The Spire by William Golding
His cheek was hard against the pinnacle and he knew he had not moved. But a sixth counter had appeared, had slid into view with another square of board under it. He knew he had not moved; but he knew that the tower had moved, gently, soundlessly up here, though down there the pillars might have cried — eeee — at the movement. Time after time, he watched the white counter slide into view, then disappear again; and he knew that the tower was swaying under him like a tall tree.
Slowly he turned his eyes away and looked at the charcoal and drying puddles. I mustn’t scream, or run, he thought. That would be unworthy of the vision. He got up carefully, feeling his weight on both feet. He went step by step, carefully down the talking tower, down the steep ladders, down the corkscrew stairs to a deserted church. The pillars were singing again; and now he understood something about the rhythm of their singing. He made himself stand in the crossways and listen as if it were a penance. Perhaps for a minute they would be silent; but then — eeeeeeeeeee — in full voice, hold the note, and at last, with the same gradations retreat into silence.
He looked down at the replaced pavement. It was here the vision came to me, he thought, on these very stones. Here I threw myself down, and offered myself to the work, all those years ago. And I’ve been faithful. It’s in Your hands.
Then slowly, without looking back, he went away.
*
But the day had not done with him.
When he reached the deanery there was a man on horseback with a letter. The man had ridden the five miles back from Stilbury; and when Jocelin saw how quickly a letter could go and come, the first thought he had was that Stilbury was too near. The second thought was a more confused one of how Stilbury was quite far enough. But he took the letter and broke the seal and read. Yes, Stilbury would accept the wretched woman but on terms other than his, terms which amounted to a good sized dowry. He went to his coffer and took out money. I know what they will say, he thought. First Jocelin’s Folly; and now Jocelin’s whore. But I don’t mind what they say. I’ve lived with derision so long I no longer notice it. This also.
He crossed the close again and went up the nave under the singing stones, then across the south transept towards Pangall’s kingdom. He stood in the doorway, looking at the slumped cottage, and it squeezed his heart small. So he stood there feeling the tide of misery rise. He thought to himself. This is the worst! Do this and I shall have peace. It must be done, for my sake and his sake and for the sake of my poor daughter.
So he braced himself to go to the cottage; but before he could take a step, he was jerked and staggered. There was a scarlet flash by his right eye and Rachel Mason rushed down the yard to the cottage, flung the door open and darted inside. At once, there was a crash from the cottage, screaming and shouting, Rachel shouting words that blistered. The door bounced open and the master builder stumbled out, his hands to the blood of his head. An instant later Rachel came out behind him. She screamed her hoarse imprecations at him, she struck him about the head and shoulders with a broom and there was a whisp of red hair caught in her fingers that flipped and flinked as she swung the broom handle; and all the time she screamed and shouted and foamed and looked at nothing but her target with her bolting eyes. The two of them stumbled past Jocelin without paying any attention to him; and he heard how the noise of justice multiplied in the cathedral — and he heard that there were workmen about now, for they were laughing. He stood, looking this way and that for a moment. Then he hastened down the yard and stood, holding money, in the open door.
Goody Pangall was half kneeling before the dull fire, where the black pot still swung slowly in little circles on its chain. Her weight was on her right hip and hands, and her legs were bent up beneath her. The light through the door gleamed from her naked shoulders, and her head was dropped, in a cascade of red, torn hair. She was gasping and sobbing and there was a kind of surging in her whole body. His long shadow fell across her. She looked, saw, and screamed. He put out a hand to stop her, but suddenly she stopped herself, seemed to gather herself, squatting round on her hams, and looking inward. She jerked up her legs, jerked them up under her skirt. She grabbed her belly with both hands and screamed again; but this scream was not like the first. It was short and sharp, like the cruel blade of a knife. And then she screamed just so, again and again.
The money fell from his hands. He turned and ran shouting up the yard into the south transept.
‘Get the women here quickly! For the love of God! Oh my dear soul! A midwife!’
The workmen at the crossways started to run round and argue and shout. Jocelin ran back into the yard where the knife was still stabbing. He fell on his knees, praying incoherently have mercy, have mercy, I didn’t know it was to be this, not this oh anything only stop the stabbing, the unendurable — but feet were passing him, there were shoutings and more argument. He got up and ran to the door of the cottage, to help, to do something, anything, have mercy. The workmen were holding up white, thin legs in the air, there was a white belly jerking and screaming under them, and there was blood over the money on the floor so that the world spun. When he came to himself he had to take part in a hideous ceremony of baptism; and then the women came, and father Anselm with oil and the Host which he thrust into the white, collapsed face. So Jocelin went away along the yard from buttress to buttress, leaning and clinging to the stone, a reed shaken in the wind. He found his way to the choir and knelt to pray for her, but the hair and the blood blinded the eyes of his mind. It was when she saw me, he thought. I was the church in her mind, I was the accuser and she fled from me. Oh Lord preserve her and I’ll give what you leave me of my life to bring her peace — only stop the noise and the blood, and the stones singing in my head. It was more than a year ago I saw them and the tent was round them and the tent expanded wherever they went, and I consented under your eye. More than a year ago I —
He knelt there, seeing nothing but the woman in her storm. Now and then he shook himself and groaned. Now and then he spoke words.
