The Spire by William Golding
He paused, thinking. I speak of myself, perhaps, as much as of him. It was joy once; but strangely, no longer joy. Only a longing for peace.
‘And Roger — when you have done and it stands here for all to see — the net may break.’
The master builder muttered.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘But build quickly — quickly! Before you consent to the major evil and the net never break —’
The master builder swung round, head down and lowering.
‘Keep your sermons to yourself!’
‘— because you have all become precious to me — you and all the rest — and I begin to live by you.’
‘What d’you mean?’
What did I mean, he thought. I meant something about Goody and Rachel — I must speak to her as I spoke to him, or as the Will spoke to him.
He nodded seriously at the master builder.
‘I must go down now, Roger. There’s something I have to do.’
So he began to climb down the ladders with his angel; and before he was out of sight, he heard Roger Mason speaking softly.
‘I believe you’re the devil. The devil himself.’
But he dropped below the voice and the pillars were singing again; and by the time he reached the pavement of the crossways, their singing had put his purpose out of his head.
Then the tower stopped growing for nearly a month, but broke instead into a grove of pinnacles, twelve of them, three at each corner, with a master pinnacle at the centre of each group. Roger Mason spent less time up there, leaving the workmen to Jehan, who used them cheerfully, and got a joke out of every stone. So Jocelin was forced to go about his proper business and try to catch up with it, though it still lay a long way ahead of him. But the master builder lived for the most part at ground level, talking with iron workers; and Rachel talked with him. They got away from Jocelin by this means; and since the top of the tower was so crowded, he only saw the work in craning glimpses. He watched, while two hundred and fifty feet up in the air, a soundless Jehan jollied the stonecutters into making slots in every projection so that a steel ribbon could run right round, and fit tidily against the stone. On the few occasions when he stood among the forest of pinnacles at the tower top, Jocelin saw how the long shed by the river was coming to life. It smoked. All day and half the night, the hammers rang there like a peal of untuned bells; and when darkness came, he could see the reflection of the fires in the river. Inside the shaft of the tower, two floors closed off all but the central well. As the pinnacles rose, workmen took away unnecessary scaffolding by the ton. They lugged the members from the walls and filled most of the holes with stone. What holes were left, the ravens and pigeons investigated with speculative interest. Soon there was little left but the ropes that hung down the central well, and one steep, wooden stair that zigzagged up round the wall. The only temporary structure left in the tower was the swallow’s nest where the workmen kept their tools and the master builder his instruments; and since there would soon be ample room at the base of the spire itself, even the swallow’s nest was under orders to go. What scaffolding remained was now grouped round the tower top like a head of unruly hair; or like a stork’s nest above the fantasticated, eighty foot fall of the lights.
Then, one day, Jocelin came from a rowdy meeting in Chapter where the news of the extra expense had been received with an incredulity which changed to indignation. In the end, with a flash of seeing, he understood that he would have to affix his own private seal to these documents, which he did in the deanery without more discussion. But the strain of chapter brought back his high laugh; and his angel was at once a blessing and a great wearisomeness to him; and because his own will slackened he could not control the thoughts and images that floated through his mind, images of the spire, of red hair, of a wolf-howl, till he longed for the strange peace of the tower. He went out into the close and heard suddenly how there was no noise at all and the world held its breath, for the shed was silent. He went into the nave, and found a little noise there between the services because the great pillars sang — eeeeeeeeeeeee — as if the strain had become intolerable. He went slowly and quietly up the corkscrew stair towards the peace and happiness where the pinnacles had grouped themselves. He went silently as a ghost; and that was why half-way up the wooden stairs of the tower, he heard the moan. It stopped him on the stair, back bent under the angel, each foot on a different rung, and hands gripping. It was the moan of some trapped animal, a roedeer, perhaps, past the time of kicking in the snare and now become nothing but helpless misery. He glanced sideways towards the swallow’s nest. There was a gap at the top for light; and the gap was interrupted by an upright with the bark still on it. There was something else besides bark. A hand was gripping the upright; and Jocelin who had seen that hand many times — touching stone or wood, levelling an instrument, clenched in anger, or lifted in despair — knew the red and brown of it as well as he knew the paleness of his own. But the very moment he saw it, and recognised the touches of dirty white at the knuckles, and before he had time to think whom it implied, so passionately gripping wood, another hand, smaller, whiter, softer slid over it and held it tight.
Open-mouthed, motionless, unblinking, he stayed there on the stair; and heard her voice, voice of the moan, pleading, ingenuous and sweet.
‘But I didn’t laugh — did I?’
The tough fingers leapt from the upright, the two hands wrung into each, vanished; and then the more familiar voice laboured up as if from the very pit bottom in the grey pavement —
‘Oh God!’
