FullReads

He touched the breast of a weather-beaten doublet. He gave her that queer twisted sort of smile which the girl could not but find attractive, somehow. He said: “Why but this heart thumping here inside me may stop any moment like a broken clock. Here is Euripides writing better than I: and here in my body, under my hand, is the mechanism upon which depend all those masterpieces that are to blot the Athenian from the reckoning, and I have no control of it!”

“Indeed, I fear that you control few things,” she told him, “and that least of all do you control your taste for taverns and bad women. Oh, I hear tales of you!” And Cynthia raised a reproving fore-finger.

“True tales, no doubt. ” He shrugged. “Lacking the moon he vainly cried for, the child learns to content himself with a penny whistle. ”

“Ah, but the moon is far away,” the girl said, smiling—“too far to hear the sound of human crying: and besides, the moon, as I remember it, was never a very amorous goddess—”

“Just so,” he answered: “also she was called Cynthia, and she, too, was beautiful. ”

“Yet is it the heart that cries to me, my poet?” she asked him, softly, “or just the lips?”

“Oh, both of them, most beautiful and inaccessible of goddesses. ” Then Marlowe leaned toward her, laughing and shaking that disreputable red head. “Still you are very foolish, in your latest incarnation, to be wasting your rays upon carpet earls who will not outwear a century. Were modesty not my failing, I repeat, I could name somebody who will last longer. Yes, and—if, but I lacked that plaguey virtue—I would advise you to go a-gypsying with that nameless somebody, so that two manikins might snatch their little share of the big things that are eternal, just as the butterfly fares intrepidly and joyously, with the sun for his torch-boy, through a universe wherein thought cannot estimate the unimportance of a butterfly, and wherein not even the chaste moon is very important. Yes, certainly I would advise you to have done with this vanity of courts and masques, of satins and fans and fiddles, this dallying with tinsels and bright vapours; and very movingly I would exhort you to seek out Arcadia, travelling hand in hand with that still nameless somebody. ” And of a sudden the restless man began to sing.

Sang Kit Marlowe:

“Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Woods or sleepy mountain yields.

“And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals—”

But the girl shook her small, wise head decisively. “That is all very fine, but, as it happens, there is no such place as this Arcadia, where people can frolic in perpetual sunlight the year round, and find their food and clothing miraculously provided. No, nor can you, I am afraid, give me what all maids really, in their heart of hearts, desire far more than any sugar-candy Arcadia. Oh, as I have so often told you, Kit, I think you love no woman. You love words. And your seraglio is tenanted by very beautiful words, I grant you, thought there is no longer any Sestos builded of agate and crystal, either, Kit Marlowe. For, as you may perceive, sir, I have read all that lovely poem you left with me last Thursday—”

She saw how interested he was, saw how he almost smirked. “Aha, so you think it not quite bad, eh, the conclusion of my ‘Hero and Leander’?”

“It is your best. And your middlemost, my poet, is better than aught else in English,” she said, politely, and knowing how much he delighted to hear such remarks.

“Come, I retract my charge of foolishness, for you are plainly a wench of rare discrimination. And yet you say I do not love you! Cynthia, you are beautiful, you are perfect in all things. You are that heavenly Helen of whom I wrote, some persons say, acceptably enough—How strange it was I did not know that Helen was dark-haired and pale! for certainly yours is that immortal loveliness which must be served by poets in life and death. ”