Chapter Four
From that time Jocelin became very busy. He rode out, gaitered and splashing through the mud to the country churches which were in his gift, examined his vicars, and preached to their haggard congregations. He preached in the churches of the city where he was archdeacon. In the Church of Saint Thomas, when he was high up, speaking from the pulpit in the triforium and half way down the nave — and the people stood below him, looking up, a half-moon of them — he found that he was talking about the spire urgently, softly striking his clenched fist on the stone desk. But the people moaned and beat their breasts, not because they understood him, but because he spoke so urgently; and because it was a time of rain, floods, death and starvation. That morning when he returned to the cathedral the rain was blown away by wind and at last he saw the whole building again. But now it was a sane, factual thing, so many feet long, broad, high, with neither grandeur nor majesty. Then he looked up into the cold sky; but it was shut. So he went to his room in the deanery and stared out of the little window at the building, for the confinement of the window sometimes gave what he saw from it a kind of extra definition and importance, like a picture in a frame. But the building was still a barn. Though he knew this was an illusion, the cathedral seemed to have sunk, too. Outside the gutter at the foot of the wall, the earth had swollen with water and pushed up the coarse grass, so that the stone seemed to dint the earth and the main impression was not now one of God’s glory, but of the weight of man’s building. And his vision of the spire seemed far away as a dream remembered from childhood. If he thought of Anselm, since the old man was part of childhood, the question of confession hung, poised in his mind. But he shook himself irritably and said to the air through clenched teeth;
‘I am about my Father’s business.’
At this time, he ignored another letter from the Lady Alison.
Nevertheless, the wind brought a change. It cleared away the clouds and purged the cathedral of stink, through the open doors. The floods began to go down, leaving rot and ruin, but paths that could be walked on, and flint roads where a wagon might pass. When he walked towards the west front now, he saw that the gargoyles had respite and waited motionless with straining mouths for what might come next. He would stand, thinking with what accuracy and inspiration those giants had built the place, because the gargoyles seemed cast out of the stone, burst out of the stone like boils or pimples, purging the body of sickness, ensuring by their self-damnation, the purity of the whole. Now that the rain had gone, he could see the moss and lichen of green and black, so that some of the gargoyles seemed diseased, as they yelled their soundless blasphemies and derisions into the wind, yet made no more noise than death in another country. The saints and martyrs, the worthies and confessors, dried out imperturbably at the west end, having indifferently endured the winter, just as they now waited indifferently to endure the sun.
He began to feel that perhaps a little energy was coming back. When he thought of his tool, Roger Mason, with the women circling about him, he could say to himself — ‘She is a good woman!’ — and believe that was enough. For things were picking up. There was less coughing in chapter, and only one death; death of the ancient chancellor who had tottered through his last door; and since this was a proper death in slow time and with all the appropriate ceremonies, it was a matter for rejoicing rather than sorrow. Besides the new chancellor was young and diffident. It seemed in the twinkling of an eye that the time came when the curtains in the cloisters were taken down so that the boys of the songschool played in the open or tried to climb the great cedar. Suddenly, coming through the west door one morning, he saw that the cathedral was full of earthly life again. People had come to stare down into the hole at the crossways, or up at the hole in the vault. Now that the floods had gone back into the river and the sky was full of broken blue, the waters sank in the pit at the crossways so that when Roger Mason lowered a candle, it found no reflection of itself. The army became cheerful, whistling as it climbed the ladders among the scaffolding round the south east pillar, whistling into the corkscrew stair that led up to the triforium. As it returned with arms or hod or basket empty, it whistled or sung itself into view, and marched as indifferently as the effigies looked, through all the sternness of Lent. The army made a constant noise, however Jocelin complained to Roger Mason. There was a constant adzing going on in the shed outside the north transept, and a constant banging and thumping from the roof over the vault. But Lent was a time of girding for Jocelin who knew that soon he would be in battle; so in that preoccupation, he was helpless before the cheerful army as a girl herding too many geese. Helplessly he heard the songs; helplessly he saw Pangall aped through the crossways; helplessly, he saw Roger and Goody in the tent.
