‘Explain this work to me.’
But Jehan laughed in his face.
‘It’s mad.’
Jocelin shook him by the shoulders as in the old days.
‘I must know. It’s my work too.’
Then Jehan shrugged under his hands so that he took them away.
‘The whole thing rests on wedges. He’ll pin the woodwork into the capstone. If a storm blows up before that — topple, bang, smash! If not, he’ll slacken the cable little by little and let the octagons, or the members between them, stretch down. The whole thing’ll hang, and hold the spire against the wind. So.’
He kicked one of the wedges.
‘He thinks the whole thing will stretch — that much. Who knows? He may be right.’
‘Have you seen it done before?’
Jehan laughed.
‘Has anyone built this high before?’
Jocelin looked at the stone skin round them.
‘Perhaps in foreign countries. They tell stories.’
‘If the skin doesn’t crumble, or the capstone split; if the wood stretches enough and if the pillars stand it —’
He kicked a wedge again, shook his head, and whistled ruefully.
‘No one but he could have an idea like that.’
‘Roger?’
‘He’s drunk and he’s crazy. But then, you have to be crazy to build as high as this.’
He turned and began to clamber down through the trap. After a second or two, his parting words came back up the ladder.
‘Up here, we’re all crazy.’
Then Jocelin had some insight into the master builder. I must give him what strength I have, he thought. So the next morning he kept close to Roger and questioned him.
‘What’s this thing called, my son? And this?’
But Roger Mason would have none of him. In the end he shouted back.
‘What’s what? There aren’t any names for bits of stone and wood. That thing fits on that thing, which’ll fit on that thing — perhaps. Leave me alone!’
So he climbed heavily away like a bear, and stopped halfway up the ladder for a nip. But Jocelin went after him, not to be with the master builder, but to squat among the workmen at the top where he knew he was welcome. At first he could not understand why he was welcome, but at last he found that he was a specific against fear; and this he was able to understand fully since his angel was now in daily and nightly attendance and performed the same office for him, which was good, though it bent his back a little. Nowadays he would come back into the church at dawn, and stand, as it were, in the middle of his adult life. If the work had not yet begun, and if he could avoid the golden maze, he would stand and try to examine the extraordinary tides of feeling that were swallowing him up.
What’s this called? And this?
Sometimes, standing in the dim church, he would put propositions to himself, though the spire in his head prevented him from coming to a conclusion.
‘When it’s finished I shall be free.’
Or: ‘It’s part of the cost, you see.’
Or: ‘I know Anselm as a person; and him; and him. But I never knew her. It would be so precious to me if —’
What’s this called? And this?
Once, in the grey light, when he felt calm for a whole hour, he had a thought which seemed like a blank wall; and then significant as a birthday to a child. He was looking towards the wooden screen between him and the Lady Chapel. He was remembering certain things that had happened to him and they seemed to have happened in another life.
There was God!
So he stood there, looking at the grey pillars and the grey light through the preaching patriarchs in the clerestory. Then he spoke to the wooden screen.
‘Is that included?’
But there was no answer; so he hurried forward to the ladders, got there at the same time as the workmen, and gave them his blessing. And then the spire put the thoughts out of his head.
But to work now in the narrowing spire, was to be lifted a further stage from the earth. It was a beginning, not an end. The lines of the tower drew together downwards now, so that the whole thing was not massively based, but an arrow shot into the earth, with up here, an ungainly butt. The perceptible swaying was no longer soulclutching as it had been, to the men who lived in the air; but there was in the rhythmic heaviness and lightness a kind of drain, not so much on the muscles as on the spirit. Jocelin learnt how the strain built up, so that after a time you would find you had held your breath, and clutched at something with frozen violence. Then you would let this breath out in a gasp, and be easy for a while, until the strain built itself up once more. But there was an advantage in working so high, three hundred feet up. When the wind blew, you could not hear the pillars singing, though you could think of them down there; four needles stuck in the earth, holding up this world of wood and stone.
The remedy for this was work which needed extreme concentration. The skin of the cone had to be built with the utmost accuracy, since only then would it achieve its full strength. Yet except on a windless day, a level placed on the flooring at the top of the tower would exhibit a kind of slow insanity, drifting about like a soul in limbo. After that, the master builder would speak to no one, but brood; and sometimes fly out at a workman.
Then another thing happened to which no one could put a name. It happened slowly like a drop in the temperature of the air. This was, perhaps, the consciousness that now they were where no men had ever been before. No one could positively detect a new law, a new menace; yet some new apprehension lay clammily on the skin. There was seldom measured speech in the cone now; silence, or muttered argument, or sudden spats of temper. Sometimes there were gusts of laughter. Now and then, there were tears.
