He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head.  God the Father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight through painted glass, a glory that moved with his movements to consume and exalt Abraham and Isaac and then God again.  The tears of laughter in his eyes made additional spokes and wheels and rainbows.

Chin up, hands holding the model spire before him, eyes half closed; joy —

"I've waited half my life for this day!"

Opposite him, the other side of the model of the cathedral on its trestle table stood the chancellor, his face dark with shadow, over ancient pallor.

"I don't know, my Lord Dean.  I don't know."

He peered across at the model of the spire, where Jocelin held it so firmly in both hands.  His voice was bat-thin, and wandered vaguely into the large, high air of the chapter house.

"But if you consider that this small piece of wood — how long is it?"

"Eighteen inches, my Lord Chancellor."

"Eighteen inches.  Yes.  Well.  It represents, does it not, a construction of wood and stone and metal —"

"Four hundred feet high."

The chancellor moved out into sunlight, hands up to his chest, and peered round him.  He looked up at the roof.  Jocelin looked sideways at him, loving him.

"The foundations.  I know.  But God will provide."

The chancellor had found what he was looking for, a memory.

"Ah yes."

Then, in ancient busyness, he crept away over the pavement to the door and through it.  He left a message, in the air behind him.

"Mattins.  Of course."

Jocelin stood still, and shot an arrow of love after him.  My place, my house, my people.  He will come out of the vestry at the tail of the procession and turn left as he has always done; then he will remember and turn right to the Lady Chapel!  So Jocelin laughed again, chin lifted, in holy mirth.  I know them all, know what they are doing and will do, know what they have done.  All these years I have gone on, put the place on me like a coat.

He stopped laughing and wiped his eyes.  He took the white spire and jammed it firmly in the square hole cut in the old model of the cathedral.

"There!"

The model was like a man lying on his back.  The nave was his legs placed together, the transepts on either side were his arms outspread.  The choir was his body; and the Lady Chapel where now the services would be held, was his head.  And now also, springing, projecting, bursting, erupting from the heart of the building, there was its crown and majesty, the new spire.  They don't know, he thought, they can't know until I tell them of my vision!  And laughing again for joy, he went out of the chapter house to where the sun piled into the open square of the cloisters.  And I must remember that the spire isn't everything!  I must do, as far as possible, exactly what I have always done.

So he went round the cloisters, lifting curtain after curtain, until he came to the side door into the West End of the cathedral.  He lifted the latch carefully so as not to make a noise.  He bowed his head as he passed through, and said as he always did interiorly, "Lift up your heads, o ye Gates!"  But even as he stepped inside, he knew that his caution was unnecessary, since there was a whole confusion of noise in the cathedral already.  Mattins, diminished, its sounds so small they might be held in one hand, was nonetheless audible from the Lady Chapel at the other end of the cathedral, beyond the wood and canvas screen.  There was a nearer sound that told — though the components were so mixed by echo as to be part of each other — that men were digging in earth and stone.  They were talking, ordering, shouting sometimes, dragging wood across pavement, wheeling and dropping loads, then throwing them roughly into place, so that the total noise would have been formless as the noises of the market place, had not the echoing spaces made it chase round and round so that it caught up with itself and the shrill choir, and sang endlessly on one note.  The noises were so new, that he hurried to the center line of the cathedral in the shadow of the great west door, genuflected to the hidden High Altar; and then stood, looking.

He blinked for a moment.  There had been sun before, but not like this.  The most seeming solid thing in the nave, was not the barricade of wood and canvas that cut the cathedral in two, at the choir steps, was not the two arcades of the nave, nor the chantries and painted tomb slabs between them.  The most solid thing was the light.  It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle, so that they exploded with color, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation, to hit the bottom yard of the pillars on the north side of the nave.  Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension.  He blinked at them again, seeing, near at hand, how the individual grains of dust turned over each other, or bounced all together, like mayfly in a breath of wind.  He saw how further away they drifted cloudily, coiled, or hung in a moment of pause, becoming, in the most distant rods and trunks, nothing but color, honey-color slashed across the body of the cathedral.  Where the south transept lighted the crossways from a hundred and fifty foot of grisaille, the honey thickened in a pillar that lifted straight as Abel's from the men working with crows at the pavement.

He shook his head in rueful wonder at the solid sunlight.  If it were not for that Abel's pillar, he thought, I would take the important level of light to be a true dimension, and so believe that my stone ship lay aground on her side; and he smiled a little, to think how the mind touches all things with law, yet deceives itself as easily as a child.  Facing that barricade of wood and canvas at the other end of the nave, now that the candles have gone from the side altars, I could think this was some sort of pagan temple; and those two men posed so centrally in the sundust with their crows (and what a quarry noise and echo as they lever up the slab and let it fall back) the priests of some outlandish rite — Forgive me.

In this house for a hundred and fifty years, we have woven a rich fabric of constant praise.  Things shall be as they were; only better, richer, the pattern of worship complete at last.  I must go to pray.

And then he was aware that lie would not go to pray yet, even on this great day of joy.  And he laughed aloud for pure joy, knowing why he would not go, knowing as of old, the daily pattern; knowing who was hunting, who preaching, who deputizing for whom, knowing the security of the stone ship, the security other crew.

As if the knowing was cue for entry in an interlude he heard a latch lift in the north-west comer and a door creak open.  I shall see, as I see daily, my daughter in God.

Sure enough, as if his memory other had called her in, she came quickly through the door, so that he stood, waiting with his blessing tor her as always.  But Pangall's wife turned to her left, lifted a hand against the dust.  He had only time to glimpse the long, sweet face, before she had gone up the north aisle instead of coming straight across; so that he had to think his blessing after her.  He watched her with love and a little disappointment as she passed the unlighted altars of the north aisle, saw her pull back her hood so that the white wimple showed, got a glimpse of green dress as the grey cloak swung back.  She is entirely woman, he thought, loving her; and this foolish, this childish curiosity shows it.  But that is a matter for Pangall or Father Anselm.  And as if she recognized her own folly he saw how she circled the pit quickly, one hand up against the dust, crossed the nave and clashed the door of the Kingdom behind her.  He nodded soberly.

"I suppose, after all, it must make some difference to us."

After the clash of the door there was near-silence;

then in the silence, a new little noise, tap, tap, tap.  He turned to his left, and there the dumb man sat on the plinth of the north arcade in his leather apron, the lump of stone between his knees.

Tap.  Tap.  Tap.

"I think he made you choose me, Gilbert, because I stand still so much!"

The dumb man got quickly to his feet.  Jocelin smiled at him.

"Of all die people connected with this thing, I must seem to do least, don't you think?"

The dumb man smiled doglike, and hummed with his empty mouth.  Jocelin laughed back, delightedly, and nodded as if they shared a secret.

"Ask those four pillars at the crossways if they do nothing!"

The dumb man laughed and nodded back.

"Soon I shall go to pray.  You may follow me there, sit quietly, and work.  Bring a cloth with you for the chips and dust, or Pangall will sweep you out of the Lady Chapel like a leaf.  We mustn't fret Pangall."

Then there was another new noise.  He forgot the dumb man and listened, with his head turned to one side.  No, he said to himself, they can't have done it yet; it can't be true!  So he hurried away into the south aisle where he could peer slantwise across the cathedral into the north transept.  He stood by the comer of the Peverel chantry.  He whispered with joy too deep for the open air.

"It's true.  After all these years of work and striving.  Glory be."

For they were doing the unthinkable.  I have walked by there for years, he thought.  There was outside and inside, as clearly divided, as eternally and inevitably divided as yesterday and today.  The smooth stone of the Inside, patterned and traced with paint, the rough and lichened stuff of the outside; yesterday, or a Hail Mary ago, they were a quarter of a mile apart.  Yet now the air blows through them.  They touch, those separated sides.  I can see, as through a spyhole, right across the close to the comer of the chancellor's house, where perhaps Ivo is.

Courage.  Glory be.  It is a final beginning.  It was one thing to let him dig a pit there at the crossways like a grave for some notable.  This is different.  Now I lay a hand on the very body of my church.  Like a surgeon, I take my knife to the stomach drugged with poppy.

.     .     .     .     .

He had a tariff of knees.  He knew how they should be after this length of kneeling or that.  Now, when they had passed through a dull ache, to nothing, he knew that more than an hour had passed.  He was in himself again; and as the slow lights swam before his closed eyes lie felt the pain surge back in his shins and knees and thighs.  My prayer was never so simple; that's why it took so long.