But still he said: ‘I am about my Father’s business!’
Then one morning when he entered the cathedral (Lift up your heads, O ye Gates) and stood by the pit where no smell was, he heard a change in the noises from the vaulting. He strained back his head on his neck, and a grain of sky hit him, smack, breathtaking, unbelievable, wonderful, blue. As the edges of his small window sometimes gave a depth and intensity to what he saw through it, so the roof round the tiny hole made this glimpse into a jewel. Up there, they were laying back the lead, rolling it back on the rafters. The blue widened and lengthened, joined earth to heaven, straight up there, where one day and soon, the geometric lines would leap into a picture of infinity. His head was back, his mouth open, his eyes screwed up and watering. He saw the busy shapes of men who did as they were told but did not know what they were doing; he saw an edge of white invade the blue, then pass; heard Rachel come clacking, but took no notice of what she said, how long she stayed, or where she went; stood with painful, disregarded neck, exhilarated like a child running through flowers, until the widening patch blurred and became a sparkling cascade. At last he eased his neck and came down into a confusion of light, honey-bars from the windows, phantom lights that swam through his head and wrestled with the sliding afterimage of the sky.
From that time, whenever the army worked in the roof, the sky looked straight down at the open, waiting pit. Presently the gap was interrupted by a pattern of rafters; then these were taken away, piece by piece. The army hauled in a vast tarpaulin on a sledge and ropes slid down to it from the vault. The ropes went up again with the tarpaulin and some singing. When the men knocked off, the tarpaulin kept out the sky, though the rain sometimes drummed on it, a shower like choir feet, or a roar. Then the men would come back when the weather was fine, and reveal the sky again. Every day, the master builder would inspect the pit. Once, he went down it himself, but came up with muddy feet, and shaking his head. He would say nothing, but this did not matter since Rachel explained the transaction to any who would listen, and to some who would not.
Lent moved on towards Easter, and there were complaints that the noise from the roof reached into the Lady Chapel, so that Jocelin saw it was now necessary for the dean to climb, and see things for himself. So he climbed a corkscrew stair laboriously and carefully, and came out at last in the vaulting, where the pit was no more than a black dot, a hundred and twenty feet below. He was in a wide square with battlements all round; there was air and light. He picked his way among the mystifying wood and stone and leaned out to see; and the square of the cloister was below him, with the bulge of the cedar in the middle. The boys of the songschool were playing tag on the grass, or bent over checkers on the sill of the arcade. It seemed suddenly to Jocelin that now he loved everybody with ease and delight. He was filled with excitement. When he drew in his head — a raven missed it by inches — there was matter for more excitement. For he saw that he was standing on a single course of new stone that ran right round the square. A mason was spreading mortar thin as the white of an egg. So Jocelin clasped his hands, lifted up his head and included the boys and the dumb man and Roger Mason and Goody in one tremendous ejaculation: ‘Rejoice, O daughters of Jerusalem!’
So it was Easter, parti
cularly in the Lady Chapel where the event announced itself by changes in the altar frontal, which became unbleached linen. There was unbleached wax in the candles, there was the driving out of the congregation, and the grave waited for an angel to say He is arisen. But in the crossways, where the light had nothing but grisaille to contend against, Easter proclaimed itself in another manner, with noise and sun.
After that the courses rose quickly, until as Jocelin looked from his window he could see how white stone rose above the battlements. Presently the rising square grew scaffolding on its own account, with a ladder, two ladders. The beams from Ivo’s forest nosed into the cathedral through the gap in the north west transept. Ropes came down for them and they went up, end on, like arrows, and men kept out of their way. Jocelin wanted to see what happened to them, but the master builder put him off. When at last he climbed again, he saw how Ivo’s beams — or his father’s beams — had formed a base on four sides for a flooring where there used to be a roof. But there was a square gap in the middle, so that a torrent of sky still fell down it. The stone course on all four sides began to progress irregularly. They left gaps in themselves, and Jocelin understood that they had reached the windows, fifty feet high, which would give the tower its light.