There were also defections. Ranulf was one of these. He was small, and dry and wrinkled. He was one of the silent ones, perhaps because his English was so uncouth no one could understand more than a quarter of it. He worked with snail slowness, but he never stopped. Nor did the bursts of hysterical laughter or anger include him. He was often forgotten; but when you looked that way again, you saw that another stone was in position with his mark on it. But one afternoon in July, when the spire was moving again, he backed away from the skin and began to put his tools in his bag. No one said anything; but one by one the others stopped too, until they were all watching him. This made no difference at all to Ranulf, who did exactly as he had done any number of times before. He arranged his tools methodically, cleaning them, and binding them with rag. He checked over his food bag, and dusted his hands. Then he took both bags and moved slowly down the cone out of sight. The others watched his head disappear, then one by one, returned to their work; but there was a cold comment in this methodical withdrawal by such a man that set limbs quivering.
There was a more terrifying defection still.
The model of the spire had been finished with a button in which the toy cross was fixed. When Jocelin first saw this button outside the north transept in its wooden cradle, he went through incredulity to a flash of terror. The button was bigger than a millstone, must weigh more than a horse and cart; yet it had to be hauled, foot by foot, to the top. He watched how they moved the stone to the crossways, then in a curtain of ropes up through the vaulting, up, stage by stage. At each stop, there was much manoeuvring with wedges and crows to the exact point for a new journey; until the capstone lay brutally dominating the centre of the first octagon. Nor was this all; for as the stone rose, there came the point where the next octagon would be too small for the stone to go through it. So three hundred and fifty feet up, they shifted the stone outside the cone on to scaffolding specially built for it. After that, the next course of the cone took the scaffolding and the stone up with them. Then the scaffolding would be removed from below, to be used again higher up, the way children play the hand game.
Jocelin found the capstone ungood to look at. As it lay, chocked and wedged and bound on the scaffolding, it hid a whole parish of the city.
Moreover it hung, impossibly as Mahomet’s tomb, off centre. When the swaying began in the warm, summer wind, though the soul had faith, the body became a thing of contracted muscles, quivering nerves, that believed the thing would snap those four needles down there like alder sticks. Then the only thing to do was to avert the mind and concentrate attention on the cone that rose towards the point up there, fifty feet higher; until the mind tired, and looking again, the eyes saw how a whole parish was hidden. Nor was there now the same frightened pleasure in looking down, for the inside of the cone was darkening as the skin drew together. And if the eye was indeed drawn down outside the skin to the pinnacles that reached up and out from the birdhaunted tower top, it risked lining up some stone with a point on the blue cup of earth and detecting a movement, or inventing one. Nor could his hands work. He could only crouch, clinging to his will, or whatever will it was and try to hold up the spire and the men with it, in the new, clammy place.
Perhaps this was why he found climbing so difficult. The ladders made him breathless, so that often he would arrive, to lie gasping on the planks until his heart was steady, or as steady as it normally was. The climb with hands and feet, and the comfort of the angel, was bending his back. He kept out of the way as much as possible, but this was not easy now the cone was drawing together. Yet no one at the top ever tried to drive him off, and he could not think why this was, until one day he asked Jehan who answered him simply.
‘You bring us luck.’
It was Jehan who fathered the next crisis and the next defection. He came up one day, with a set, unlaughing face, borrowed the master builder’s plumb and line. Then while the others snatched their midday meal in the lee of the skin, while the master builder nip-nipped and said nothing, Jehan went back quickly down the spire.
After that, the meal was very silent.
Presently Jehan came up again, handed the plumb and coil of line to the master builder, then looked at Jocelin. There was that in his face which had to be met and known. Jocelin heard his voice crack in the high giggle as he used it.
‘Well? Are they sinking?’
Heavy, pause, light, pause.
Jehan licked his lips. There was a dirty green tinge round them. His voice when it came, was a croak.
‘Bending.’
Then there was silence, except for the susurration of the wind over the raw edge of the cone.
The next sound was so strange, it seemed there was a new person, or a new creature in the cone. It was a mooing; and it came from Roger Mason. He was crouched in the lee of the skin, and he was looking straight through the other side.
‘Roger!’
Heavy, pause.
‘My son!’
Light, pause.
The master builder scrambled sideways over the boards like a crab and fumbled his way out of sight. They heard him going down, ladder after ladder; and as he sank away from them, only the moo-ing went higher, until it was a screaming and a singing, like the singing of the stones. After that, there was silence again.
Then suddenly they were all laughing, shrieking, howling, thumping stone or wood with fists that bled; and there was a great fire of love that flamed from the one to the other in the darkening cone. The will itself opened Jocelin’s lips and promised them more money among the flames of love; and they hugged the lean body that was the vessel of the will.