And then, quite suddenly, he knew he was not alone.  It was not that he saw, or heard a presence.  He felt it, like the warmth of a fire at his back, powerful and gentle at the same time; and so immediate was the pressure of that personality, it might have been in his very spine.

He bent his head in terror, hardly breathing.  He allowed the presence to do what it would.  I am here, the presence seemed to say, do nothing, we are here, and all work together for good.

Then he dared to think again, in the warmth at his back.

It is my guardian angel.

I do Thy work; and Thou hast sent Thy messenger to comfort me.  As it was of old, in the desert.

With twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.

Joy, fire, joy.

Lord; I thank Thee that Thou hast kept me humble!

Once more, the windows were coming together.  The saint's life still burned in them with blue and red and green; but the spark and shatter of the sun had shifted.  He was back, looking at the familiar window over clasped hands; and the angel had left him.

Tap.  Tap.  Tap.

Scrape. 

Thou dost glorify the lives of Thy chosen ones, like the sun in a window.

He bore down on the desk and managed to break up the rigor of his knees.  He tottered a step or two before he could stand and walk erect.  He smoothed out his cassock with his right hand, and while he was doing this, he remembered the tap and scrape and looked towards the north wall, where the dumb man sat, his mouth hanging open.  There was a cloth on the pavement at his feet, and he scraped carefully at the lump of stone.  He stood up quickly when Jocelin's shadow fell on him.  He was a hefty young man and he held the carving easily in both hands by his stomach.  The joy and comfort and peace of the angel laid a favor on the young man's face as on all the world; so Jocelin felt a smile bend the seams of his own face as he looked round his nose at him.  He was a big young man too; could look at the dean on a level, eye to eye.  Jocelin looked him over, in the joy of the angel, still smiling, loving him, the brown face and neck, the chest where the laced leather parted to show a covert of black hair, the curly head, the black eyes under their black eyebrows, the brown arms sweated at the armpits through the jerkin, the legs crossbound, rough shoes white with dust.

"I was still enough for you today, I think!"

The young man nodded eagerly again and again, and made a humming noise in his throat.  Jocelin went on smiling into the eager, doglike eyes.  Where I led he would follow.  If only he were the master builder!  Perhaps one day —

"Show me, my son."

The young man shifted a hand under the stone and held it in profile by his chest.  Jocelin lifted his head and laughed down at it.

"Oh no, no no!  I'm not as beaky as that!  Not half as beaky!"

Then the profile caught his attention again and he fell silent.  Nose, like an eagle's beak.  Mouth open wide, lined cheeks, hollow deep under the cheekbone, eyes deep in their hollows; lie put up a hand to the comer of his mouth and pulled at the parallel ridges of flesh and skin.  He opened his mouth to feel how that action stretched them, striking his teeth together three times as he did so.

"And no, my son.  I haven't as much hair as that either!"

The young man shot out his free arm sideways, brought it in again, and made the palm sweep through the air in a swallow flight.

"A bird?  What bird?  An eagle, perhaps?  You are thinking of the Holy Spirit?"

Arm out again, sweeping.

"Oh I see!  You want to get an impression of speed!"

Young man laughing all over his face, nearly dropping the stone but catching it again, communion over the stone as with an angel, joy —

Then silence, both looking at the stone.

Rushing on with the angels, the infinite speed that is stillness, hair blown, torn back, straightened with the wind of the spirit, mouth open, not for uttering rainwater, but hosannas and hallelujahs.

Presently Jocelin lifted his head, and smiled ruefully.

"Don't you think you might strain my humility, by making an angel of me?"

Humming in the throat, headshake, doglike, eager eyes.

"So this is how I shall be built in, two hundred feet up, on every side of the tower, mouth open, proclaiming day and night till doomsday?  Let me see the face."

The young man stood obediently, with the full face turned towards him.  For a long time then, they were both still and silent, while Jocelin looked at the gaunt, lifted cheekbones, the open mouth, the nostrils strained wide as if they were giving lift to the beak, like a pair of wings, the wide, blind eyes.

It is true.  At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

"How do you know so much?"

But the young man looked back blank as the stone.  Jocelin laughed a little again and patted the brown cheek then tweaked it.

"Your hands know, perhaps, my son.  There's a kind of wisdom in them.  That was why the Almighty tied your tongue."

Humming in the throat.

"Go now.  You can work at me again tomorrow."

Jocelin turned away and stopped suddenly.

"Father Adam!"

He hurried across the Lady Chapel to where Adam Chaplain stood in the shadows under the south windows.

"Have you waited all this time?*

The little man stood patiently, the letter held in his hands like a tray.  His colorless voice scratched itself into the air.

"I am under obedience, my Lord."

"I am to blame, Father."

But even as he said it, other things pushed the contrition out of his head.  He turned and walked away towards the north ambulatory, hearing the click of nailed sandals behind him.

"Father Adam.  Did you see — see anything behind me there, as I knelt?"

Creak of a mouse voice.

"No, my Lord,"

"If you had, of course, I should have commanded your silence."

He stopped in the ambulatory.  There were shafts and trunks of sunlight overhead; but the wall between the choir and the wide passage round it, kept the pavement where they stood, in shadow.  He heard the noises of breaking stone from the crossways, and watched the dust that danced even here beyond the wooden screen, if more slowly.  This drew his eyes upward, to the high vaulting, and he stepped back to see it more clearly.  He felt soft toes under his shod heel.

"Father Adam!"

But the little man said nothing, did nothing.  He stood, still holding the letter, and there was not even a change of expression in his face; and this might be, thought Jocelin, because he has no face at all.  He is the same all round like the top of a clothespeg.  He spoke, laughing down at the baldness with its fringe of nondescript hair.

"I ask your pardon.  Father Adam.  One forgets you are there so easily!"  And then, laughing aloud in joy and love — "I shall call you Father Anonymous!"

The chaplain still said nothing.

"And now.  About this foolish letter."

On the other side of the church, the choir had gathered for the next service.  He heard them begin the processional chant.  They were moving; you could hear the children's voices first most clearly; then these faded, to be replaced by the low voices of the Vicars Choral.  Presently these faded too, and from the Lady Chapel, a single voice sang, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah; and chased itself in echoes round the acreage of the vault.

"Tell me Father.  Everyone knows, that as the world has these things, she is my aunt?"

"Yes, my Lord."

"One must be charitable, as always — even to such as she is; or has been."

Still silence.  With twain he covered Ins feet.  Thy angel is my security.  I can bear anything now.

"What do they say?"

"It is tavern talk, my Lord."

"Tell me, then."

"They say that if it had not been for her wealth, you would never build the spire."

"That's true.  What else?"

"They say that even if your sins are as scarlet, money can buy you a grave next to the High Altar."

"Do they so?"

The letter was still there, like a white tray.  A faint perfume still clung round it and pushed out at the nostrils, so that the ambulatory, dark beneath its north windows, seemed invaded by a breath of artificial spring.  For all the new beginning and the angel, his irritation came back.

"It stinks!"

The wah-wah-wah from the Lady Chapel died away.

"Read it out!"

"'To my nephew and —'"

"Louder."

(And from the Lady Chapel, a single voice, slow, defeating the echo.  I believe in one God.)

"'— father in God Jocelin, Dean of the cathedral church of the Virgin Mary.'"

(And from the Lady Chapel, voices young and old chanting together.  Of all things visible and invisible.)

"'This letter is written for me by Master Godfrey, since I suppose among your church business and building matters you neglected the ones he has written for me during these last three years.  Well, dear nephew, here I am again, bringing up the old question.  Can you not spare a word for me?  It was a different and a much quicker answer you gave when the question was one of money.  Let us be frank.  I know and the world knows and you know, what my life has been.  But all that ended with his death — murder, martyrdom, I should say.  The rest is penance before my Maker, who I hope will vouchsafe his unworthy handmaid many more years of living death to repent in.'"

(Suffered under Pontius Pilate.)

"'I know you are silent because you condemn my traffic with an earthly king.  But is it not said render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's?  I have done that at least, to the best of my power.  I was to lie in Winchester, among the kings, I had his word for it, but they have turned me away, though the time will soon come when dead kings are all I am fit to lie among.'"

(To judge the quick and the dead.)

"'Master Godfrey wishes to strike out that last sentence, but I say he must leave it in.  Are all the bones in your church so sanctified?  You may say I have small prospect of heaven, but my hope is better.  There is a place, or there was before your day, on the south side of the choir, where the sun comes in, between some old bishop and the Provost Chantry.  I think the High Altar could see me there and perhaps be more absent-minded than you about those faults I still find it so difficult entirely to repent of.'"