There were flowers in the Lady Chapel and pale faces filled out and the mouths of children were sweet with praise. So Ivo came, robed to be made a canon. Before three Principal Persons he read from the great bible, or recited, it was difficult to know which since he read Our Father and Hail Mary; but the new chancellor declared that now Ivo could read well enough. So the ceremony of installation took place in qualified sunlight from the life of St Aldhelm worked in the little windows. Jocelin sat in his stall, with a sense of the tower rising. He waited for Ivo who performed with dignity enough. So finally Jocelin received him at the west end of the Lady Chapel, and took him by the warm hand. There was the asking and the accepting, the leading hand in hand, the temporary stall; and at last among the candles and the flowers, the kiss of peace.
After that Ivo went back to his hunting.
All this time the air and the earth dried; and then the dust came again. The carefully laid plans for dealing with it were tacitly laid aside, for Pangall and his sweepers had lost heart. What mud had been left in the nave and the aisles dried and drifted. More dust came down from the square shaft over the crossways. It lay here and there in modest drifts and dunes. Sunshafts were bright with it, monuments held it in little films and screes. The crusaders who lay in heraldic silence on slabs between the pillars of the nave were no longer flamboyant with heraldry, but wore filthy chainmail, or dungcoloured plate armour as if they had been struck down then and there in the press. On this side of the wood and canvas screen, the body of the church was secular as a stable or an empty tythe barn. For the purpose of the building seemed concentrated in the funnel over the crossways. The scaffolding climbed up inside, so that to look up from the crossways was like looking up a chimney where very methodical birds had been building. Ropes hung, platforms reduced the square of sky, uprights seemed to draw together, and ladders slanted from level to level. All this was threaded continually by the army. The noisy cheerfulness of spring died away, to leave behind it a quiet concentration. In the body of the church they had been rowdy and casual. But now, lifted nearly two hundred feet into the air, their individual mysteries laid hands on them, so that the noises were for the most part, blows, chipping, rubbing, scraping. Sometimes, on his way to service or meditation in the Lady Chapel, Jocelin would pause and peer up, to watch a workman plod along a bouncing plank that lay across a corner in the dizzy air. Sometimes he would follow a single stone from Pangall’s Kingdom, watch it go up stage by stage in a hod, or sway up the centre on a thread. He would watch the master builder climbing heavily and carefully from stage to stage, his T square under his arm, and a lead plummet hanging from his waist. He had an instrument for sighting, too. It was metal with a minute hole bored in it; and hour by hour he would sight along the walls, or from corner to corner. Every time he used the T square or the sighting thing, he would repeat the measurement the other way round, then drop the plumbline; so that at least two of the workmen would be idle. Jocelin would find that he was holding his own breath in exasperation at this idleness, till some necessary business of his position, a message brought by Father Anonymous perhaps, called him back to the wide world. At the first possible moment he would return to the crossways, and stand, squinting up and ejaculating, so that the young man who had now reached the third of the four head’s of Dean Jocelin had a hard time of it.
Then, one day when he paused, he saw clusters of men in argument at the high top. He saw Roger Mason jollying and cajoling, losing his temper deliberately, or being reasonable, so that after hours wasted, the work limped on. After that, the master builder came down to ground level with Jehan and worked on the pavement. He brushed Jocelin aside testily. He set dishes of water on the pavement, chocking them up with slivers of wood, and sighted at them. He made a scratch on the stone of each of the four pillars of the crossways and drew a chalk mark over each scratch. From that time and at least twice a day, he was preoccupied with these marks. He would stand, for example, by a door in the south transept, and squint at each mark in turn, then look for their reflections in the dish of water. When the chalk dropped from a pillar, he marked it in again.
But Jocelin, passing happily through the crossways, laughed and shook his head at Roger. Sometimes he would call out to him.
‘What! Still no faith, my son?’
