‘Lord, let our cry come unto Thee!’
Then there was a rumour of plague in the city. The number of faces — the strained, silent, shining-eyed faces before the light that betokened the presence of the Host — increased to a crowd. But Jocelin never joined them, since his own angel sometimes came to comfort, warm and sustain him. But like a good general, he saw how they needed help; for even to him, his instruments, these people he had to use, seemed little more than apes now that clambered about the building. He had the model of the cathedral brought to the crossways and stood against the north west pillar, spire and all, to encourage them. The model stood on a trestle table, and seemed the only clean thing in the building, though a finger that touched it came away wet.
That way, Christmas passed. Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad before the face of the Lord; because he cometh.
And it was supposed that he came; but the clouds still hung over the battlement; and if the drizzle ceased for a time, men looked up, feeling their cheek, and thinking that something was wrong. Once, when the rain had stopped, but the cavern of the nave was particularly noisome, Jocelin stopped by the model, to encourage himself. He detached the spire with difficulty, because the wood was swollen, and held the thing devoutly, like a relic. He caressed it gently, cradling it in his arms, and looking at it all over, as a mother might examine her baby. It was eighteen inches long, squared for half its length and with tall windows, then bursting into a grove of delicate pinnacles, from among which the great spire rose, undecorated and slender with a tiny cross at the top. The cross was smaller than the one he wore hanging from his neck. He stood by the north west pillar, still cradling the spire, and telling himself that surely by now the floods must begin to sink. For there had been no rain for a week, though March was proving not windy, but dull. Even so, it was possible to believe that somewhere a soaked sun was struggling to reach the pocked mud of the fields. He stroked the spire, and heard Jehan talking himself out of the gap in the north transept. He shut his eyes, and thought to himself; we have endured! Let this be the turn of things! And it seemed to him behind his shut eyes as if he might feel the dry days gathering momentum, moving towards the light. He heard the maul sounds from the roof, and all at once he was excited by the thing in his arms; and the remembered lines drawing together in the air over the cathedral caught him with excitement by the throat. He felt life. He lifted his chin, opened his eyes and his mouth and was about to give thanks.
Then he stood still, saying nothing.
Goody Pangall had come out of Pangall’s kingdom. She had come briskly for three steps. She stopped, and went back a step. She came forward more slowly towards the crossways but she was not looking at it. She was looking sideways. One hand gripped the cloak by her throat, and the other rose, bringing the basket with it. She was looking sideways as if she were sidling past a bull or a stallion. Her feet took her outside the scope of the tether, shoulder almost scraping the wall; only they were feet without much will to go forward. Her eyes were two black patches in her winter pallor, her lower lip had dropped open, and she would have looked foolish if anything so sweet could ever look foolish, and if it had not been for the open terror in her face. Drawn by the terror, Jocelin looked where she was looking; and now time moved in jerks, or was no time at all. Therefore it was not surprising that he found himself knowing what she was looking at, even before he saw the master builder.
Roger Mason had one foot on the bottom rung of the bottom ladder of the scaffolding round the south east pillar. He had come down from it, looking at Goody. He was turning. He was walking across the pavement, and she was creeping more and more slowly by the wall. She was shrinking too, shrinking and looking up sideways. He had her pinned there, he was looking down and talking earnestly, and she was still staring, her mouth open, and shaking her head.
A strange certainty fell on Jocelin. He knew things, he saw things. He saw this was one encounter of many. He saw pain and sorrow. He saw — and it was in some mode like that of prayer that he saw it — how the air round them was different. He saw they were in some sort of tent that shut them off from all other people, and he saw how they feared the tent both of them, but were helpless. Now they were talking earnestly and quietly; and though Goody shook her head again and again, yet she did not go, could not go, it seemed, since the invisible tent was shut round them. She held the basket in her hands, she was dressed for a visit to the market, she had no business to be talking to any man, let alone the master builder; she need do no more than shake her head, if that; she could easily ignore the man sturdy in his leather hose, brown tunic and blue hood, no there was no need even to pause; only need to pass by with head averted, for his hand was not on her. But she stood looking up at him sideways while her black, unblinking eyes and her lips, said no. Then suddenly she did indeed break away as if she would break physically something in the air: but uselessly for the invisible tent that made a pair of them expanded and kept ahead of her. She was still inside, would always be inside, even as she was inside now, hurrying away down the south aisle, her cheek no longer white, but red. Roger Mason stood looking after her down the south aisle as though nothing and no one in the whole world mattered, as though he could not help her mattering and was tormented by her mattering. He turned away, his back to Jocelin, as the north west door clashed behind Goody, he went to the ladder like a man sleepwalking.