(The forgiveness of sins and the life everlasting.)

"'What is it?  More money?  Do you want two spires rather than one?  Well, you may as well know that I intend to divide my fortune, he was generous in that as in all else, between you and the poor, setting aside sufficient for my tomb, a mass priest, a gift for the cathedral in your dear mother's name, once we were very close —'"

He reached out and folded the letter together in the chaplain's hands.

"We could do well enough without women, Father Anonymous.  What do you think?"

"They have been called dangerous and incomprehensible, my Lord."

(Amen.)

"And the answer, my Lord?"

But Jocelin was remembering the new beginning, remembering the angel, and the invisible lines of the spire that even now for those who knew, Had sketched themselves in the sunny sky over the crossways.

"Answer?" he said, laughing.  "What need is there to change a decision?  We shall make no answer."

He came out of the ambulatory through the temporary wooden door and stood blinking for a moment in the sudden light of the crossways.  The gap in the wall of the north transept was big enough for a wagon; and some of the master builder's army were busy tidying the edges.  The dust was thicker than ever, like yellow smoke, so that he coughed, and his eyes ran.  The two men breaking up the pavement were working out of sight to their thighs, and the dust was so thick in that part of the air, he thought their faces were monstrously deformed, until he saw that they had drawn cloths over their mouths; and these cloths were caked with dust and sweat.  A hodman stood waiting by the pit, and when he had a hodful he walked away through the north transept and another took his place.  As the hodman came from more dust to less, with the hod over his shoulder, he began a labored singing.  Jocelin understood these words, and after the first few, he clapped his hands over his ears and opened his mouth in the dust to rebuke the singer, who paid no attention, but marched singing through the gap in the wall.  Jocelin hurried into the nave and peered round him.  He went poking and peering round pillars but found no one.  He went purposefully through the south transept; he clashed the great cloister door, he wrenched back the curtain.  But there was no Principal Person in the scriptorium; only a deacon who compared two manuscripts, his nose three inches from the page.

"Where is the Sacrist?"

The young man leapt to his feet, saving a book as he did so.

"My Lord, he came through —"

Jocelin snatched the next curtain aside; but there was no one in the school room either.  The benches were in disorder, one lying on its side.  He went to the arcade of the cloister, leaned with both hands on the sill among the bone counters and game board scratched in the stone and stuck his head through.  The Sacrist was sitting on a bench taken from the school room.  He sat in the sun, his back against a pillar of the arcade, hands folded in his lap.

"Father Anselm!"

An early fly struck Father Anselm on the nose and bounced away.  He opened his eyes without focusing, then he shut them again.

"My Lord Sacrist!"

Jocelin hurried through the next curtain, entered the central square, stood by Father Anselm, put by his irritation, and spoke in a normal, conversational voice.

"The nave is empty.  No one is standing guard."

Though he seemed asleep, Father Anselm was trembling very slightly.  He opened his eyes but looked away.

"The dust, my lord.  You know how it is with this poor chest of mine."

"There was no need for you to sit there.  You have authority!"

Anselm coughed delicately, tuh, tuh, tuh.

"How can I ask others to do what I can't do myself?

And after a day or two there will be less dust.  The master builder told me so."

"So meanwhile they can sing any filthy song they like?"

Despite his care, his determination, Jocelin's voice rose, and his right fist clenched.  Deliberately he unclenched it, then flexed the fingers as if the gesture had meant nothing.  But the Sacrist had seen, even though he now looked at the great cedar.  He was still shaking, but his voice was calm.

"When you consider, my Lord Dean, to what a degree we must accept a disruption of our normal life, a song — forgive me — however worldly, seems an offence venial enough.  After all, we have twelve altars in the side aisles of the nave.  Because of this, this new building of ours, no candles burn there.  And — forgive me again — but since these men, these strange creatures from every end of the world, seem willing to resort to violence at the slightest provocation, it might be wiser to let them sing."

Jocelin opened his mouth and shut it silently.  A picture of the grave deliberations in Chapter, flashed through his mind; but the Sacrist had turned from the cedar, and was looking straight at him, head on one side.

"Yes indeed, my lord Dean.  Let them sing for a day or two, at least until the dust settles."

Jocelin got his breath back.

"But we decided in Chapter!"

"I was given a certain latitude."

"They defile the church."

The Sacrist became motionless as the stones behind him.  He no longer shook.

"At least they don't destroy it."

Jocelin cried out.

"What d'you mean?"

The Sacrist's hands were still, as though he had forgotten how lie had spread them.

"I, My Lord?  Only what I said."

Very carefully, the Sacrist brought in his hands and clasped them in his lap.

"You mustn't misunderstand me.  It's conceivable that these ignorant men dirty the air with their words, just as they fill it with dust and stink.  But they don't destroy the air.  They don't destroy the building round it."

"And I do!"

But the Sacrist was on guard.

"Who was talking about you, my Lord?"

"Ever since you voted against the spire in Chapter —"

The irritation in his throat stopped him.  Anselm smiled slightly.

"A lamentable lack of faith, my Lord.  I was overruled, and agree now, that we must all put our shoulders to the wheel."

There was a hint of quotation round the wheel and the shoulder, so that the irritation in Jocelin's throat became anger.

"A lamentable lack of faith indeed!"

The Sacrist's smile was not only secure, but kind.

"We don't all feel ourselves so uniquely chosen, my Lord."

"Do you think I don't see an accusation; however cautiously you phrase it?"

"I have said what I have said."

"Sitting down."

Some odd combination of causes was bringing Jocelin's blood to a rage.  When he spoke again, there was a quick vibration in his voice.

"I believe our founder's statute is still valid."

Now the Sacrist was very still.  His delicate face was perhaps a shade pinker.  He put his feet back under him, and stood up slowly.

"My Lord."

"The crossways still lack an overseer."

The Sacrist said nothing.  He clasped his hands, gave the merest inclination of his head, and turned to walk towards the cloister door.  Suddenly Jocelin put out his hand.

"Anselm!"

The Sacrist stopped, turned, waited.

"Anselm, I didn't mean — You are the one friend I have left from the old days.  Where have we come to?"

No answer.

"And you know I didn't mean you to leave like this.  Forgive me."

No smile under the eyes in the pink face.

"Of course."

"There are a dozen people you could appoint.  That boy in there, in the scriptorium.  Surely Chrysostom can wait?  Think how long he's been waiting!"

But the Sacrist was secure again, and shaking his head.

"I wouldn't ask anyone else to do it today.  The dust, you know."

Then they were both silent.

What am I to do?  It is a small vexation and it will pass.  But I am learning.

"Your command still stands, my Lord?"

Jocelin turned on his heel and looked up.  He saw the arcade of the cloister and its battlements, inspected above them the buttresses and high windows of the south wall; followed up the angle between the wall and the transept to where the crossways were roofed briefly and squarely.  The sunlight soaked the stone without warming it; and above the cliffs of stone, the sky was rinsed clear by a rainy night.  It held no clouds, but a promise of wind.  He let his eye rest on the invisible geometric lines that sketched themselves automatically above the battlements of the crossways, up there, where a bird wheeled, and drew to a point, four hundred feet up in the sky.

Let it be so.  Cost what you like.

He looked back at the Sacrist, and surprised on his face an ambiguity of kindness and amused malice.  I am your friend, said the smile, your confessor and your friend in particular.  It said also, and in no way that could be answered; the invisible thing up there is Jocelin's Folly, which will fall, and in its fall, bury and destroy the church.

"Well, my Lord ?"

Jocelin kept his voice low.

"Yes.  Go, go."

So the Sacrist clasped his hands and inclined his head.  It was the perfect act of obedience; and it was more, because of the frayed thread that bound them.  He paused at the door into the south transept; and Jocelin heard even in the delicate lifting of the latch and the careful pressure that grated back the door, an indefinable rebuke that was a sort of insolence, so that the thread snapped.  Well, he thought, it is the end.  Then he remembered how thick and long the thread had been, a rope binding them heart to heart, and his own was sore at the thought of it.  And he knew that when he recovered from his irritation, he would grieve, remembering the cloister by the sea, the flashing water, the sun and sand.

"It's been coming for a long time."

I didn't know how much you would cost up there, the four hundred feet of you.  I thought you would cost no more than money.  But still, cost what you like.

.     .     .     .     .

