The Old Phoenix Tavern Read online

  A cold gust made the fire jump and snap. Turning our heads, we saw the front door had opened again. Taverner was greeting a new arrival. We couldn't see past him to that person, but the entrance was full of gray fog and drizzle. I judged the time yonder to be near sundown of a winter's day in a northern land.

  "Did he go forth into that weather because it matched his sentiments?" Villon wondered aloud. "Then he has need of comforting, him."

  "Failures, did you say?" I challenged, for the implications were not pleasant. "Why on. . . earth. . . would the Taverners bring together a crowd of losers?"

  "Well, many have lost, or will lose, in colorful ways. Observing them justify themselves to each other, that should amuse." There isn't much compassion in Villon's milieu, none in his part of it.

  "No, wait," I protested. "The Taverners aren't the sort who—"

  He raised his palm. "Hold." Mercurial, his attention had gone beyond the room, perhaps beyond this whole pocket universe. "I feel—yes, my second stanza, I have it."

  Apparently an accompaniment was included, for he put his beaker aside, laid hand to strings, and chanted while the chords snarled underneath.

  At Stamford Bridge did Harald the tall

  Win him a grave as long as he.

  Dick Crookback's hissed from a theater stall.

  Lionheart beggared his monarchy.

  Athenian men fared valiantly

  To die in the quarries of Syracuse.

  Bolivar cried he had plowed the sea.

  Even the dead have much to lose.

  The lute fell into his lap. He reached for the wine and knocked it back in a single gulp.

  The newcomer approached. He had folded an umbrella, which he swung like a walking stick, and carried a bowler hat in his left hand, but drops glistened on tweed suit and Ascot tie. He was of sturdy medium height. An inward vigor and the rosiness that came from a lengthy tramp made it hard to guess his age, but thinning reddish hair suggested the mid-fifties. His nationality was never in doubt. That face would fit John Bull.

  The breath whistled in between my teeth.

  "Eh?" said Villon. "You know that fellow, do you?"

  "I know of him," I whispered. "He—" Recollection. "Sorry, it'd be too hard to explain without letting names slip."

  He accepted that. "Perhaps another evening, under a different rule of the house. Ohé, my cup is empty and yours has not far to go."

  The Englishman reached the hearth, leaned umbrella against stone, laid hat on mantel, and held palms out to the fire. It wasn't arrogance, simply a lack of shyness. At first he scarcely noticed the Dutchman, whom I could not see from where I was and who kept silence. Despite the ample candlelight, I could trace flame-glow at play across his visage, and picture it on the other's.

  Were they really that unlike, the healthy and the ravaged? Now that he was close, I saw the heaviness on the Englishman's mouth, the darknesses beneath and behind his eyes.

  The barmaid hove into sight. "Wot'll it be, sir?" she asked him.

  I glimpsed a forced smile. "You should know by now, my dear," he told her. "A large black coffee, if you please, and a larger cognac."

  "Right, sir." She swung past us. "Yer ready too, ain't yer? Be straight back, loves."

  As she pattered away, I turned to Villon and said very softly, "Failures? No, you're wrong. I tell you, he—Well, he's not."

  The poet raised his brows. "Are you quite certain? I deem he has no more triumph in him than you do, my friend."

  The subject of this ignored us, whom he saw peripherally, around the corner as we were. He looked down toward the Dutchman while he felt inside his jacket. "Do you mind if I smoke a cigar?" he inquired. The hand stopped short. Astonishment smote. "You."

  "Me?" the other mumbled. "You know me, monsieur?" He had fallen into an accented French. It was what he mostly used, expatriate that he was.

  "Why, of course, of course. That is—" John Bull gathered his wits. "I have seen your self-portraits. Sir, I am overwhelmed."

  "What?" asked the vague, harsh voice. "You have seen them? Where? How?" With an effort: "Oh, yes. Things work differently here, don't they? Forgive me. This light is too dim."

  "Most light is, isn't it?" murmured the Englishman. "Except in the Provençal summer."

