crown on his head, his feet resting on the celestial sphere while he holds the terrestrial globe in his right hand. Pale as a wax taper on an altar, with eyes deeply aglow like burning incense, he walked the streets on stormy nights when the pest was over the city.

  Some have said he had a strange mark like a seal on his right thigh, but the point will never be verified since no one saw his body naked after death.

  For mistress he took a prostitute from Bankside, a girl who had haunted the waterfront streets. He called her Rosamonde. His love for her was unique. On her blonde, innocent face the rouge spots burned like flickering flames, and she was very young. Rosamonde bore Cyril Tourneur a daughter whom he loved. Having been looked at by a prince, Rosamonde died tragically, drinking emerald-coloured poison from a transparent cup.

  Vengeance merged with pride in Cyril’s soul.

  Night came... he walked the Mall, down the full length of that royal promenade, flourishing a torch of burning horsehair to illuminate his face, this poisoner prince. Hatred of all who reign was in his mouth and on his hands. So he became a highwayman, not to steal but to assassinate kings.

  Various princes who disappeared in those days were lighted to their death by Cyril Tourneur’s torch before he killed them.

  He would lie in wait along the queen’s highway, hiding near some gravel pit or lime kiln. Selecting his victim from a group of travellers, he would offer to guide the gentleman through the quagmires. At the mouth of the pit he would extinguish his torch and hurl the unsuspecting man into the black hole. The gravel always gave way under their feet and Cyril would roll two enormous stones down to stifle the cries. In the dull glow of the kiln, he would sit through the night watching the cadaver as the lime consumed it.

  When Cyril Tourneur had thus satisfied his hatred for kings he was assailed by his hatred of the gods. The divine spark within him urged him on to original creation. He dreamed of founding an entire generation out of his own blood – a race of gods on earth. He looked at his daughter. She was pure and desirable. To carry out his plan under the eyes of heaven he chose a cemetery as the most appropriate scene. Vowing to brave death and create a new humanity in the heart of that destruction decreed by the gods, Cyril Tourneur sought among old, dead bones to engender new ones. He carried out this project on the roof of a charnelhouse.

  The end of his life is lost in a haze of obscurity. We may not be sure what pen has given us The Atheist’s Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy. One legend pretends that the pride of Cyril Tourneur went still farther. He is said to have raised a black throne in his garden. Several persons have seen him sitting there with his gold crown on his head, though they all ran away, frightened by the long blue aigrettes waving to and fro above him.

  He read the poems of Empedocles in the manuscript. He often expressed his admiration for the manner in which the ancient poet died. No one saw the manuscript of Empedocles after Cyril Tourneur disappeared. That year the plague was come again, and the people of London took refuge on barges floating midstream in the Thames. One night a meteor flashed across the face of the moon.

  Moving with a sinister roar it whirled like a globe of white fire toward Cyril Tourneur’s house. On his black throne, in his black robes and his golden crown, the man waited for the comet. Like a battle on the stage, an om
inous blast of trumpets sounded a funereal fanfare across the night. In a shimmering, sanguine blaze, Cyril Tourneur was borne away to some unknown god in the sombre, stormy regions of the sky.

  WILLIAM PHIPS

  Treasure Hunter

  William Phips was born in 1651 near the mouth of the Kennebec River and those forests from which the shipbuilders cut their lumber. In a Maine village, poor and small, he dreamed his dreams of fortune hunting and adventure for the first time.

  There, in the sight of ships and makers of ships, the shifting, changing light from the New England seas brought to his eyes a gleam of sunken gold – a gleam of silver buried beneath the sands. Wealth was out there under the sea, he believed, and he wanted it.

  He learned shipbuilding, earned a small stake, journeyed to Boston. Strong in his faith, he repeated this prophecy: “Some day I’ll command a king’s ship and own a fine brick house on Green Street.” In those days numerous shipwrecked Spanish galleons laden with gold lay rotting at the bottom of the Atlantic. Rumours of them stirred William Phips to the soul. When he learned of a mighty one, wrecked years ago near Port de la Plata, he sailed for London after scraping together all the money he could command, planning to fit out an expedition.