Then Rachel had broken away from the rest and was hurrying across the pavement to them, talking and gesticulating before she was properly within reach — "Didn't expect their foundations to be dug up before Doomsday and why not, after all they must have been under contract like my man here —" talking and nodding, body shaken with vehemence, skirt not held up but clutched up until one saw too much of a clumsy ankle and foot — "Birchwood under the rubble was what you expected, wasn't it Roger?  He always knows, my Lord" — My Lord as if she were not a woman but a canon with a valid vote in chapter!  Her whole body a part of speech, black eyes popping, not like a decent, reticent English-woman (not like silent Goody Pangall, my dear daughter-in-God) but even pretending to knowledge, building knowledge, even contradicting a man!  Rachel, dark haired, dark eyed and energetic, with her constant flow, she, earth's most powerful argument for celibacy if one was wanted — "Forgive me my Lord but I must say it, I know a little about these things; I remember what Roger's old master said.  "Child —" he called me child, you see because Roger was his assistant then — "Child, a spire goes down as far as it goes up —" or was it "Up as far as it goes down?"  But what he meant you see was —" and then she leaned her head on one side, smiling mysteriously, one finger sticking in Jocelin's face "— was that there has to be as much weight under a building as there is over it.  So if you are going up four hundred feet you will have to go down four hundred feet.  Isn't that so Roger?  Roger?"  On and on she went, released from the necessary, the penitential silence of the service, her body and her dark face shaken by the words as a pipe is shaken by the water that jets out of it.  Yet there was a curious thing about Roger and Rachel Mason.  Not only were they inseparable, but alike in appearance; more like brother and sister than man and wife, dark, sturdy, redlipped.  They were islanded, and their life was a pattern of its own.  Roger never struck her, and their frequent quarrels were like flares, blown out presently by some wind, to leave the scene just as it had been before.  They revolved round each other in a way which people found incomprehensible.  It was impossible to understand how they put up with each other; though certain techniques of living could be observed in them.  For example, Roger Mason had evolved a method of dealing with Rachel which often made farce of a situation, as it did now.  He ignored her, merely raising his voice, so that he could be heard and understood.  This never seemed to irritate him; but it was certain to irritate the third in the party, especially when the third was a high dignitary of the church.

"— a much more complicated problem than you think."

And Rachel, face shaken now, so the master builder's words were obscured again.  Jocelin raised his own voice, consenting to the farce, and angered by it.

"We were talking of Pangall!"

"Such a sweet thing, and such a pity she has no children but then neither have I, my Lord, we must bear this cross!"

"— will build as high as I can —"

"— as high as you dare —"

Suddenly Jocelin heard his voice in clear, with nothing to fight against.  Rachel had turned away.  Her torrent was falling into the pit which swallowed it.

"And what is the good of a small dare, Roger?  My dares are big ones!"

"Well?"

"Four hundred feet of dare!"

"I haven't convinced you then."

Jocelin smiled at him, but nodded meaningly.

"Start to build.  That's all I ask."

They looked at each other, each determined, neither saying more, but aware that nothing had been settled, and this was only a truce.  I will urge him up stone by stone, if I have to, thought Jocelin.  He has no vision.  He is blind.  Let him think he can cut off a tower where he likes — but then Rachel turned back from the pit and they heard how little light there was in it now and how tired the men were, you can drive a willing horse just so far, they ought to knock off.  So Jocelin turned away, furious with himself, and with the foolish woman, and with the man who was more easily able to ignore her than control her.  He saw, with surprise, how the sun now came through the west windows; and with the sight he felt a pang of hunger.  This made him angry too; and he was only slightly soothed to hear behind him the master builder bawl at Rachel.

"How can you be so stupid?"

Yet he knew that the roar was nothing, not even a rebuke, but perhaps something to keep off the bad luck, and that another five minutes would find them revolving round each other, laughing, or walking scandalously arm-in-arm; or muttering in some secret conversation that was no one else's business.  And she was a good woman, as these things go; in all the rumored and outrageous combinations of the sexes that were said to take place in New Street where the builders had set up camp, there was no scandal that touched either Rachel or the master builder.  He looked down the nave into the sunlight, and found himself irritated again.  the day began in joy, he thought; and great things have happened; there is a beginning, and there is my angel; and at the same time there is a diminution of joy, as if my angel were sent not only to strengthen and console me, but also as a warning.  He saw father Anselm far off, sitting nobly by the west door, and the stillness of the old man under his crown of silver hair touched him with sorrow as well as irritation.  He lifted his chin, and spoke to the preaching patriarchs in the clerestory.

"Let him sulk, if he wants to."

Behind him, he heard laughter going out of the north transept through the new gap in the wall.  Rachel was gone then; and he turned back for a moment to watch the master builder talking to the men by the pit.  He wondered for a moment whether he should return and apply more pressure.  I should not have gone to see him, he thought.  I should have called him before me and rebuked him for the fight at the gate.  What if the mayor demands a court?  I didn't say the half of what I meant to say.  It's that woman with her torrent, and her bold, shaken face.  There are some women who are stronger than gates and bars by their very ignorance.  I should rebuke her too for her presumption, teach her to know her place.  Next time I see her without him, I will speak to her gently, and explain what she should be.

"Lord, what instruments we have to use!"

He heard the clicking of nailed sandals in the nave and knew it was the clothespeg man.  He turned to watch.  Father Adam was walking at his usual pace, neither slow nor fast, but as though he never did any thing else, only went like this from one day to the next, delivering, taking away, waiting for instructions, impersonal, without animation or complaint.  Now he stood before his master, hands together, a doll a child might cut, the face too complex for an attempt, the arms, the hair painted on.  He stood between Jocelin and the long-delayed meal with more business in his hands.

"Couldn't you wait.  Father Adam?"

Father Anonymous.

Father Anonymous scratched an answer into the air with his useful voice.

"I thought you would wish to read it at once, my Lord."

Jocelin sighed, and answered him, tired, irritable, and strangely sapped of joy.

"Let me see it, then."

He turned to the east, held up the letter so that the sunlight fell on it.  As he read, his face cleared, went from irritation, to satisfaction; then to delight.

"You did well to show it to me!"

He fell down on his knees, crossed himself and gave thanks.  But the tide of joy was back, stood him on his feet, hurried him to where the master builder was talking to Jehan, his assistant, by the pit.  As he came near, the master builder looked away from Jehan and spoke to him.

"They've found no gravel yet.  And if the floods still rise we may have to wait for weeks before we can dig any deeper.  Perhaps for months."

Jocelin tapped the letter.

"Here's your answer, my son."

"That?"

"My Lord Bishop has remembered us.  Even though he kneels before the Holy Father at Rome, he remembers his distant sheep."

The master builder answered impatiently.

"You never understand what I say, do you?  I tell you, money can't build your spire for you.  Build it of gold and it would simply sink deeper."

Jocelin shook his head, laughing.

"Now I shall tell you, and then you can sleep easy.  He sent no money.  For what is money after all?  But far, far, oh infinitely more valuable —" a tide of emotion swept Jocelin up so that his voice rose with it.  He laid an arm across the master builder's shoulders and hugged him.  "We shall put this in the very topmost stone of the spire, and it will stand till the last day.  My Lord Bishop is sending us a Holy Nail."

He took his arm from the inscrutable master builder and looked down the nave into the sun.  He saw the white head of Father Anselm and knew at once that life was unendurable without the oil of healing.  He went, almost at a run, down the nave towards the old man, and he waved the letter in his hand.

"Father Anselm!"

This time, father Anselm got up and stood.  He did it slowly, bearing his martyrdom; and as if to complete the brave picture, he swallowed his three coughs so that they were only just audible.  His face was cold and blank.

"Father Anselm.  Friendship is a precious thing."

Still blank.  Buoyed up by his joy, Jocelin tried again.

"What have we done to it?"

"Is that a real question, my Lord, or a rhetorical one?"

Jocelin surrounded him with love.

"Would you like to read this letter?"

"Do you command me, my Lord?"

Jocelin laughed aloud.

"Anselm I Anselm!"

Stubbornly, the old man resisted his love, looked away towards the wood and canvas screen; coughed quietly but audibly, tuh, tuh, tuh.

"If it concerns the Chapter, my Lord, no doubt we shall all get to hear it in time."

"Anselm.  Here is a gift from me to you.  I release you from this duty.  I ought to have understood, that with all the opposition, and your health — There is no one, after all, engaged as I am to this business.  I shall take it into my hands.  You know that, and you know why, you of all people, my confessor, manager of my soul."

"Let me see this clearly, my Lord.  I am neither to be overseer, nor organize the overseers?"

"That's what I said."

Anselm never altered his face.  He kept his noble profile looking to the east, under the crown of white hair.  He stood, senatorial, august and secure.  The words fell.

"In writing?"

