Kitabı oku: «A Journey from This World to the Next», sayfa 8
CHAPTER XXI
Julian’s adventures in the post of a soldier.
“I was born at Caen, in Normandy. My mother’s name was Matilda; as for my father, I am not so certain, for the good woman on her death-bed assured me she herself could bring her guess to no greater certainty than to five of duke William’s captains. When I was no more than thirteen (being indeed a surprising stout boy of my age) I enlisted into the army of duke William, afterwards known by the name of William the Conqueror, landed with him at Pemesey or Pemsey, in Sussex, and was present at the famous battle of Hastings.
“At the first onset it was impossible to describe my consternation, which was heightened by the fall of two soldiers who stood by me; but this soon abated, and by degrees, as my blood grew warm, I thought no more of my own safety, but fell on the enemy with great fury, and did a good deal of execution; till, unhappily, I received a wound in my thigh, which rendered me unable to stand any longer, so that I now lay among the dead, and was constantly exposed to the danger of being trampled to death, as well by my fellow-soldiers as by the enemy. However, I had the fortune to escape it, and continued the remaining part of the day and the night following on the ground.
“The next morning, the duke sending out parties to bring off the wounded, I was found almost expiring with loss of blood; notwithstanding which, as immediate care was taken to dress my wounds, youth and a robust constitution stood my friends, and I recovered after a long and tedious indisposition, and was again able to use my limbs and do my duty.
“As soon as Dover was taken I was conveyed thither with all the rest of the sick and wounded. Here I recovered of my wound; but fell afterwards into a violent flux, which, when it departed, left me so weak that it was long before I could regain my strength. And what most afflicted me was, that during my whole illness, when I languished under want as well as sickness, I had daily the mortification to see and hear the riots and excess of my fellow-soldiers, who had happily escaped safe from the battle.
“I was no sooner well than I was ordered into garrison at Dover Castle. The officers here fared very indifferently, but the private men much worse. We had great scarcity of provisions, and, what was yet more intolerable, were so closely confined for want of room (four of us being obliged to lie on the same bundle of straw), that many died, and most sickened.
“Here I had remained about four months, when one night we were alarmed with the arrival of the earl of Boulogne, who had come over privily from France, and endeavored to surprise the castle. The design proved ineffectual; for the garrison making a brisk sally, most of his men were tumbled down the precipice, and he returned with a very few back to France. In this action, however, I had the misfortune to come off with a broken arm; it was so shattered, that, besides a great deal of pain and misery which I endured in my cure, I was disabled for upwards of three months.
“Soon after my recovery I had contracted an amour with a young woman whose parents lived near the garrison, and were in much better circumstances than I had reason to expect should give their consent to the match. However, as she was extremely fond of me (as I was indeed distractedly enamored of her), they were prevailed on to comply with her desires, and the day was fixed for our marriage.
“On the evening preceding, while I was exulting with the eager expectation of the happiness I was the next day to enjoy, I received orders to march early in the morning towards Windsor, where a large army was to be formed, at the head of which the king intended to march into the west. Any person who hath ever been in love may easily imagine what I felt in my mind on receiving those orders; and what still heightened my torments was, that the commanding officer would not permit any one to go out of the garrison that evening; so that I had not even an opportunity of taking leave of my beloved.
“The morning came which was to have put me in the possession of my wishes; but, alas! the scene was now changed, and all the hopes which I had raised were now so many ghosts to haunt, and furies to torment me.
“It was now the midst of winter, and very severe weather for the season; when we were obliged to make very long and fatiguing marches, in which we suffered all the inconveniences of cold and hunger. The night in which I expected to riot in the arms of my beloved mistress I was obliged to take up with a lodging on the ground, exposed to the inclemencies of a rigid frost; nor could I obtain the least comfort of sleep, which shunned me as its enemy.
“In short, the horrors of that night are not to be described, or perhaps imagined. They made such an impression on my soul, that I was forced to be dipped three times in the river Lethe to prevent my remembering it in the characters which I afterwards performed in the flesh.”
Here I interrupted Julian for the first time, and told him no such dipping had happened to me in my voyage from one world to the other: but he satisfied me by saying “that this only happened to those spirits which returned into the flesh, in order to prevent that reminiscence which Plato mentions, and which would otherwise cause great confusion in the other world.”
He then proceeded as follows: “We continued a very laborious march to Exeter, which we were ordered to besiege. The town soon surrendered, and his majesty built a castle there, which he garrisoned with his Normans, and unhappily I had the misfortune to be one of the number.