  I shouldn't eavesdrop. Not that Villon would have hesitated, but neither of those two had meaning for him; and he was, after all, my drinking buddy. Furthermore, I wanted to refute that disturbing idea of his. "Failures?" I repeated. "People whose dreams crashed to the ground? Can't be. I wouldn't call you a failure, for instance. They'll remember you while they remember Homer and Shakespeare."

  He'd obviously acquired some knowledge of the latter. Had they met, maybe, when I was not present? That wasn't a thought to pursue. As somebody has remarked, envy is the single one of the seven deadly sins that gives no pleasure whatsoever.

  "I disappear young from history," he answered coolly. "Knifed in a sordid little fight, hanged in a provincial town whose records burned in a later war or revolution, or what? Who knows? Who cared?"

  Asking about your destiny isn't actually forbidden in our tavern, unless when a special rule like tonight's implies as much, but the atmosphere discourages it. So does common sense. Regardless, Villon was bound to ferret out the story of himself.

  "That doesn't follow, you know," I reminded him needlessly. "I've seen evidence your biographers have found, that you may have retired to safe obscurity and a ripe old age."

  His laughter crowed. A lusty obscenity followed, to express his opinion of that evidence.

  Knowing him, I agreed, and tried another tack. "Anyway, doubtless many of you exist, in many distinct histories. This Villon might well do better than the rest. In fact, if you don't, when you've been forewarned, you're a fool, and that's not the insult I'd choose for you."

  His tone was almost flippant. "A fool and a fated man are not necessarily the same person. We do not what we should, but what we will, and devise fine reasons why that is what we must. Eh?" Once more he shrugged. "As for myself, I shall see."

  I nodded toward the chevalier and the Berber. They had grown vibrant, waving their arms, talking into each other's mouths, ardent as lovers. "Those two are having a grand time. Infirmities aside, what's wrong with their lives?"

  The barmaid reappeared. Her laden tray drew Villon's attention and thus perforce mine. The Englishman had pulled over an arm-chair that I had not noticed earlier, to settle opposite the Dutchman. I heard him: "I myself paint. Purely amateur. My landscapes are pretty, at best. But I should be honored if you would care to tell me—Ah, thank you, Mrs. Boniface, thank you."

  As Villon took his own fresh vessel, I asked him, "Why do you drink that red vinegar?" Out of curiosity I had taken a single sip when first we met. "Here you could have the best that any of the worlds will ever know."

  "But this I am used to," he said. "It makes going home at dawn easier." His smile gibed. "The proper appreciation of squalor and failure requires discipline."

  "Damn it, you aren't—Well, what about the pair I mentioned? Do you happen to know anything about them?"

  "As a matter of fact, I do. They aroused my inquisitiveness precisely because they seem exceptional. I spent an hour in the game at the table nearby, largely to keep an ear cocked toward them."

  I glanced that way. Greasy cards were still in the hands of three shabby men and a sleazy-bright woman. Money lay strewn among the glasses. Tobacco smoke hazed their heads. Dresses, hair styles, features proclaimed them from various lands and eras. I wondered how such a drab, beaten lot had gotten in.

  "Between what I heard and what threads of knowledge I had earlier unraveled from learned visitors, I won to a fair idea of who those two are," Villon continued. "No names at present, Monsieur Aubergiste requires. But I will hazard declaring that they rank with the greatest natural philosophers who ever lived. The Christian seeks to understand what drives the development of life, the infidel seeks to understand what drives the developme
nt of humanity. And they come close—so close! But they lack certain information that men will gain after their deaths, and all their majestic efforts go for nothing. Of course, they do not foresee that, and I'd not spoil their pleasure."

  I had no ready response. Through the silence between us, from around the corner of the fireplace, cut the Dutchman's cry. "You have sold paintings, you say? Sold those things you dabble at? Do you know how many of mine have been bought in my entire lifetime? One."