He backed swiftly away down the ladder, mouth still open. He stood on the beams over the vaulting, bent his head and clapped his hands over his ears. He swayed from side to side, and stared round him through the stone walls. He felt his way to the corkscrew stair and went stumbling down it; and there in the darkness before his unblinking eyes the memories came storming in — a green girl running in the close and slowing decorously for my Lord the Dean, my reverend father, the shy smile and the singing of the child’s game, noticed, approved, and at last looked for, yes looked for, expected, cherished, a warmth round the heart, an unworldly delight, the arranged marriage with the lame man, the wimpled hair, the tent —
‘Oh no, dear God no!’
The cost of building material.
He came out at last into the church under the singing pillars and Rachel appeared circling, then positively at a run so that he let out his high giggle. And Roger was not at the foundry or the woodstacks was he up the tower or in the stairs, he needed food, he was exhausted — all the way down the nave into the twilight of the close she followed him, gabbing and clacking. He turned by the west door to bless her from his pain to hers: and saw her there before him under a weight of confessors, martyrs, saints, her red, illegal dress not yet settled into folds round the stocky body, her hands up to her mouth, no more words, strained, hurt eyes, popping out of the ageing, painted face. So he left her, and knelt at last in his own place, mouth still open, eyes open still, and staring at nothing.
By the evening of the next day, the swallow’s nest was gone.
Chapter Seven
So he went to pray; but prayer had changed also. He was bent into a little grey space, tense and appalled, and when he glanced up to where help had been, a fall of red, knotted hair blazed there so that he would cower away from it. He would say to himself: I must offer all this up! And then, wordlessly, without his volition, he would find that his mind was making itself into nothing but a question: to where? If he deliberately detached himself from the hair, he might have a few moments of comparative freedom; and then, as if someone or something had taken it and brought it dangling, the hair was back, hanging in front of him, brilliant and real; and she would be back, with her green ribbons and torn dress and the black patches of her eyes staring across. So he would get up and go anywhere. Sometimes he would say ‘Work! Work! Work!’ briskly and speak urgently to people of business; then remembe
I must go to her, he thought, I must save what can be saved; but even as he had the thought, he felt the prurience in him like a leprosy, and knew that if he were to find her alone there would be nothing for it but to ask, and pry, and demand, without knowing what he wanted. Then he was suddenly aware of himself, a tall, gaunt man, standing in his cassock at the west end, his eyes staring at the wooden screen and his hands clenched. So he climbed again in the deserted tower past the place where the swallow’s nest had been, which stabbed him and took away his breath. He made himself look from the tower — out into the world where other people went about their incomprehensible business; and he saw that for many of them that business had come to a stop. The tower with its grove of pinnacles had claimed them. The ends of the streets that led to the close were never empty. Men and women stood there, at that distance their faces no more than a blur, and looked up. As some left, others would come to fill their place. It was a continual drift and supply; and he felt a great bitterness as he looked at them, and he spoke into the wind.
‘What do you people know about it all?’
The head of the tower was still, and matter-of-fact about him. He looked it over, a stone forest lifted up round the place where the spire was to be. This is nothing like my model, he thought — nothing like my vision; but we do what we can. Perhaps it’s a diagram of the folly they don’t know about.
Then he shouted aloud.
‘Work! Work! Work! Why aren’t they here?’
So he went quickly down the tower to find the master builder; and by the time he reached the pavement his irritation had become a mad anger. But the master builder was working. He had assembled the army in the shed by the north transept and was talking to them gruffly out of his mayfly life. When Jocelin heard him his anger died away, and became a restless eagerness to get the thing done with; for Roger Mason was giving each man directions, whatever his craft was. So Jocelin understood that they were dealing with the matter of the steel band; and with the thing in hand, he took his inability to pray back with him to the deanery, where his angel and the devil visited him, and the unholy marriage stormed, and he waited for the dawn. Sure enough, the great bell in the detached belltower rang out of time, and all the ways to the cathedral were noisy with talk and the sound of feet. He went to see; but Roger Mason drove him away from the tower itself with an authority that surprised and shook them both. So he walked and circled like Rachel in the close; and then he went back to his room, remembering what he had to do. He wrote a long letter to the abbess of Stilbury, setting out certain facts — but not all of them — and asking that on conditions, a poor, fallen woman should be taken in. After that he went to the nave, looked at the pillars and found himself thinking that perhaps they felt as he did; but that at least they could not feel this extra thing, this dreadful heaviness round the heart which was a purely human prerogative. Yet there was nothing to be seen of the work, so he went to the long shed which was empty except for the octagons and the master carpenter. The octagons seemed heavy enough to defeat the highest wind; or so the master carpenter said, as he swung his maul to strike the sixth one apart, and there was in his voice something which led Jocelin to enquire further; but the master carpenter would say no more.