“Here we were confined closer than I had been at Dover; for, as the citizens were extremely disaffected, we were never suffered to go without the walls of the castle; nor indeed could we, unless in large bodies, without the utmost danger. We were likewise kept to continual duty, nor could any solicitations prevail with the commanding officer to give me a month’s absence to visit my love, from whom I had no opportunity of hearing in all my long absence.
“However, in the spring, the people being more quiet, and another officer of a gentler temper succeeding to the principal command, I obtained leave to go to Dover; but alas! what comfort did my long journey bring me? I found the parents of my darling in the utmost misery at her loss; for she had died, about a week before my arrival, of a consumption, which they imputed to her pining at my sudden departure.
“I now fell into the most violent and almost raving fit of despair. I cursed myself, the king, and the whole world, which no longer seemed to have any delight for me. I threw myself on the grave of my deceased love, and lay there without any kind of sustenance for two whole days. At last hunger, together with the persuasions of some people who took pity on me, prevailed with me to quit that situation, and refresh myself with food. They then persuaded me to return to my post, and abandon a place where almost every object I saw recalled ideas to my mind which, as they said, I should endeavor with my utmost force to expel from it. This advice at length succeeded; the rather, as the father and mother of my beloved refused to see me, looking on me as the innocent but certain cause of the death of their only child.
“The loss of one we tenderly love, as it is one of the most bitter and biting evils which attend human life, so it wants the lenitive which palliates and softens every other calamity; I mean that great reliever, hope. No man can be so totally undone, but that he may still cherish expectation: but this deprives us of all such comfort, nor can anything but time alone lessen it. This, however, in most minds, is sure to work a slow but effectual remedy; so did it in mine: for within a twelve-month I was entirely reconciled to my fortune, and soon after absolutely forgot the object of a passion from which I had promised myself such extreme happiness, and in the disappointment of which I had experienced such inconceivable misery.
“At the expiration of the month I returned to my garrison at Exeter; where I was no sooner arrived than I was ordered to march into the north, to oppose a force there levied by the earls of Chester and Northumberland. We came to York, where his majesty pardoned the heads of the rebels, and very severely punished some who were less guilty. It was particularly my lot to be ordered to seize a poor man who had never been out of his house, and convey him to prison. I detested this barbarity, yet was obliged to execute it; nay, though no reward would have bribed me in a private capacity to have acted such a part, yet so much sanctity is there in the commands of a monarch or general to a soldier, that I performed it without reluctance, nor had the tears of his wife and family any prevalence with me.
“But this, which was a very small piece of mischief in comparison with many of my barbarities afterwards, was however, the only one which ever gave me any uneasiness; for when the king led us afterwards into Northumberland to revenge those people’s having joined with Osborne the Dane in his invasion, and orders were given us to commit what ravages we could, I was forward in fulfilling them, and, among some lesser cruelties (I remember it yet with sorrow), I ravished a woman, murdered a little infant playing in her lap, and then burned her house. In short, for I have no pleasure in this part of my relation, I had my share in all the cruelties exercised on those poor wretches; which were so grievous, that for sixty miles together, between York and Durham, not a single house, church, or any other public or private edifice, was left standing.
“We had pretty well devoured the country, when we were ordered to march to the Isle of Ely, to oppose Hereward, a bold and stout soldier, who had under him a very large body of rebels, who had the impudence to rise against their king and conqueror (I talk now in the same style I did then) in defense of their liberties, as they called them. These were soon subdued; but as I happened (more to my glory than my comfort) to be posted in that part through which Hereward cut his way, I received a dreadful cut on the forehead, a second on the shoulder, and was run through the body with a pike.
“I languished a long time with these wounds, which made me incapable of attending the king into Scotland. However, I was able to go over with him afterwards into Normandy, in his expedition against Philip, who had taken the opportunity of the troubles in England to invade that province. Those few Normans who bad survived their wounds, and had remained in the Isle of Ely, were all of our nation who went, the rest of his army being all composed of English. In a skirmish near the town of Mans my leg was broke and so shattered that it was forced to be cut off.
“I was now disabled from serving longer in the army; and accordingly, being discharged from the service, I retired to the place of my nativity, where, in extreme poverty, and frequent bad health from the many wounds I had received, I dragged on a miserable life to the age of sixty-three; my only pleasure being to recount the feats of my youth, in which narratives I generally exceeded the truth.
“It would be tedious and unpleasant to recount to you the several miseries I suffered after my return to Caen; let it suffice, they were so terrible that they induced Minos to compassionate me, and, notwithstanding the barbarities I had been guilty of in Northumberland, to suffer me to go once more back to earth.”