After that he found it even easier to ignore groundlevel; and this was necessary because with the bending of the pillars, people at groundlevel tended to interrupt him, and all he could do was to look through them at the spire and wait till they went away. In this trance of will, he heard how the city people cursed him for ending the services in the cathedral. Even the godless cursed him. They would stand at the west door, peer the length of the nave at the pillars. When he came through from a struggle between his angel and his devil, if they were there, they would not dare to curse him openly, but they muttered at his back. He knew what they said because he could detect the bending of the pillars himself. There was no doubt that Jehan had been right. Solid stone could not do this; but solid stone was doing it. If you looked through the nave at the east windows you could see the two nearer pillars at the crossways perceptibly bent in towards each other, though your eye had to look long and carefully. There was only one good thing to this bending. The more the pillars bent the less they sang. By midsummer, they seemed to have stopped bending and singing altogether; but Jehan said they were waiting for the gales of autumn, when he personally would take care to be somewhere else. This care was taken already by everyone but the builders and the man who brought them luck.
At the top, the work speeded up, as if each man felt the gales of autumn already promised on his cheek. Jocelin knew these men better than he had ever known anybody in his life, from the dumb man, to Jehan. He was part of the crew. Clinging, crouching in the lee of the skin, his angel always at his back, he began to handle wood and stone, to lay his hand to a rope, or his weight to the end of a crow. As for the men, they called him ‘Father’ but they treated him jocularly, like a child. As the skin came further in, and there was laughter and fierceness in the tent-like space, they let him take charge of the metal sheet that threw reflected light into the interior. He was very proud of this, even to tears, though he could not tell why. He would squat there holding the sheet, and the master carpenter would be lying on his back and hammering up into a corner.
‘Left a bit, Father!’
‘Like that, my son?’
‘More. More. Steady!’
So he would squat there, devotedly directing the light. They are all good men, he thought. They blaspheme and curse and work with their hands, but they are good men. I taste their goodness here in the sunlight nearly four hundred feet above the pavement. Perhaps it’s because they were chosen just as I was chosen.
So he told them about his angel and they were not surprised, but looked into the space behind his back and nodded soberly. Then he broke even a little more of his purpose and told them about his vision, because it seemed to him that they were worthy of this hire. But they could not understand. In the end he gave up, shaking his head and muttering fretfully.
‘I have it all written down somewhere.’
After that he remembered the sermon he was going to preach when the spire was finished, and the pulpit built against the pillars he would preach it from. But at that, the others made long faces. Jehan said that any man who worked under those pillars from now on was a fool, and enough was enough. But the dumb man came to Jocelin, humming and nodding and tapping himself on the chest. So that was an end of what looked like a difficulty.
One day, the men knocked off early and would not go on no matter how much Jocelin begged them to. They simply shut him out from among them and went away. So after a while he went down too, and what with the cathedral people at groundlevel it was difficult to keep the spire erect in his head. He looked at the curved pillars, and wandered round the church until the silence and the golden marks of feet drove him back to the ladders. He climbed them again, and the flimsier ladders that were lashed among the octagons. Because he knew this time there was nothing to be done but wait, he went slowly and noted how even that made his heart trot. But he reached the top at last and squatted there among the ravens. While the sun sank in great stillness he sat there, and all the spire was in his head.
Yet before the sun had gone, he found he was not alone with his angel. Someone else was facing him. This creature was framed by the metal sheet that stood against the sky opposite him. For a moment he thought of exorcism, but when he lifted his hand, the figure raised one too. So he crawled across the boards on hands and knees and the figure crawled towards him. He knelt and peered in at the wild halo of hair, the skinny arms and legs that stuck out of a girt and dirty robe. He peered in closer and closer until his breath dimmed his own image and he had to smear it off with his sleeve. After that he knelt and peered for a long time. He examined his eyes, deep in sockets over which the skin was dragged — drag
ged too over the cheekbones, then sucked in. He examined the nose like a beak and now nearly as sharp, the deep grooves in the face, the gleam of teeth.
The kneeling image cleared his head. Well Jocelin, he said soundlessly to the kneeling image; Well Jocelin, this is where we have come. It began when we were knocked down, I think. It was when the earth moved, more or less. We can remember what happened since then, but what happened before is some sort of dream. Except for the vision.
After that, he got up and began to move about, restlessly. The evening turned green over the rim of the cup. Then the rim went black and shadows filled it silently so that before he was well aware of it, night had fallen and the faint stars come out. He saw a fire on the rim and guessed it was a haystack burning; but as he moved round the rim of the cone, he saw more and more fires round the rim of the world. Then a terrible dread fell on him for he knew these were the fires of Midsummer Night, lighted by the devilworshippers out on the hills. Over there, in the valley of the Hanging Stones, a vast fire shuddered brightly. All at once he cried out, not in terror but in grief. For he remembered his crew of good men, and he knew why they had knocked off work and where they were gone. So he shouted aloud in anger at someone.
‘They are good men! I say so!’
But this was only one feeling. Inside them, his mind knew what it knew.