  The Englishman's voice was an instrument which he played like a master, in summons to battle or, now, to call down peace. "Yes, I know, sir. I have read. It is an intolerable shame. But don't blame the people of my day too much, I beg you. By then we have begun to comprehend a little of what you were doing, and treasure it. Nobody pretends that my canvases are any more significant than the bricklaying that also helps me pass my days. It is my name upon them that excites a bit of interest—a name that you have never heard, naturally, unless attached to an ancestor of mine." Brief roughness: "And, to be sure, I have some friends left. A few. They wish to encourage me."

  "Yes, failure can be very subtle, very quiet," Villon said after a minute. "Yours, for example, I surmise." His look searched like a pickpocket's fingers. "A disappointment in love? But scarcely straightforward."

  "I don't want to talk about it!" I snapped. What hurt too much was that I was not the worst hurt; and that is all I will ever care to say.

  He leered above the rim of his beaker. "The physicians and the old wives agree that for every ill, nature provides a remedy. Often the old wives know what some of those remedies actually are. Now let me prescribe. She playing cards and I have had our encounters before. I can introduce you without giving names, and then, if you will show a little enterprise—our host is tolerant and his hospitality goes far, you know. I assure you, in certain respects the wench is all else but a failure."

  For an instant I was tempted, less by her than by her entire table. Speaking with them might teach me a minim of what a few writers (which, for these?) have known by instinct. . . . I decided against it. I really hadn't the heart to cultivate any new acquaintances, especially ones who in person were probably inarticulate.

  Perhaps John Bull's words had entered my unconscious to breed that fleeting notion, for I grew aware of them.

  "—writing. I can believe that's worth my doing, more than a pastime. History, biography, and, above all, warnings of what my countrymen must prepare against." He sighed. I visualized that heavy head shaking. "If they will only listen."

  "Why should they not?" asked the artist. The personality before him must have drawn him a small ways out of his despair, and maybe out of his mad visions. "You said you have been a statesman."

  "They call me a blundering ass. Many of them call me a murderer. You see, during the Great War I conceived the idea of—No matter. It failed, and thousands of young lives went down with it." Anguish yielded to stoicism. "Hence in due course I was rusticated." I saw a deep draught of brandy, a ferocious drag on the cigar.

  It was my bladder that reminded me I had no business listening. I got up. "The expedition," I said. Villon nodded absently and laid hold of his lute. His look went beyond me anew.

  The lavatory of the Old Phoenix, in the hall below the staircase, is so logically designed that it has to be from a later century than mine. My course toward it brought me close past a foursome who made my stride turn slow. For a reason obscure to me, they were the most striking in the whole assembly. Even the cadaverous Spaniard who had patched together a ridiculous armor, and the stunningly beautiful, imperially garbed Chinese lady for whom he attempted courtliness—even they grabbed at me less than these.

  The white man and the woman close beside him were presumably wedded, for they were both dressed like subjects of the Ottoman Empire, he in turban and robe, she veiled and trousered. Just the same, I didn't think they were Turks. The aquiline features above his beard suggested—not other Iberians, actually. Sephardim? He could have been in his forties, he could have been far older. May you and I never know such grief as had hollowed him out.

  The second woman was of about that calendrical age. Physically she must live well, for her Tudor ruff, stomacher, gown were of the finest materials, though the dyes were somber, and jewels glittered on rings. But sorrow and ill health had given her the waxy pallor of those whose time grows short. She clutched a crucifix to her breast and obviously forced herself not to recoil from the second man.

  "Jack Wilson," I heard him say. He had forgotten for the moment that he could dispense with English. His was quite fluent, in a slightly drawling dialect. "Can't give you my real name, that they know me by these days, but if you want a handle, then Jack Wilson is what the whites called me when I lived amongst them."

  He was a Native American—from the Southwest, to judge by his looks. His shirt, vest, pants, bandana could have been on any ranch hand, except that the lower sleeves bore some kind of symbols and above them were armbands, each holding a feather. His hair fell to his shoulders.

  The other man clenched a fist till I thought the skin might split over the knuckles. "Shall I give you the Islamic name I received?" he croaked. "Does the law of tonight's master allow that?" The veiled woman stroked his wrist. Her touch trembled.