CHAPTER XXII
What happened to Julian in the person of a tailor.
“Fortune now stationed me in a character which the ingratitude of mankind hath put them on ridiculing, though they owe to it not only a relief from the inclemencies of cold, to which they would otherwise be exposed, but likewise a considerable satisfaction of their vanity. The character I mean was that of a tailor; which, if we consider it with due attention, must be confessed to have in it great dignity and importance. For, in reality, who constitutes the different degrees between men but the tailor? the prince indeed gives the title, but it is the tailor who makes the man. To his labors are owing the respect of crowds, and the awe which great men inspire into their beholders, though these are too often unjustly attributed to other motives. Lastly, the admiration of the fair is most commonly to be placed to his account.
“I was just set up in my trade when I made three suits of fine clothes for king Stephen’s coronation. I question whether the person who wears the rich coat hath so much pleasure and vanity in being admired in it, as we tailors have from that admiration; and perhaps a philosopher would say he is not so well entitled to it. I bustled on the day of the ceremony through the crowd, and it was with incredible delight I heard several say, as my clothes walked by, ‘Bless me, was ever anything so fine as the earl of Devonshire? Sure he and Sir Hugh Bigot are the two best dressed men I ever saw.’ Now both those suits were of my making.
“There would indeed be infinite pleasure in working for the courtiers, as they are generally genteel men, and show one’s clothes to the best advantage, was it not for one small discouragement; this is, that they never pay. I solemnly protest, though I lost almost as much by the court in my life as I got by the city, I never carried a suit into the latter with half the satisfaction which I have done to the former; though from that I was certain of ready money, and from this almost as certain of no money at all.
“Courtiers may, however, be divided into two sorts, very essentially different from each other; into those who never intend to pay for their clothes; and those who do intend to pay for them, but never happen to be able. Of the latter sort are many of those young gentlemen whom we equip out for the army, and who are, unhappily for us, cut off before they arrive at preferment. This is the reason that tailors, in time of war, are mistaken for politicians by their inquisitiveness into the event of battles, one campaign very often proving the ruin of half-a-dozen of us. I am sure I had frequent reason to curse that fatal battle of Cardigan, where the Welsh defeated some of king Stephen’s best troops, and where many a good suit of mine unpaid for, fell to the ground.
“The gentlemen of this honorable calling have fared much better in later ages than when I was of it; for now it seems the fashion is, when they apprehend their customer is not in the best circumstances, if they are not paid as soon as they carry home the suit, they charge him in their book as much again as it is worth, and then send a gentleman with a small scrip of parchment to demand the money. If this be not immediately paid the gentleman takes the beau with him to his house, where he locks him up till the tailor is contented: but in my time these scrips of parchment were not in use; and if the beau disliked paying for his clothes, as very often happened, we had no method of compelling him.
“In several of the characters which I have related to you, I apprehend I have sometimes forgot myself, and considered myself as really interested as I was when I personated them on earth. I have just now caught myself in the fact; for I have complained to you as bitterly of my customers as I formerly used to do when I was the tailor: but in reality, though there were some few persons of very great quality, and some others, who never paid their debts, yet those were but a few, and I had a method of repairing this loss. My customers I divided under three heads: those who paid ready money, those who paid slow, and those who never paid at all. The first of these I considered apart by themselves, as persons by whom I got a certain but small profit. The two last I lumped together, making those who paid slow contribute to repair my losses by those who did not pay at all. Thus, upon the whole, I was a very inconsiderable loser, and might have left a fortune to my family, had I not launched forth into expenses which swallowed up all my gains. I had a wife and two children. These indeed I kept frugally enough, for I half starved them; but I kept a mistress in a finer way, for whom I had a country-house, pleasantly situated on the Thames, elegantly fitted up and neatly furnished. This woman might very properly be called my mistress, for she was most absolutely so; and though her tenure was no higher than by my will, she domineered as tyrannically as if my chains had been riveted in the strongest manner. To all this I submitted, not through any adoration of her beauty, which was indeed but indifferent. Her charms consisted in little wantonnesses, which she knew admirably well to use in hours of dalliance, and which, I believe, are of all things the most delightful to a lover.
“She was so profusely extravagant, that it seemed as if she had an actual intent to ruin me. This I am sure of, if such had been her real intention, she could have taken no properer way to accomplish it; nay, I myself might appear to have had the same view: for, besides this extravagant mistress and my country-house, I kept likewise a brace of hunters, rather for that it was fashionable so to do than for any great delight I took in the sport, which I very little attended; not for want of leisure, for few noblemen had so much. All the work I ever did was taking measure, and that only of my greatest and best customers. I scare ever cut a piece of cloth in my life, nor was indeed much more able to fashion a coat than any gentleman in the kingdom. This made a skillful servant too necessary to me. He knew I must submit to any terms with, or any treatment from, him.