Now the sun was well up and the shadows sliding back across the close to the high walls that had cast them. There was a new shadow among them, of the tower; and as it slid down away from the chancellor’s house, Jocelin saw a kind of quivering indecisiveness about the end of it. So he hurried across the close almost to where the city people were grouped and waiting. When he turned on his heel and looked up, he saw that smoke was rising at the tower top. Wherever he went, circling and pausing, and whenever he stopped to look on that day, he saw how the smoke rose, never thickening but never ceasing, so that the sky trembled. When the shadows of the cathedral had crept out in the other direction the smoke still rose; and as darkness came, he could see a glow round the head of the tower — hear occasionally the voices of other men who lounged or slept or ate or drank by their buckets of water on the leaden acres of the roof. So he went to sleep; but was called out of his bed by a strange peal which came from the tower, the same tuneless peal that used to come from the shed by the river. He pulled on his cloak and went out into the close again through groups of laughing and chattering city people. Streams of sparks were falling from the head of the tower. They shot out of the glow at the top and they were not extinguished by the time the roof hid them. Once there was a scream from the tower, shouts and commotion, and for a while no more sparks fell. But before the watchers could decide what had happened, the sparks had begun to cascade down again; and presently a man came staggering through the door in the north transept, his arm wrapped in oilsoaked sacking. He paid no attention to Jocelin’s questions, but went off towards New Street, moaning and cursing. But there were plenty of people about to look after him if they chose to. It seemed to Jocelin that the whole city was awake, in the streets or the close, or behind open casements; and all looking up. Through the bland night, the tower glowed and sparked and smoked diminishingly among the stars. Then, an hour before dawn, the peal of tuneless bells rang no longer. Instead of sparks there came jets of steam shooting up, colourless as the unsunned stones and seeming a continuation of them. As day dawned, even the steam diminished. The airy furnaces, dribbling charcoal and water, crept down the fields of glass to where parties on the roof seized them and took them in. As the day brightened towards sunrise, Jocelin went forward, aching with hunger and sleeplessness to greet the men as they came down from the tower. But they ignored him. They came, swaying, staggering, with open eyes that looked through him at their distant beds; and their feet took them away. So he stood waiting for Roger Mason, in a sheer sickness of sleep. But Roger Mason never came. At last he went timidly into the crossways and climbed; and by the time he was out of the corkscrew stair he had forgotten everything but the physical being of the tower. For in that sunrise, with the beginning of a wind, the whole tower was talking, groaning, creaking, protesting, and every now and then uttering a bang! to stop the heart. But he reminded himself whose building this was, mastered the chattering of his teeth, and climbed up, past the corner where the swallow’s nest had been, up the slanting stairs till he came out on the wooden roof among the forest of stone. There was a mess of charcoal and water. When he gripped the parapet and looked down, he saw the whole world staring up, in a blur of white faces — and there was the band of steel, a foot wide and two inches thick, studded with blue rivets. Everywhere it lay close against the stone that was scarred and broken. But the band was alive and talking. It cried, wangle-angle-bangle-clang! it mouthed, and in the pauses of the mouthing, settled to a steady ringing.
He let himself down and knelt, staring between two battlements. I am here, he thought. This is what it’s about. This is my place. I can’t work wood or steel or stone; but this is what I am for.
So he crouched down to pray; but before he could pray, slumped sideways against the base of a pinnacle, he fell asleep, and his angel came, unseen with six wings and stood to warm his back.
He was awakened by the wind in his hair, awakened slowly out of dreams that slid away from him and left him alone with the wind. He opened his eyes; and in sudden vertigo knew that he was looking down at the cloisters, almost vertically down, two hundred and fifty feet. He shut his eyes again, screwing them up tight, and looking inward for the quiet place of dreams. Bu
Nevertheless, something was different, and he was forced back into thought, by the need to decide what the difference was. It lay in, or came to him, through his body, through the touch of hipbone, or cheekbone against the pinnacle — and bang! went the steel band as if to confirm that he thought rightly; might therefore be some new quality in the stone itself. It was so subtle a newness that only this solitude, this close contact of flesh against the newly cut surface could detect it. It was a newness in the stone; in the stone all down his right side. This stone — and his hand felt out over it — this stone. And now more — less? more? solid when he touched it. He had a moment of fantasy when the stone seemed soft as a pillow, and he thought to himself; I am still half asleep! But a raven slipped past the battlements with a descending squawk that was sane and daylight and matter-of-fact. He lay there, looking down blankly at the cloisters, where sandalled feet and the hem of a gown strolled leisurely past, beyond the foreshortened arches of the arcade.
The boys of the songschool had left their game on the sill of the arcade again. He could not see the squares of the board scratched in stone, but he could see the white, bone counters of the game that lay on it. He could see some of them; but only some, for the stone between the battlements cut off a corner of the board from his eye. There was a kind of childish security in looking at the game, the white counters, one, two, three, four, five —