They fell.  They were not jewels or pearls, as befitted the saintly face.  They were pebbles.  There was no insult, nothing to grasp; for if the words had insolence in them, they were nevertheless correct and according to the statute.  When it is ordained that a matter shall be so decided between two of the four Principal Persons, let it be written — As if the statute hung there legibly in the air between them, Anselm clinched the matter by quoting from it.

"What has been written, if there is a change, let that also be written; and let the small bone seal be affixed in the presence of two Persons."

"I know."

Anselm spoke again, calmly and coldly.  His cough had gone.

"Is that all, my Lord?"

"That's all."

He heard the sacrist's steps going away up the nave, and he stood so, looking back over his left shoulder.  I must erase him, he thought.  I was deceived.  He drops nothing but pebbles out of that noble head of his.

He looked down at the bishop's letter.  It's like a pair of scales in the market, he thought.  Joy carries me up in one pan, and Anselm sinks in the other.  There is the Nail and my angel.  There is the chancellor and the master builder and his wife.

Suddenly he understood how the wings of his joy were clipped close, and anger heated him again.  Let them fall and vanish, so the work goes on!  And as he passed under the west window, the letter clutched in one hand to his chest, he was muttering fiercely over his lifted chin.

"Now I must change my confessor!"

That night, when he knelt by his bed to pray before sleeping, his angel returned and stood at Ins back in a cloud of warmth, to comfort him a little.

.     .     .     .     .

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 other.  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 other 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 paralyzed 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, he 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; particolored 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!"

.     .     .     .     .

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 Ills 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 lie 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.

.     .     .     .     .

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 realized 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 centered 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 tiling 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.

Then he was jerked up out of himself.  The dumb man stood by him, with no leather apron and no shaped stone in his hands, but humming with his empty mouth.  He even laid a hand on Jocelin to pull him; and ran away again, into a commotion at the crossways.

I must go to them, thought Jocelin, as he watched the dumb man vanish through the flashes in his head.

He spoke aloud.

"I eat too little, and the Lenten Fasts exhausted me.  Who am I that I should dare to mortify flesh necessary to the work?"

He heard shouting from the crossways, and the urgency of it got him on his feet.  He hurried down the ambulatory and stood, blinking in the light of the crossways.  The sunlight made haloes where his eyes looked out of his aching head, but he frowned at them with a fierce effort of will and they subsided.  He could not tell at first what the trouble was, because Rachel came circling and babbling and it cost him some more will to shut her out.  All the men of the army were in the crossways, the whole crowd of them.  The women, except Rachel, were grouped in the north transept.  Yet in the first few seconds of his entry he saw how more people joined those already there, whispered a little, then were still and tense as the others.  It was as if all the players were present at an interlude, standing still, and waiting for the drum to sound.  There was Goody Pangall, Pangall with his broom, Jehan, the dumb man, Roger Mason; it was as if they were clockfigures, frozen in attitudes of mechanical activity and waiting for the hour to strike.  They were an irregular circle, and the center of this circle was the open pit.  On tills side — and sick and fretful as Jocelin was, he recognized the cleverness of it — a sheet of metal had been set up on a trestle so that the sun was trapped and hurled straight down the pit.  Jehan and the master builder crouched on the other side, looking down.

Jocelin went quickly to the pit, with Rachel clacking by him; but as he readied it, the master builder lifted his head.

"Everybody get further off — go on!  Right into the transepts!"

Jocelin opened his mouth to speak; but Roger whispered fiercely at Rachel.

"You — get out of the light!  Right out of the church!"

Rachel went.  Roger Mason put his head to the edge of the hole again.  Jocelin knelt by him.

"What is it, my son?  Tell me!"

Roger Mason went on staring down the hole.

"Look at the bottom.  Keep still, and watch."

Jocelin leaned forward on his hands, and a weight of hot water seemed to run from his neck into the back of his head, so that he had trouble in not crying out.  He shut his eyes tightly and waited for the flashes of sickness and pain to go out of them.  By him, he heard Roger whisper.

"Look right at the bottom."

He opened his eyes again, and the reflected sunlight in the pit was easy to them.  It was peaceful, secluded.  He could see the different kinds of soil all the way down.  First there was stone, six inches of it, the slabs on which they knelt; then, as it were hanging from this lip, the sides became fragmented stone held together with accretions of lime.  Beneath that again was a foot or two of furry things that might be the crushed and frayed ends of brushwood.  Beneath that was dark earth, stuck everywhere with pebbles; and the bottom was a darker patch, with more pebbles.  There seemed little enough to look at, but the quiet light from the metal sheet was restful; and no one made any noise.

Then, as Jocelin looked, he saw a pebble drop with two clods of earth; and immediately a patch perhaps a yard square fell out of the side below him and struck the bottom with a soft thud.  The pebbles that fell with it lay shining dully in the reflected light, and settled themselves in their new bed.  But as he watched them and waited for them to settle, the hair rose on the nape of Ins neck; for they never settled completely.  He saw one stir, as with a sudden restlessness; and then he saw that they were all moving more or less, with a slow stirring, like the stirring of grubs.  the earth was moving under the grubs, urging them this way and that, like porridge coming to the boil in a pot; and the grubs were made to crawl by it, as dust will crawl on the head of a tapped drum.

Jocelin jerked out his hand and made a defensive sign at the bottom of the pit.  He glanced at Roger Mason, who was staring at the grubs, lips tight round his teeth, a yellow pallor shining through his skin which was not all reflection.

"What is it, Roger?  What is it?"

Some form of life; that which ought not to be seen or touched, the darkness under the earth, turning, seething, coming to the boil.

"What is it?  Tell me!"

But the master builder still strained down, eyes wide open.

Doomsday coming up; or the roof of hell down there.  Perhaps the damned stirring, or the noseless men turning over and thrusting up; or the living, pagan earth, unbound at last and waking, Dia Mater.  Jocelin found one hand coming up to his mouth; and all at once he was racked with spasms, and making the same sign over and over again.

There came a sharp scream from by the south west pillar.  Goody Pangall stood there, her basket still rolling at her feet.  From below the steps that led up to the wooden screen cutting on" the choir, there came an imperious smack; and flicking or flinching that way, Jocelin saw bits of stone skittering out like pieces of smashed ice on the ice of a pond.  One triangular piece the size of his palm slid to the edge of the pit and dropped in.  And with the piece of stone, came something else; the high ringing of unbearable, unbelievable tension.  It came from nowhere in particular, could not be placed, but sounded equally at the center of things and at the periphery; it was needles in either ear.  Another stone smacked down so that a leaping fragment clanged on the metal sheet.

All at once there was a tumult of human noises, shouts and curses and screams.  There was movement too, which as it began, became at once violent and uncontrolled.  There were many ways out of the crossways and no two people seemed to have the same idea about how to go.  As he got to his feet and backed hastily away from the pit, Jocelin saw hands and faces, feet, hair, cloth and leather — saw them momentarily without taking them in.  The metal screen went down with a crash.  He was jerked against a pillar and a mouth — but whose mouth?  — screamed near him.

"The earth's creeping!"

He put his hands to fend off and somewhere the master builder was shouting.

"Still!"

And marvelously all the noise died away so there was nothing left but the high, mad ringing of tension.  As it died, the master builder shouted again.

"Still!  "Still!"  I said!  Get stone, any stone — fill the pit!"

Then the noises broke out once more, but this time in a kind of chant.

"Fill the pit!  Fill the pit!  Fill the pit!"

Jocelin crouched against the pillar as the crowd swirled and shredded away.  Now I know what I must do, he thought, this is what I am for.  So as the edge of the crowd came back — two hands bore a head of Dean Jocelin and hurled it into the pit — he crept past the pillar and into the ambulatory.  He went, not into the Lady Chapel, but into the choir, and knelt in a stall as nearly under the key of the arch as he could get.  The singing of the stones pierced him, and he fought it with jaws and fists clenched.  His will began to burn fiercely and he thrust it into the four pillars, tamped it in with the pain of his neck and his head and his back, welcomed in some obscurity of feeling the wheels and flashes of light, and let them hurt his open eyes as much as they would.  His fists were before him on the stall but he never noticed them.  He felt confusedly and mutinously; It is a kind of prayer!  So he knelt, stiff, painful and enduring; and all the time, the singing of the stones operated on the inside of his head.  At last, when he understood nothing else at all, he knew that the whole weight of the building was resting on his back.  He passed, in this frozen attitude, through a point of no time and no sight.  It was only when he was puzzled by the two shapes in front of him, that he realized he had come back from somewhere; and looking round the flashes of light — but now they were glossier and swam rather than jerked — he saw the shapes were his two fists, still ground into the wood where he had put them.  Then he knew something was missing, and his mouth strained open in sudden fright, till he realized that the stones were no longer singing; and this was perhaps because they had done whatever work it was they had come to do in his head.  So he looked past his fists; and there was Roger Mason, standing, smiling a little, and waiting.