  Only through the power of the place could I know what he had said; and the English of the Tudor woman came near being a foreign language itself: "No matter names, until we lie dead and men open our hearts to see which are carved on them." She snatched her wine and drank in a single ragged motion.

  "Would they truly do that in your land?" asked the American, dismayed. His mother tongue, unknown to me, brought a power akin to John Bull's into his voice. "Our ancestors will freely give us their names, their true and sacred names, when we have danced them home to us."

  She tautened. Her lips drew thin. "Black necromancy, is it?" she hissed. "Are you fallen that deep in the toils of Satan?"

  "No! It was God who spoke to me, on that day when the sun was darkened—"

  My feet inexorably bore me out of hearing. I quickened them, and didn't linger in the washroom. On my way back, I slowed down again.

  "Christ will receive you," the Tudor woman implored.

  The man of the turban barked, whether in laughter or in pain. "I suppose we two can abjure yet another faith," he said, "if you will smuggle us to where it will not cost us our lives. But which Christ, my lady? Yours, the Lutherans', the Greeks', whose?"

  "All roads up a mountain lead toward heaven," said the tribesman. "Let each walk the one his forefathers trod. On mine, I see their footprints in the dust before me, and in the wind I hear their ghosts singing the olden songs—"

  A finger tapped my arm. Taverner had come this way after putting a fresh log on the fire. He beckoned. I followed him over to the wall.

  "You really shouldn't listen in like that," he told me.

  "I'm sorry," I blurted. "I didn't mean any harm."

  He waited. His stance was amiable.

  "Not to snoop or, or anything," I said. "I was just, well, fascinated and. . . chilled."

  "Of course," he answered. "Ordinarily it's fine for our guests to mingle." He smiled. "In fact, we hope they will." Turning earnest: "But in this case, if you'd stuck around any longer they'd have noticed you, and it would have interrupted what's happening between them. Why don't you rejoin your friend?" Again a smile. "We've got a special brew on tap that you haven't sampled. It'll be waiting for you."

  "Taverner," I asked desperately, "why are you doing this? What's it about? I never expected you'd bring people like these together. To watch them hurting? The losers, the damned—"

  A frown crossed his bare brow. "Can you say who's damned and who's not? I wouldn't dare try." He clapped my shoulder, as when I had entered. "Go drink your ale."

  I seized it upon my return. Villon hailed me eagerly. "I have my third stanza," he announced. Nodding sideways: "Some words between those two there gave me the idea. It seems your politician did
not send men to die without having aforetime ridden in the van of combat himself. The painter liked that. So do I."

  Strings clanged.

  A yeoman defeated becomes a thrall,

  Knowing his children shall not be free.

  Whatever we build must break and fall

  Under the hoofs of history.

  Since naught can remain for posterity

  But a name all honor and none abuse,

  Who was the victor, Grant or Lee?

  Even the dead have much to lose.

  "That's a stark thing," I said.

  "Why, I would call it mild." Thinking of others by him—the "Hanged," say—I had to grunt assent. "An envoi is still lacking," he added. "Well, let it come as it chooses. Tell me about your era's latest lunacies."

  The next couple of hours have nothing to do with anybody but us two. Honest fellowship is a healer second only to love. Not that Francois Villon was ever a nice guy. Nor did I give him either of the names in my own heart. But we walked arm in arm down crooked lanes; he took me a-scramble over moonlit roofs, while showing him vistas of what I had seen opened my eyes to the wideness of them. His account of the priest, the sailor, and Minou was evilly poetic and unforgivably funny.

  I could not help catching fragments of the talk at the fire.

  "You are a brave man."

  "I do not think I would have the courage to live with demons."

  "Do I? Mine overrun me. I think in the end they will take me."

  "You will have fought until the end."

  "With what for weapon?"

  "Your brush. And I swear, I promise, that what that wins for us, the gates of hell shall not prevail against."

  The shutters stay closed over the windows of the Old Phoenix. I suspect nobody has ever inquired of Taverner what he would see through them. A grandfather clock in a corner ticks and ticks, booming at each hour. Its hands announce the dawn when the last guests must leave. As that drew near, I found that I no longer dreaded going home.