Then an anger rose out of some pit inside Jocelin. He had glimpses in his head of a face that drooped daily for his blessing, heard the secure sound of her singing in Pangall’s Kingdom. He lifted his chin, and the word burst out over it from an obscure place of indignation and hurt.
‘No!’
All at once it seemed to him that the renewing life of the world was a filthy thing, a rising tide of muck so that he gasped for air, saw the gap in the north transept and hurried through it into what daylight there was. Immediately he heard the distant jeering of men, workmen; and at that temperature of feeling, understood what an alehouse joke it must seem to see the dean himself come hurrying out of a hole with his folly held in both hands. He turned again and rushed back into the crossways. But a little procession was coming up the north aisle; and there was Rachel Mason among them, carrying a dear bundle; so he spoke, giving her mechanically a congratulation and a blessing until the constable’s lady snatched the baby away and swelled on towards the lady chapel and the christening. This left him with Rachel who was somehow compelled to stay behind; and though his eyes were blinded by the vision of Roger and Goody Pangall, he began to hear why. Nor could he believe how any woman, even an outraged one (her eyes bulging, tresses of black hair escaped across her cheek) would ever talk so. What paralysed him was not her spate, but the matter of it. Rachel, face shaken like a windowpane in a gale, was explaining to him why she had no child though she had prayed for one. When she and Roger went together, at the most inappropriate moment she began to laugh — had to laugh — it wasn’t that she was barren as some people might think and indeed had said, my Lord, no indeed! But she had to laugh and then he had to laugh —
He stood in sheer disbelief and confusion, until she took herself away into the north ambulatory to catch up with the christening. He stood at the foot of the scaffolding, and part of the nature of woman burned into him; how they would speak delicately, if too much, nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times; but on the ten thousandth they would come out with a fact of such gross impropriety, such violated privacy, it was as if the furious womb had acquired a tongue. And of all women in the world, only she, impossible, unbelievable, but existent Rachel would do it — no, be forced to do it by some urgency of her spatelike nature, to the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. She stripped the business of living down to where horror and farce took over; particoloured Zany in red and yellow, striking out in the torture chamber with his pig’s bladder on a stick.
He spoke viciously to the model in his hands.
‘The impervious insolence of the
woman!’
Then Zany struck him in the groin with the pig’s bladder so that he jerked out a laugh that ended in a shudder.
He cried out loud.
‘Filth! Filth!’
He opened his eyes and heard his own words ringing through the crossways. And there was Pangall with his broom, standing startled by the temporary door from the north ambulatory. So in a half-conscious effort to make his words logical and to hide their true source, Jocelin cried out again.
‘The place is filthy dirty! They dirty everything!’
But men were coming through the crossways, Mel, the old stonecutter, and Jehan the chosen assistant to Roger Mason. He was laughing now as they passed Jocelin without paying any attention to him.
‘Call her a wife? She’s his keeper!’
So Jocelin, the blood still beating in his head, tried to speak naturally to Pangall, and found himself as breathless as if he had run the length of the cathedral.
‘How is it with you now, Pangall my son?’
But Pangall was glaring belligerently from some private trouble or encounter of his own.
‘How should it be?’
Jocelin went on in a nearly normal voice.
‘I spoke to the master builder. Have you come to terms with them?’
‘I? Never. You spoke a true word, reverend father. They dirty everything.’
‘Do they leave you alone?’
Pangall answered him flatly.
‘They’ll never leave me alone. They’ve chosen me to be their fool.’
To keep off bad luck. His mouth repeated old words, as feet will take their own accustomed path.
‘We work with what we have. We must all put up with them.’
But Pangall, who had moved away, swung round.
‘Then why didn’t you use us, father? I and my men —’
‘You couldn’t do it.’
Pangall opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. He stayed where he was, peering fiercely at Jocelin; and there was a twitch at the corner of his mouth, that in anyone less devoted and faithful, would have been a sneer; and in the air between them, hung the words unspoken: and neither will they be able to do it, no one can do it. Because of the mud and the floods and the raft and the height and the thin pillars. It is impossible.
‘They are a trial to us all, my son. I admit it. We must be patient. Didn’t you say once that this is your house? There was sinful pride in that, but also loyalty and service. Never think you aren’t understood and valued, my son. Presently they will go. In God’s good time you will have sons —’
Pangall’s sneer disappeared.
‘The house they will have to guard and cherish will be far more glorious than this one. Think, man. In the middle of it this will stand up —’ and passionately he held out the spire — ‘and they will tell their children in their turn; “This thing was done in the days of our father.”’