“He knew it was easier for him to find another such a tailor as me than for me to procure such another workman as him: for this reason he exerted the most notorious and cruel tyranny, seldom giving me a civil word; nor could the utmost condescension on my side, though attended with continual presents and rewards, and raising his wages, content or please him. In a word, he was as absolutely my master as was ever an ambitious, industrious prime minister over an indolent and voluptuous king. All my other journeymen paid more respect to him than to me; for they considered my favor as a necessary consequence of obtaining his.
“These were the most remarkable occurrences while I acted this part. Minos hesitated a few moments, and then bid me get back again, without assigning any reason.”
CHAPTER XXIII
The life of alderman Julian.
“I now revisited England, and was born at London. My father was one of the magistrates of that city. He had eleven children, of whom I was the eldest. He had great success in trade, and grew extremely rich, but the largeness of his family rendered it impossible for him to leave me a fortune sufficient to live well on independent of business. I was accordingly brought up to be a fishmonger, in which capacity I myself afterwards acquired very considerable wealth.
“The same disposition of mind which in princes is called ambition is in subjects named faction. To this temper I was greatly addicted from my youth. I was, while a boy, a great partisan of prince John’s against his brother Richard, during the latter’s absence in the holy war and in his captivity. I was no more than one-and-twenty when I first began to make political speeches in public, and to endeavor to foment disquietude and discontent in the city. As I was pretty well qualified for this office, by a great fluency of words, an harmonious accent, a graceful delivery, and above all an invincible assurance, I had soon acquired some reputation among the younger citizens, and some of the weaker and more inconsiderate of a riper age. This, co-operating with my own natural vanity, made me extravagantly proud and supercilious. I soon began to esteem myself a man of some consequence, and to overlook persons every way my superiors.
“The famous Robin Hood, and his companion Little John, at this time made a considerable figure in Yorkshire. I took upon me to write a letter to the former, in the name of the city, inviting him to come to London, where I assured him of very good reception, signifying to him my own great weight and consequence, and how much I had disposed the citizens in his favor. Whether he received this letter or no I am not certain; but he never gave me any answer to it.
“A little afterwards one William Fitz-Osborn, or, as he was nicknamed, William Long-Beard, began to make a figure in the city. He was a bold and an impudent fellow, and had raised himself to great popularity with the rabble, by pretending to espouse their cause against the rich. I took this man’s part, and made a public oration in his favor, setting him forth as a patriot, and one who had embarked in the cause of liberty: for which service he did not receive me with the acknowledgments I expected. However, as I thought I should easily gain the ascendant over this fellow, I continued still firm on his side, till the archbishop of Canterbury, with an armed force, put an end to his progress: for he was seized in Bowchurch, where he had taken refuge, and with nine of his accomplices hanged in chains.
“I escaped narrowly myself; for I was seized in the same church with the rest, and, as I had been very considerably engaged in the enterprise, the archbishop was inclined to make me an example; but my father’s merit, who had advanced a considerable sum to queen Eleanor towards the king’s ransom, preserved me.
“The consternation my danger had occasioned kept me some time quiet, and I applied myself very assiduously to my trade. I invented all manner of methods to enhance the price of fish, and made use of my utmost endeavors to engross as much of the business as possible in my own hands. By these means I acquired a substance which raised me to some little consequence in the city, but far from elevating me to that degree which I had formerly flattered myself with possessing at a time when I was totally insignificant; for, in a trading society, money must at least lay the foundation of all power and interest.
“But as it hath been remarked that the same ambition which sent Alexander into Asia brings the wrestler on the green; and as this same ambition is as incapable as quicksilver of lying still; so I, who was possessed perhaps of a share equal to what hath fired the blood of any of the heroes of antiquity, was no less restless and discontented with ease and quiet. My first endeavors were to make myself head of my company, which Richard I had just published, and soon afterwards I procured myself to be chosen alderman.