‘I was a protected man. I never came up against beldame.’
Then he forgot his knees, his hunger, forgot everything in a tumult of glimpses that presented themselves to him as if they were connected, though they had neither order nor logic. There was the arranged marriage and the swallow’s nest. There was hair and blood, and a lame man with a broom limping through the crossways. He made no sense of these things, but endured them with moanings and shudderings. Yet like a birth itself, words came, that seemed to fit the totality of his life, his sins, and his forced cruelty, and above all the dreadful glow of his dedicated will. They were words that the choir boys sang sometimes at Easter, quaint words; but now the only words that meant anything.
This have I done for my true love.
Late that evening, while he still crouched and shuddered, father Adam felt his way along the darkening stalls, and told him that Goody Pangall was dead.
Chapter Eight
So they put her body away in the raw earth and he wandered without seeing much. He wandered without saying much to anyone but himself, or at least to some nameless and invisible attendant. He would find himself walking down the south aisle one fist clenched by his chest; and then he would remember that he had been saying something, over and over again. Even when he could remember as he sometimes did — or even when he heard himself in the middle of a word — it would be a word that made no sense. He would stand, looking round his nose, head up, fists clenched. He would make positive efforts to control himself and find out what was the matter with him. Then he would be aware of a feeling rising in him, coming up towards the chest like a level of dark water. Often, his angel stood at his back; and this exhausted him, for the angel was a great weight of glory to bear, and bent his spine. Moreover, after a visit by the angel — as if to keep him in his humility — Satan was given leave to torment him, seizing him by the loins, so that it became indeed an unruly member.
Then again, he would find himself repeating one word endlessl
As far as some people were concerned, his eye had acquired a new facility. (Pain did it, pain did it, pain did it.) He saw with dreadful clarity of vision how the master builder had gone back to Rachel; or more correctly, was now seen by everybody to be her property again. (She is a good woman. She is a good woman. She is a good woman. Tap, tap, tap.) The two of them no longer flashed a quarrel at each other. They kept together, but they no longer revolved round each other. Roger Mason would stand watching his work, shoulders slightly bent, concentrating on whatever was to hand, and sullen. She would stand behind him and slightly to one side, not watching the work, but him. And watching them both with his new eyes, he saw the iron collar round Roger Mason’s neck, and could follow the slack chain back from it to her right hand. If Roger climbed, she would stand there below, the chain in her hand, waiting to lock it on again.
Then he would have a feverish thought.
‘Now, if I told him to build a thousand feet high, he would do it. I’ve got what I wanted.’
(No, no, no, no, no, no, hand pressing and relaxing, pressing and relaxing on the edge of a tomb.)
Once, his feet took him without his volition into Pangall’s kingdom, where the door of her slumped cottage stood ajar. (God, God, God, pulling and twisting and tearing at the high stalks of weed.) So he hurried his feet back into the church, and went widdershins to the Lady Chapel. His mouth said the accustomed words but he saw, no, no, no, no, no, the white body and irretrievable blood. Then he thought of Anselm, but knew he could not explain these things profitably to that noble, empty head. (I must change my confessor, I must change my confessor, I must change my confessor.) But before he had done thinking that, he had forgotten what he said, because she was back again, with her tormented body and the terrible christening.
Then he let out his breath, looked closely at the grain of the wood before him, and spoke aloud, but humbly.
‘I’m not very intelligent.’
As if his angel had whispered to him, there was help at hand.
‘Think of her as she was before!’
And immediately he thought gladly of the girl coming from market with her basket and clumsy gentleness; and this stood him up and hurried him away laughing, so that he almost missed the chancellor. So he had to stand, nodding and smiling while the man talked. But his mind had gone back five happy years to the arranged marriage and while he was remembering it the chancellor disappeared. (Such a suitable, such an inevitable marriage, both fathers faithful servants of the church with their hands in their proper station.)
But I didn’t laugh — did I?
(No, no, no, no, no, no, no, hand pressing and pressing and pressing —)
Hurry into the crossways for the major work, the essential complex, the reason, the burden laid; and Rachel, older, not so voluble, looking him in the eye, daring him to think ill of her — but who could? In the guild of married women she is a heroine, yes indeed, I must believe it, since she laboured and got back her man. But the pillars were singing again, and he forgot her as he listened, understanding how the fear had come with the singing, and driven the diminished congregations from the Lady Chapel.
(They are the little ones, the little ones, little ones —)
So he spoke aloud again.
‘There are the great ones; the builders!’
As if in answer to him, a man came swinging down from the work. He carried his tools in a bag, and he was pulling his blue hood over his head. He passed Jocelin without a sign and hurried into the north transept.
‘Come back!’