"Reverend Father."

Suddenly Jocelin was back in the world; but not entirely.  Too much had altered, too much been rearranged.  He moistened his lips, allowed his fists to unclench; yet there was that within him which he could not unclench.

"Well, Roger, my son?"

Roger Mason smiled even more broadly.

"I've been watching you, and waiting."

(And can you see how my will burns, Bullet Head?  I fought him, and he didn't win.)

"I'm always here for you when you need me."

"You?"

The master builder put his hands to the back of his head and moved it sideways as if he were freeing it from something.  That's what it is, thought Jocelin.  It's freed him.  He thinks it's freed him.  He can't see.  He doesn't know.  For the moment there's a kind of ease in him.

The master builder let his hands down and nodded thoughtfully, as if he conceded a point.

"Right, Father.  I've never denied your interest — even your enthusiasm.  You couldn't know of course.  But things have settled themselves, haven't they?  And I'm glad, in a way.  No.  Not in a way; in every way.  Things have come to a point."

"What point?"

Roger Mason laughed easily, in the dim choir, like a man at peace.

"It stands to reason.  Now we must stop building."

Jocelin smiled with his lips.  He saw Roger from a long way off, and small.  Now, he thought.  We shall see.

"Explain yourself then."

The master builder examined the palms of his hands, knocked dust off them.

"You know as well as I do, Reverend Father.  We've gone as high as we can."

He grinned at Jocelin.

"After all, you have one light completed, one window.  You can have a pinnacle at each corner, and four heads of Dean Jocelin — we shall have to cut them again, by the way — one above each window.  We'll lead in a roof and you can put a weathercock in the middle.  Do more; and the earth'll creep again.  You were right, you see.  It's incredible even for that generation; but there aren't any foundations.  None at all worth having.  Just mud."

Careful of the weight on his back and the suggestion of his angel's return, Jocelin sat upright in his stall and folded his hands in Ills lap

"What would satisfy you, Roger?  I mean, by the rules of your art, how could you make the spire safe?"

"I couldn't.  Or put it this way, there's nothing I can do.  If you had all the time and money in the world, let alone the art and skill — well then; we could take down the cathedral stone by stone.  We could dig a pit a hundred yards each way, and say, forty feet deep.  Then we could fill it with rubble.  But the water would get there first of course.  How many men with how many buckets?  And imagine the nave, standing all that time on the lip of a cliff of mud!  You see, Father?"

Jocelin looked away for a moment at the altar through the fire of his head.  This is what it is, he thought, this is what it is to offer oneself and have the offer accepted.

"You're a man for a very little dare."

"I dare as much as most."

"That's still very little.  Where's your faith?"

"Faith or no faith, Father, we've come to the end.  That's all there is to it."

And this is how a will feels when it is linked to a Will without limit or end.

"There's building work to be had at last, Roger.  Malmesbury, isn't it?"

The master builder looked at him expressionlessly.

"If you say so."

"I know so and so do you.  You'd find safe wintering there, and work for your army, you think."

"Men must live."

There was a sudden burst of noise from the crossways that fanned some feeling into irritation.  Jocelin shut his eyes against it and spoke angrily.

"What was that?"

"It's my men.  They're waiting."

"For our decision."

"The earth made it for us!"

The master builder's deep breathing came close to the shut eyes.

"Finish now, Father, while there's still time."

"While there's other work for the army."

Now the master builder's voice was angry too.

"All right then.  Have it your own way if you like!"

He felt the breathing go away, and put out his hand quickly.

"Wait a moment.  Wait!"

He put his clasped hands on the desk and bowed his forehead gently on them.  He thought to himself; presently my whole body will be on fire, my pulse a blinding one.  But this is what I am for.

"Roger?  Are you there?"

"Well?"

"I'll tell you a thing.  What's closer than brother and brother, mother and child?  What's closer than hand and mouth, closer than the thought to the mind?  It's vision, Roger.  I don't expect you to understand that —"

"But of course I understand!"

Jocelin lifted his face and smiled suddenly.

"You do, do you?"

"But there comes a point when vision's no more than a child's playing let's pretend."

"Ah!"

He shook his head, slowly and carefully; and the lights swam.

"Then you don't understand at all.  Not at all."

Roger Mason moved over the smooth tiles and stood looking down.

"Reverend Father.  I — admire you.  But the solid earth argues against us."

"Closer than the solid earth to the foot."

Roger put a hand on either hip, as if he had made up his mind.  His voice was louder.

"Listen.  You can say what you like.  I've made the decision for us."

"You're breaking it to me, then."

"I understand in a way what it means to you.  That's why I'm prepared to explain.  There are other things, you see.  They trapped me."

"The tent."

"What tent?"

"Never mind."

"I might have been caught — but now the building's impossible, I can go away, go right away, forget, however much it costs me."

"Break the web."

"It's only gossamer, after all.  Who ever would have thought it!"

Carefully, his eye on the open trap, Jocelin nodded at the animal.

"Only gossamer."

"And there's another thing.  What's his priesthood to a priest?  There's a thing you have a right to know about, Father.  You could call it Builder's Honor."

"With more work for the army at Malmesbury."

"I'm trying to tell you!"

"So you can keep this honor and the army too.  Things aren't as easy as that.  They cost more than that, Roger."

"Well then.  Forgive me."

Goody Pangall and Rachel began to circle through the fire in his head.  All the faces of the Chapter — I had a vision.  I would protect her if I could — protect all of them.  But we are each responsible for our own salvation.

"There's no one but you who can build it.  That's what they said.  Notable Roger Mason."

"There's no one at all."

And from the crossways; a shout of anger, then laughter.

"Who knows, Roger?  Perhaps a braver man —"

Stubborn silence.

"You're asking me to release you from a sealed contract.  I can't do it."

Roger's words were a mumble.

"All right then.  Whatever happens, I've decided."

Escape from the web, from cowardice and little dares.

"Take time, my son."

He heard more shouting from the crossways, and the master builder's feet begin to move away over the tiles.  Once more he held out his hand.

"Wait."

He heard the man stop and turn.  Where have I come to, he thought dizzily.  What am I about to do?  But what else can I do?

"Well, Father?"

Jocelin answered him fretfully, hands over his eyes.

"Wait a moment.  Wait!"

It was not that he needed time; for the decision had made itself.  He felt behind his eyes a kind of sick apprehension, not because the spire was in danger; but because the spire was not in danger — never more strongly ordained and planted, more inevitably to be built.  And therefore he knew what he must do.

He began to tremble from head to foot, as the stones must have trembled when they began to sing.  Then, like the singing, the trembling passed away, left him still and cold.

"I wrote to Malmesbury, Roger.  To the abbot.  I knew what was in his mind.  I let it be known how long we shall need you here.  He will look elsewhere."

He heard quick steps towards him in the choir.

"You — !"

He lifted his head and opened his eyes carefully.  There was not much light left in the choir, and now, what there was, seemed all run into dazzles and haloes that lay round every object.  They lay round the master builder, who clutched with both hands the edge of the desk.  His hands had clamped on it and moved as if they would twist it apart.  Jocelin blinked at the haloes and spoke quietly, because he did not like the echo of the words in his head.

"My son.  When such a work is ordained, it is put into the mind of a, of a man.  That's a terrible thing.  I'm only learning now, how terrible it is.  It's a refiner's fire.  The man knows a little perhaps of the purpose, but nothing of the cost — why can't they keep quiet out there?  Why don't they stand quietly and wait?  No.  You and I were chosen to do this thing together.  It's a great glory.  I see now it'll destroy us of course.  What are we, after all?  Only I tell you this, Roger, with the whole strength of my soul.  The thing can be built and will be built, in the very teeth of Satan.  You'll build it because nobody else can.  They laugh at me, I think; and they'll probably laugh at you.  Let them laugh.  It's for them, and their children.  But only you and I, my son, my friend, when we've done tormenting ourselves and each other, will know what stones and beams and lead and mortar went into it.  Do you understand?"

The master builder was staring down at him.  He no longer wrestled with the wood but held on as if it were a plank in a whirling sea.

"Father, Father — for the love of God, let me go!"