“Opposition is the only state which can give a subject an opportunity of exerting the disposition I was possessed of. Accordingly, king John was no sooner seated on his throne than I began to oppose his measures, whether right or wrong. It is true that monarch had faults enow. He was so abandoned to lust and luxury, that he addicted himself to the most extravagant excesses in both, while he indolently suffered the king of France to rob him of almost all his foreign dominions: my opposition therefore was justifiable enough, and if my motive from within had been as good as the occasion from without I should have had little to excuse; but, in truth, I sought nothing but my own preferment, by making myself formidable to the king, and then selling to him the interest of that party by whose means I had become so. Indeed, had the public good been my care, however zealously I might have opposed the beginning of his reign, I should not have scrupled to lend him my utmost assistance in this struggle between him and pope Innocent the third, in which he was so manifestly in the right; nor have suffered the insolence of that pope, and the power of the king of France, to have compelled him in the issue, basely to resign his crown into the hands of the former, and receive it again as a vassal; by means of which acknowledgment the pope afterwards claimed this kingdom as a tributary fief to be held of the papal chair; a claim which occasioned great uneasiness to many subsequent princes, and brought numberless calamities on the nation.
“As the king had, among other concessions, stipulated to pay an immediate sum of money to Pandulph, which he had great difficulty to raise, it was absolutely necessary for him to apply to the city, where my interest and popularity were so high that he had no hopes without my assistance. As I knew this, I took care to sell myself and country as high as possible. The terms I demanded, therefore, were a place, a pension, and a knighthood. All those were immediately consented to. I was forthwith knighted, and promised the other two.
“I now mounted the hustings, and, without any regard to decency or modesty, made as emphatical a speech in favor of the king as before I had done against him. In this speech I justified all those measures which I had before condemned, and pleaded as earnestly with my fellow-citizens to open their purses, as I had formerly done to prevail with them to keep them shut. But, alas! my rhetoric had not the effect I proposed. The consequence of my arguments was only contempt to myself. The people at first stared on one another, and afterwards began unanimously to express their dislike. An impudent fellow among them, reflecting on my trade, cried out, ‘Stinking fish;’ which was immediately reiterated through the whole crowd. I was then forced to slink away home; but I was not able to accomplish my retreat without being attended by the mob, who huzza’d me along the street with the repeated cries of ‘Stinking fish.’
“I now proceeded to court, to inform his majesty of my faithful service, and how much I had suffered in his cause. I found by my first reception he had already heard of my success. Instead of thanking me for my speech, he said the city should repent of their obstinacy, for that he would show them who he was: and so saying, he immediately turned that part to me to which the toe of man hath so wonderful an affection, that it is very difficult, whenever it presents itself conveniently, to keep our toes from the most violent and ardent salutation of it.
“I was a little nettled at this behavior, and with some earnestness claimed the king’s fulfilling his promise; but he retired without answering me. I then applied to some of the courtiers, who had lately professed great friendship to me, had eat at my house, and invited me to theirs: but not one would return me any answer, all running away from me as if I had been seized with some contagious distemper. I now found by experience, that as none can be so civil, so none can be ruder than a courtier.
“A few moments after the king’s retiring I was left alone in the room to consider what I should do or whither I should turn myself. My reception in the city promised itself to be equal at least with what I found at court. However, there was my home, and thither it was necessary I should retreat for the present.
“But, indeed, bad as I apprehended my treatment in the city would be, it exceeded my expectation. I rode home on an ambling pad through crowds who expressed every kind of disregard and contempt; pelting me not only with the most abusive language, but with dirt. However, with much difficulty I arrived at last at my own house, with my bones whole, but covered over with filth.
“When I was got within my doors, and had shut them against the mob, who had pretty well vented their spleen, and seemed now contented to retire, my wife, whom I found crying over her children, and from whom I had hoped some comfort in my afflictions, fell upon me in the most outrageous manner. She asked me why I would venture on such a step, without consulting her; she said her advice might have been civilly asked, if I was resolved not to have been guided by it. That, whatever opinion I might have conceived of her understanding, the rest of the world thought better of it. That I had never failed when I had asked her counsel, nor ever succeeded without it; – with much more of the same kind, too tedious to mention; concluding that it was a monstrous behavior to desert my party and come over to the court.
“An abuse which I took worse than all the rest, as she had been constantly for several years assiduous in railing at the opposition, in siding with the court-party, and begging me to come over to it; and especially after my mentioning the offer of knighthood to her, since which time she had continually interrupted my repose with dinning in my ears the folly of refusing honors and of adhering to a party and to principles by which I was certain of procuring no advantage to myself and my family.
“I had now entirely lost my trade, so that I had not the least temptation to stay longer in a city where I was certain of receiving daily affronts and rebukes. I therefore made up my affairs with the utmost expedition, and, scraping together all I could, retired into the country, where I spent the remainder of my days in universal contempt, being shunned by everybody, perpetually abused by my wife, and not much respected by my children.
“Minos told me, though I had been a very vile fellow, he thought my sufferings made some atonement, and so bid me take the other trial.”