The old wound in the north transept had become a door, and it slammed shut. Who came back was the precentor, claiming a moment of conversation with such deadly calm it was clear he was furiously angry. But what with the dead woman, the present impossibility of prayer, and the defection of a workman, Jocelin could only put his hands to his ears and rock himself.
‘It’s necessary. It’s an overriding necessity that I should abandon everything else to stay with these men. They have no faith and they need me. Divide responsibility for all else among you. I shall be here, every moment, in the new building.’
He peered up to where the tower started and never noticed when the precentor went away. He hurried to the master builder’s side.
‘Now you shall have me always with you.’
Roger Mason looked at him over the iron collar out of dull eyes.
‘Good, My Lord Dean. Oh very good.’
Jocelin remembered the precentor and cried after him.
‘You heard that, my Lord?’
And the pillars continued to sing. He girded himself and climbed up and up into the tower. Where he found men, he spoke to them cheerfully and laughed, so that they laughed back, somewhat uncertainly. They spoke to him of the long rope and how it was haunted, so that in the end, he examined it himself. It was haunted indeed. It fell down through the tower, through the wide louvre left above the crossways, and the end lay on the pavement like a dead snake. He watched the timbers of the octagons go up by this rope for reassembly. He heard the men at ground level faintly answering the halloos from above, and then the load slid up the air with not another word said. At some point in the ascent, no matter how carefully the men hauled, the rope would start to circle and snake, rubbing the sides of the louvre, so that to haul the burden through was a matter of exact judgement, lest it should strike and smash stone.
He saw Roger Mason come climbing up to the base of the tower; heard Rachel below him shouting instructions from her maximum height. This made him remember the swallow’s nest so that he climbed breathlessly above where it had been. He spoke aloud to his angel.
‘She never came this high.’
But the workmen heard, misunderstood him and laughed.
‘No. This high, he’s free of her.’
Then Jehan looked down at the climbing master builder and made the workmen snigger like the boys of the songschool.
‘One day, she’ll go with him even into the privy.’
That was the day that Jocelin made another discovery; Roger Mason had taken to drink. After that he watched him closely and found he was not so much in drink as soaked with it. His breath was visible, almost. He nipped here and there on the way up, or standing on a ladder, or squatting in the lee of the rising cone that was the skin of the spire. When he understood this, Jocelin had a moment of panic, like a passenger in a ship with a drunken master, but it passed. From that moment he took no account of anyone who habitually worked and lived at ground level.
The pillars continued to sing; and the news filtered through to Jocelin at this time that they were the only things that sang in the whole building. The services had moved out and were held indignantly in the bishop’s palace. Sometimes, when he hurried from his house to the building he would cross the path of a Person; but he never had any trouble. The Person would do nothing but watch him stonily out of sight. Even when Father Adam told him that the Nail and the Visitor was coming he only said, vaguely — ‘Visitor?’ — and climbed out of sight.
His presence in the tower did the master builder no good. There was a steady inevitability about his drinking now, that was like a process in nature. Sometimes he would be sullen, cursing filthily to get a job done. When Jocelin was near, he would blaspheme in such terms as drove the white body out of Jocelin’s head. Then he would go and sit in a corner with his hands over his ears to shut out the cur
‘She’s dead. Dead!’
Sometimes by contrast, Roger would be falsely and sillily jovial, and try to force drink on anyone near. But most of the time he was just painful and slow, going heavily on the ladders; and when work was finished for the day he would lower himself to where Rachel locked his collar on and led him away. Then Jocelin would nod to himself, and say wisely:
‘He doesn’t care if he lives or dies.’
All the same, when she haunted him next day and he bound himself to Roger to be rid of her, he found he had misjudged him. Roger must care whether he lived or died otherwise the fear would not have laid so obvious a hand on him. There was no clear way of explaining why the fear was so obvious in the master builder. Jocelin saw it in the same way as he had seen the tent and the chain; and he saw that the fear was not a rational one, like the fear of a healthy animal. It was a poisoned fear like Roger’s old fear of heights. Now it set him gripping and looking close, and enduring the heights because he had to. He doesn’t mind if he dies, thought Jocelin, indeed, he would like to die; but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep; but not at the price of falling to it. That’s another reason why he goes nip-nipping from one level to another, a nip here, a nip there, with hot, stinking breath.
Thus there were a few men working at the base of the spire, one, a drunk; one, keeping his eyes averted from ground level where the golden maze of her feet was spread below him; the others, sane, more or less. There was also a mad, wooden floor at the top of the tower; and because this was a madness which might be understood, it drew Jocelin, who had seen none like it in the shed by the north transept. It was something to attend to, drawing out the mind. The octagon that lay on the floor was interrupted by grooves at even spaces, and each groove had a wedge in it. The men had assembled a second octagon above it, which rested on the wedges; and there was a cable strong enough to hold a ship, which went right round the lower octagon and bound the wedges in. When he asked Roger what this was for, he got nothing but a mouthful of curses, so he went back to a corner and brooded on his own affairs. Then one evening when Roger had gone grumbling down the ladders, Jocelin drew Jehan aside and pointed to the wedges.