Pangall crouched. He held his broom crossways and it quivered. His eyes stared and the skin was drawn back from his gleaming teeth. For a moment he stood like that, staring at the spire held out to him so enthusiastically. Then he looked up under his eyebrows.
‘Do you make a fool of me too?’
He turned and limped quickly away into the south transept, and the slamming of the door into his kingdom echoed round the cathedral.
A maulman was working in the roof, bang, bang, bang. All at once the noise of the slamming and the banging, the smells, the memories, the tides of unspeakable feeling seemed to engulf Jocelin so that he gasped for air. He knew where there was air to be had, and his feet took him there, stumbling, till he fell on his knees before the quiet light on the altar. He stared at it, mouth open and yearning.
‘I didn’t know.’
Yet the purity of the light was out of reach, seemed a tiny door at an infinite distance. He knelt there, in the tide, and his mind was adrift in it, so that without knowing how the change had come about, he found himself looking down at the tiles of the floor with their heraldic beasts. Nearer to him than the floor were the people, the four of them — and his body shuddered again — Roger and Rachel Mason, Pangall and his Goody, like four pillars at the crossways of the building.
Then the shuddering lifted his head so that he was staring at the dully rich story of the window and the light of the altar was a divided thing, a light in each eye.
He whispered.
‘Therefore Thou didst send Thy Angel to strengthen me.’
But there was no angel; only the tides of feeling, swirling, pricking, burning — a horror of the burgeoning evil thing, from birth to senility with its ghastly and complex strength between.
‘Thou! Thou!’
The lights came together at an infinite distance and he yearned at the door. But the four people were dancing and clamoring in place of the angel at his back, so that the lights slid apart again. Then there were only two people, she and he in the tent, but now overwhelmed by a torrent of his sorrow and indignation so that he shut his eyes and groaned for his dear daughter.
Strengthen her O Lord, through Thy great mercy, and give her peace —
Then the thought leapt into his mind like a live thing. It was put there, as surely as the thrust of a spear. One moment his eyes were shut, his heart melted and adrift with sorrow. The next, and his mind was empty of all feeling, empty of everything but the thought which existed now as if it had been there since the creation. There was no feeling in his mind, nothing but the thought, and so the pressures of the body were once more notable. There was a weight on his chest over the heart, pains in his two arms, and a pain in his right cheek. He opened his eyes, and found that he had the spire gripped to him, and his right cheek was ground against a sharp edge near the point. The tiles of the floor were before him once more, each with two heraldic beasts, their clawed feet raised to strike, their snakey necks entwined. Somewhere, either over these tiles, or perhaps where the angel had been, or in the infinite dimensions of his head, there was a scene like a painting. It was Roger Mason, half-turned from the ladder, drawn by invisible ropes towards the woman crouched by the wall. It was Goody, half-turned, unblinking; feeling the ropes pull, shaking her head, Goody terrified and athirst, Goody and Roger, both in the tent that would expand with them wherever they might go. And so distinct that it might have been written across the painting, there was the thought. It was so terrible that it went beyond feeling, and left him inspecting it with a kind of stark detachment, while the edge of the spire burned into his cheek. It was so terrible, and so allaying to all other feeling, that he had to give it words as his eyes examined the linked creatures on the floor before him.
‘She will keep him here.’
*
Then he got to his feet without looking at the light, and went slowly towards the crossways through a kind of crashing silence. He came to the trestle, where the model lay on its back, and jammed the spire into the square hole. He went away down the nave, and across to the deanery, his own place. Sometimes he examined his hands curiously, and nodded gravely. It was not till late that night that any feeling came back; and when it did, he flung himself on his knees again, and water ran out of his eyes. Then at last his angel came and warmed him so that he was somewhat comforted and the picture and the thought endurable. The angel stayed with him and he said before he fell asleep; I need you! Before today I didn’t really know why. Forgive me!
And the angel warmed him.
But as if to keep him humble, Satan was permitted to torment him during the night by a meaningless and hopeless dream. It seemed to Jocelin that he lay on his back in his bed; and then he was lying on his back in the marshes, crucified, and his arms were the transepts with Pangall’s kingdom nestled by his left side. People came to jeer and torment him, there was Rachel, there was Roger, there was Pangall, and they knew the church had no spire nor could have any. Only Satan himself, rising out of the west, clad in nothing but blazing hair stood over his nave and worked at the building, tormenting him so that he writhed
on the marsh in the warm water, and cried out aloud. He woke in the darkness, full of loathing. So he took a discipline and lashed himself hard, seven times, hard across the back in his pride of the angel, one time for each devil. After that, he slept a dreamless sleep.
The Spire Page 5