The master builder never answered him and only once came near answering. It was after his angel had comforted Jocelin strongly, so that he felt if he were given the chance he could hold up the whole building on his own shoulders. When he came back to go down the nave (and there was Goody hurrying this way) he felt an urge to communicate his triumph and he cried out to Roger behind the dish of water.
‘You see my son! I told you — They don’t sink!’
Then Roger opened his mouth but said nothing for he saw Goody hurrying up the north aisle; and it was plain to Jocelin that the master builder forgot him when he saw her. So he went away down the nave, and his triumph felt a little tarnished at the edges.
Rachel was another drawback at this time. She would stand with Jocelin when he looked up, not looking up with him, but inevitably talking, chattering, interrupting, till once more the only defence was to ignore her. She had no head for heights, she said, and this was a great distress to her since so much of Roger’s work was done in dangerous air. She waited, though, for Roger to go up and come down; and when they were at ground level they revolved round each other again, withdrawn from the rest of the world. Every time he saw this Jocelin thought to himself, with a horrid flinch, that they were more like brother and sister than man and wife, if it were not for the filthy, ludicrous thing he knew about them; he, dark, choleric, heavy but devious; she choleric, dark, strong and busy. And Pangall chipped away at a wall, or stood, leaning moodily on his broom, or limped away from the mocking army; and Goody Pangall passed through the crossways — but there were other ways she could get to her house — not looking up, with an effort that bent her neck; and Roger Mason, sighted at a chalk mark — Sometimes Jocelin surprised himself; or rather a dark corner of his mind surprised him, forcing his mouth to utter words that had no logical meaning, but seemed connected directly to triumph or uneasiness.
‘There’s much more to come.’
But then his logical mind would put the thing in perspective, and he would go, nodding towards the deanery, and wait for his angel, who gave comfort, but no advice.
Then it was June, and Jocelin came into the church with an aching head. The night before, contact with his angel had been particularly long and rewarding, and he thought at first timidly, then proudly, then timidly again in an infinite regression that exhausted his wits, that this might be because he had done well in forcing the tower up against all opposition, to the height of one window. Afterwards he
realised that the angel had come to warn him; for the devil was allowed to assail him in a particularly loathsome way, so that to his waking mind in the morning, the last hour of sleep was vile with tempestuous visions. He came early as he could, to pray. It was daylight, so that he expected to find the army working. Yet the dusty barn was silent and deserted. When he got to the dry hole at the crossways and squinted up with a flash of fire through his head and an extra ache, he saw that all nests were bare of birds in the chimney, ropes swinging slowly in some draught, nothing else moving but a pink cloud which inched across the opening at the top till it closed the square with a glowing cover. He brought his eyes back down, and some wordless anxiety sent him hurrying to Pangall’s Kingdom; but the cottage was silent, and the glasscutter’s bench deserted. He came back to the church, hurried across the echoing crossways into the north transept, so that he could peer through the gap in the wall, to see if there were workmen about in the Close; and then he saw where the army was. They filled the shed where the beams had lain seasoning all winter. At the entrance were the women, silent and still. Further in, were men who stood on the beams that had not yet been shifted. Farthest in of all, was Roger Mason, his head and shoulders dark against the opened end of the shed. He was speaking, but not loudly enough to reach Jocelin; and besides, there was noise, and movement from the whole crowd of men.
As he peered round the rough edge of the hole in the wall, Jocelin nodded wisely and ruefully to himself, through the flashes of pain in his head.
‘They want another penny a day.’
So he went away into the Lady Chapel, where the east windows were coming to life, and he prayed for the army. As if his prayer had called them, he heard them, even before he was properly centred down, coming into the crossways with their noise and work. He turned to the business of the devil, with a twitch of disgust, and mourned the unruly member. But the noises from the crossways, and his own memories, were a hard thing to put aside. He found himself instead, kneeling, his chin on his wrist, looking at nothing, and thinking about things instead of praying about them. There’s a crisis, he thought, and I must be strong for it.
The Spire Page 6