I do what I must do.  He will never be the same again, not with me.  He will never be the same man again.  I've won, he's mine, my prisoner for this duty.  At any moment now the lock will shut on him.

Whisper. 

"Make me go!"

Click. 

Silence, long silence.

The master builder let go of the wood, backed slowly away through the haloes and the turbulent noises beyond the screen.  His voice was hoarse.

"You just don't know what'll come out of our going on!"

Backing away, eyes wide; pause in the door of the choir.

"You just don't know!"

Gone. 

Silence from the crossways.  He thought to himself: it's not the stones singing.  It's inside my head.  But then the silence was slashed by a fierce yell, and he heard Roger Mason shouting.  I must go, he thought, I must go, but not to him.  I must go to my bed.  If I can get there.

He laid hold of the stall and pulled himself upright.  He thought; it's his business not mine.  Let him settle it, my slave for the work.  Carefully he went across the choir and into the ambulatory.  At the steps he paused and lay back against stone, his head back, eves shut, trying to gather strength.  I must pass among them, lie thought, for all their shouting; and he tottered down the steps.

He was struck by a gust of laughter; but not for him.  The noises were as confused as the lights that swirled in his head.  The place was a mass of brown tunics, leather jerkins, blue tunics, clothbound legs, wallets of leather, beards and teeth.  The mass moved am!  swirled and its noise denied the holy air.  He glimpsed the hole that still gaped in the pavement; and saw between the legs that it was not entirely plugged yet.  He knew this was some nightmare; since things happened and stuck in the eye as if seen by flashes of lightening.  He saw men who tormented Pangall, having him at the broom's end.  In an apocalyptic glimpse of seeing, he caught how a man danced forward to Pangall, the model of the spire projecting obscenely from between his legs — then the swirl and the noise and the animal bodies hurled Jocelin against stone, so that he could not see, but only heard how Pangall broke — He heard the long wolfhowl of the man's flight down the south aisle, heard the rising, the hunting noise of the pack that raced after him.  He understood, the breath almost out of his body, how the dumb man knelt over him, with a weight of brown bodies falling, turning, pressing down on his back.  And as he lay, waiting for the shuddering arms to spring apart and the weight to crush them both, he knew that something else he had seen was printed on his eye for ever.  Whenever there should be darkness and no thought, the picture would come back.  It had been — it was — it would always be Goody Pangall on the surround of the south west pillar where the tide of the army had washed her.  Her hair had come out into the light.  It hung down; on this side splayed over her breast in a tattered cloud of red; on that, in a tangled plait which doubled on itself, and draggled with green ribbon half-undone.  Her hands clutched the pillar behind her, hiphigh, and her belly shone about the slit of navel through the handtorn gap in her dress.  Her head was turned this way, and always, till the end of time, he would know what she was looking at.  From the moment of the tent there could be nothing else for her to look at — nowhere else she could turn that white, contracted mouth, but towards Roger on this side of the pit, his arms spread from his side in anguish and appeal, in acknowledgement of consent and defeat.

Then the dumb man's arms leapt apart.

.     .     .     .     .

Day by day getting a little strength, he watched the summer prolong itself as if in recompense for the storms and floods of spring.  The leaves turned at last, and lay tinder dry.  The coarse grass round the cathedral broke under his feet; was brown and brittle as the leaves left in a besom; and now the gargoyles, taking part in some infinite complexity of punishment, gaped as though they sought water in the dry air.  There was no point of rest for them.  They were in hell, could expect no less, that was all there was to it.  In this dry air, his will, his blazing will, was shut down to a steady glow, that illuminated and supported the new building and nothing else.  So the young man chipped and the builders climbed, Rachel circled round Roger; and Goody Pangall was to be glimpsed far off at the end of an aisle, wimpled head down, a woman about her work, the red hair hidden.  If she seemed about to come near, she circled him quickly, looking away and hurrying on, head down as if he were an unlucky comer, or a ghost, or the grave of a suicide.  But he knew that she was only ashamed with the shame of a deserted woman; and her shame squeezed his heart.  But my will has other business than to help, he thought.  I have so much will, it puts all other business by.  I am like a flower that is bearing fruit.  There is a preoccupation about the flower as the fruit swells and the petals wither; a preoccupation about the whole plant, leaves dropping, everything dying but the swelling fruit.  That's how it must be.  My will is in the pillars and the high wall.  I offered myself; and I am learning.

Sometimes he would find Rachel circling in the crossways, talking to anyone who passed, then pausing to peer up at her bear climbing in the tower; voluble Rachel who would abandon everything else at sight of the Dean, to come to him.  Then one day he found her easy to deal with.  He ignored her completely, detaching himself from the sound of her at his elbow.  When she circled to get in front of him and question him, he did not hear her question but only felt it as an interrogation mark left in the air.  He stood there, looking down at her.  He noticed that she seemed older, and strained, but the change did not interest him much.  Even when he saw how she had taken to painting her face, he felt nothing but a distaste that emerged as a twitch of his body, concealing the high giggle.  After that, he decided he was bored with looking at her, and he looked through her instead without saying anything, so he never saw the astonishment under the red paint.

As the days passed he found this indifference very useful.  It enabled him to treat the chancellor with courtesy when he came to the deanery, without allowing himself to notice what he came for.  In some cases — the precentor was one — this useful technique led to a look which he decided afterwards was downright consternation.  Then in the foggy days of Autumn, when a vast tarpaulin shut out the sky at the growing point of the tower, he discovered he could always stop these people at any moment he wanted to.  He would merely say — and this was after Father Anonymous pointed out that he never read any correspondence unless it was connected with the spire — would say: "I must get back to the building."

Despite the tarpaulin, the fog got into the church; but still it could not interfere with his will.  Nor did it interfere with the young man who still chiseled and scraped.  Surely, thought Jocelin, as he examined the second of the four heads that had filled the pit, surely they are leaner than they should be?  And isn't the mouth too wide open?  Can eyes ever be as wide as that?  But he said nothing of all this; for he loved his son in God as he loved his daughter in God; and the young man had not only preserved his life, and therefore the will that held up the pillars, but looked at him frankly, like a good dog, which Goody, if she was caught near enough, never did.

So she irked him, and her red hair irked him, and he felt nothing about her but compassion for her shame, and a strange disquiet.  By the beginning of December the four heads were finished and vanished up the chimney with the young man, to where the four upper lights were waiting for them.  On the morning when he watched them go up, Rachel was circling again, chattering.  Since he was free for the time being of the young man, the thought of Goody came on him with full force, in Pangall's desertion.  Why have I neglected her?  She needs me!  And as if the thought other had created her for him, there she was, hurrying up the north aisle, looking up — and now swerving aside, going on past the crossways into the ambulatory, faster, faster.

"My child —"

He thought; I must do it for her sake, though it interrupts my concentration.  And he went quickly to the south exit of the ambulatory; and there she came, hurrying again, and now ducking aside.

"My child!"

Laughing but half vexed, he moved across, arms spread, so that she could not pass.  She stood under the wall, sideways and shrinking.  Her hair was decently hidden, her face turned away so that he could see little but the long hollow of one cheek.

"My child, I have been meaning —"

Meaning what?  What have I to tell her?  What am I to ask her?

But she was speaking up to him, pleading.

"Let me go, Father.  Please let me go!"

"He'll come back."

"Please!"

"And meanwhile — all these years — My child, you are very dear to me."

With a sudden shock, he saw how white her lips were, white and drawn in against her teeth.  He could see too, how wide and staring, wide, dark eyes could be, as if the eyelids had been drawn back, like the lips.  The basket jerked up against her breast, and he could only just hear what she whispered.

"Not you too!"

Then she was gone, gasping and sobbing, and slipping past him, to race down the dark ambulatory, so that her heavy cloak flapped in the air, and beneath her skirt he glimpsed her ankles and feet.

He put his hands on either side of his head and spoke angrily out of the depths of his confusion and incomprehension.

"What's all this?"

Then he shook himself, for he felt her cling, and this was bad for the work.  I must put aside all small things, he thought.  If they are part of the cost, why so be it.  And if I cannot help, what is the point of all this brooding?  I have too great a work on hand.  Work!  Work!

He had a thought so brilliant he knew it had been put into his mind.  It was an illumination.  I must climb away from all this confusion t And with the thought came the high, fretful laugh again.  I shall take this burning will of mine up the tower.  He looked down at his gown and saw that it was not designed for climbing; but he bent and pulled the back hem through his legs and twisted it up into his girdle.  A workman coming down, stood aside on the first staging and knuckled his forehead.  Suddenly everything was easier in Jocelin's head.  There was sunlight at last, flashing round him.  He climbed again and again; came to the dark and unwalled platform of the triforium and ducked into a stairway lighted by nothing but arrow slits, as though the building might have to be defended by archers.  He came out of the stair and the new beams above the vaulting lay before him.  He climbed again, up wide ladders by the flash and glitter of the lower tower windows.

"Of course," he cried, "Of course!"

He felt his heart hitting his ribs and he rested a while to slow it and get his breath.  He perched on the edge of a staging like a raven on the edge of a cliff.  The men climbing up and down, looked at him curiously but said nothing.  He hutched to the very edge and let his legs hang over.  He clutched an upright with both hands, leaned round it and looked down.

The shafts, wall and windows of the tower drew together below him, and seemed everywhere only just thick enough to bear their own weight.  Everything was clean and new.  The eighty foot lights of the windows, two in each of the four sides, the platforms and uprights, the ladders and newly adzed beams, were clear with present light.  He felt the same appalled delight as a small boy feels when first he climbs too high in a forbidden tree.  He felt his head swim, and encouraged his own dizziness and caught breath by squinting straight down — down, down, hole after hole depth after depth to the distant world of the crossways.  The pavement was as dim as the bottom of the pit had been, discolored by depth and the dullness of ground level.  Then the dizziness passed to leave thought and delight behind it.

"Of course!"

.     .     .     .     .

It was at this time that Jocelin discovered something else about the master builder.  He had watched him anxiously, assessing him as a tool for building, had counted his steps on the ladders, had waited for the moment when he would need to be resharpened or have the wedge driven more firmly into his haft; but he had come out of all that examination with no more than a knowledge of how Roger Mason looked, and moved.  Then one day, looking down at the hole over the pavement, he watched him coming up the tower; and understood to his astonishment that the master builder feared heights as much as Rachel did.  He feared them but he endured them.  He lived with them, they were part of his craft; but he never enjoyed them as Jocelin did, never seemed to know the breathcatching exultation of a quivering plank up here, where you could no longer hear the stones singing, a quivering, bouncing plank over a sheer drop.  So in his new knowledge, Jocelin watched him compassionately as he came up; saw him climb methodically, slowly, never casual as some of the workmen were, saw him looking always at the nearest thing to hand; saw the shaft to the dim pavement beyond the hole, understood why he trod for preference an inch or two nearer the wall than the center of the ladder.  There was a little rain blowing, which clung to Jocelin's hair, but he stood freely at the top in the push of the wind and waited for Roger who was reduced to head and shoulders with the net visibly round him.

"Why are you afraid, my son?"

The master builder stood before him, breathing deeply.  He grasped the parapet with an arm.

"They're singing again."

"What of it?  They've sung and stopped before."

He looked up into the thin rain.

"Do you know, Roger, I've been thinking.  That cross up there — the cross that will be up there."

"I know it."

"Won't it be taller than a man?  Yet on the model it's the sort of trinket a child might wear round his neck."

The master builder shut his eyes and gritted his teeth.  He groaned.

"What is it, Roger?  What do you want to tell me?"

The master builder looked at him against the sky and spoke huskily.

"Have mercy."

"Not again!"

"Reverend Father —"

"Well?"

"This is enough."

Jocelin continued to smile; but his smile stiffened.  The master builder flung out his free hand.

"They are overcome by the splendor of what we — of what you —"

He turned away, leaned both elbows on the parapet, put his face between his hands so that his voice was muffled.

"I said, have mercy."

"There's no one but you."

Then the master builder was silent for a while, face in hands.  He spoke at last without lifting it.

"I'll try to tell you about my mystery.  The stones are singing.  I don't know why, but I can guess.  That's the trouble, you see.  I always guess.  When you come down to it, I know nothing.  Or not as you —"

He looked up sideways at Jocelin.

"Or not as you know when you speak to a congregation.  You see?"

"I see well enough."

"I tell you, we guess.  We judge that this or that is strong enough; but we can never tell until the full strain comes on it whether we were right or wrong.  And then the wind, this wind that does nothing but stir the hair round your head —"

He stared angrily at Jocelin.

"Have you a machine to measure the weight of the wind.  Father?  Give me that, and I'll tell you what will stand and what won't."

"But still the pillars aren't sinking.  I told you."

"They've begun to sing."

"Have you never known a building sing before?"

"Never.  We're surrounded by new things.  We guess; and go on building."

He bent back his thick neck and stared into the sky.

"And now the spire; another hundred and fifty feet of it.  Father — this is enough!"

The will spoke calmly out of Jocelin's head.  He heard it.

"I understand you, my son.  It's the little dare all over again.  Shall I tell you where we've come?  Think of the mayfly that lives for no more than one day.  That raven over there may have some knowledge of yesterday and the day before.  The raven knows what the sunrise is like.  Perhaps he knows there'll be another one.  But the mayfly doesn't.  There's never a mayfly who knows what it's like to be one!  And that's where we've come!  Oh no, Roger, I'm not going to preach you a sermon on the dreadful brevity of this life.  You know, as well as I do, that it's an unendurable length, that none the less must be endured.  But we've come to something different, because we were chosen, both of us.  We're mayfly.  We can't tell what it'll be like up there from foot to foot; but we must live from the morning to the evening every minute with a new thing."

Roger was watching him closely, tongue licking at his lips.

"No.  I don't know what you mean.  But I know how much the spire will weigh, and I don't know how strong it'll be.  Look down.  Father — right over the parapet, all the way down, past the lights, the buttresses, all the way down to the cedar top in the cloister."

"I see it."

"Let your eye crawl down like an insect, foot by foot.  You think these walls are strong because they're stone; but I know better.  We've nothing but a skin of glass and stone stretched between four stone rods, one at each corner.  D'you understand that?  The stone is no stronger than the glass between the verticals because every inch of the way I have to save weight, bartering strength for weight or weight for strength, guessing how much, how far, how little, how near, until my very heart stops when I think of it.  Look down, Father.  Don't look at me — look down!  See how the columns at each comer are tacked together.  I've clamped the stones together but still I can't make them stronger than stone.  Stone snaps, crumbles, tears.  Yet even now, when the pillars sing, perhaps this much may stand.  I can give you a roof over it, and perhaps a weather vane that men will see for miles."

Jocelin was suddenly very still, very wary.

"Go on, my son."

"The sheer impossibility of the spire!  You need to be thrust this high Father, to understand it, don't you see?  It'll be a stone skin with stone members.  Inside there'll be a series of those octagons, each a little smaller than the one below it.  But the wind, Father!  I should have to pin those octagons together, and hang them from the capstone so that they hold the skin down by their weight.  Weight, weight, weight, weight!  All added to this; all boring down on the columns, on the skin of the wall, down on the singing pillars —"

Now his hand was on Jocelin's sleeve.

"And even that isn't the end of it.  However I contrive, the spire won't thrust perpendicularly.  It'll thrust at the tops of these four columns and it'll thrust — out i I could put pinnacles on each to bear down — should have to — but there'd be a limit to the height I could make them, because of the weight.  At what point should I have to give up the one for the other?  Oh yes; we could put in the first octagon and the second and perhaps the third —" his hand clenched on Jocelin's arm'— but sooner or later there'd be a new noise in the building.  Look down again, Father.  Sooner or later there'd be a bang, a shudder, a roar.  Those four columns would open apart like a flower, and everything else up here, stone, wood, iron, glass, men, would slide down into the church like the fall of a mountain."

He was silent again for a moment.  Then his voice came, no more than a whisper.

"I tell you — whatever else is uncertain in my mystery — this is certain.  I know.  I've seen a building fall."

Jocelin's eyes were shut.  Inside his head, a series of octagons, each made of oak beams a foot thick, had built themselves up and up.  For a moment, as he stood with gritted teeth, he felt the solid stone under him move — swinging sideways and out.  The dunce's cap a hundred and fifty feet tall began to rip down and tear and burst, sliding with dust and smoke and thunder, faster and faster, breaking and sheering with spark and flame and explosion, crashing down to strike the nave so that the paving stones danced like wood chips till the ruin buried them.  So clear was this that he fell with the south west column that swung out over the cloister bent in the middle like a leg and destroyed the library like the blow of a flail.  He opened his eyes, sick with falling through the air.  He was clutching the parapet and the cloisters were moving below him.

"What must we do?"

"Stop building."

The answer came pat; and even before his sickness had sunk away and the cloisters steadied, some deep center of awareness understood how the master builder had led up to this answer.

"No, no, no, no."

He was muttering and understanding and shaking his head.  He understood the