The Cantor of St. Illod’s being far too enthusiastic a musician to
concern himself with its Library, the Sub-Cantor, who idolised every
detail of the work, was tidying up, after two hours’ writing and
dictation in the Scriptorium. The copying-monks handed him in their
sheets--it was a plain Four Gospels ordered by an Abbot at Evesham--and
filed out to vespers. John Otho, better known as John of Burgos, took
no heed. He was burnishing a tiny boss of gold in his miniature of
the Annunciation for his Gospel of St. Luke, which it was hoped that
Cardinal Falcodi, the Papal Legate, might later be pleased to accept.
“Break off, John,” said the Sub-Cantor in an undertone.
“Eh? Gone, have they? I never heard. Hold a minute, Clement.”
The Sub-Cantor waited patiently. He had known John more than a dozen
years, coming and going at St. Illod’s, to which monastery John, when
abroad, always said he belonged. The claim was gladly allowed for, more
even than other Fitz Otho’s, he seemed to carry all the Arts under his
hand, and most of their practical receipts under his hood.
The Sub-Cantor looked over his shoulder at the pinned-down sheet where
the first words of the Magnificat were built up in gold washed with
red-lac for a background to the Virgin’s hardly yet fired halo. She was
shown, hands joined in wonder, at a lattice of infinitely intricate
arabesque, round the edges of which sprays of orange-bloom seemed
to load the blue hot air that carried back over the minute parched
landscape in the middle distance.
“You’ve made her all Jewess,” said the Sub-Cantor, studying the
olive-flushed cheek and the eyes charged with foreknowledge.
“What else was Our Lady?” John slipped out the pins. “Listen, Clement.
If I do not come back, this goes into my Great Luke, whoever finishes
it.” He slid the drawing between its guard-papers.
“Then you’re for Burgos again--as I heard?”
“In two days. The new Cathedral yonder--but they’re slower than the
Wrath of God, those masons--is good for the soul.”
“_Thy_ soul?” The Sub-Cantor seemed doubtful.
“Even mine, by your permission. And down south--on the edge of the
Conquered Countries--Granada way--there’s some Moorish diaper-work
that’s wholesome. It allays vain thought and draws it toward the
picture--as you felt, just now, in my Annunciation.”
“She--it was very beautiful. No wonder you go. But you’ll not forget
your absolution, John?”
“Surely.” This was a precaution John no more omitted on the eve of his
travels than he did the recutting of the tonsure which he had provided
himself with in his youth, somewhere near Ghent. The mark gave him
privilege of clergy at a pinch, and a certain consideration on the road
always.
“You’ll not forget, either, what we need in the Scriptorium. There’s
no more true ultramarine in this world now. They mix it with that
German blue. And as for vermilion----”
“I’ll do my best always.”
“And Brother Thomas (this was the Infirmarian in charge of the
monastery hospital) he needs----”
“He’ll do his own asking. I’ll go over his side now, and get me
re-tonsured.”
John went down the stairs to the lane that divides the hospital and
cook-house from the back-cloisters. While he was being barbered,
Brother Thomas (St. Illod’s meek but deadly persistent Infirmarian)
gave him a list of drugs that he was to bring back from Spain by hook,
crook, or lawful purchase. Here they were surprised by the lame, dark
Abbot Stephen, in his fur-lined night-boots. Not that Stephen de Sautré
was any spy; but as a young man he had shared an unlucky Crusade, which
had ended, after a battle at Mansura, in two years’ captivity among the
Saracens at Cairo where men learn to walk softly. A fair huntsman and
hawker, a reasonable disciplinarian but a man of science above all,
and a Doctor of Medicine under one Ranulphus, Canon of St. Paul’s, his
heart was more in the monastery’s hospital work than its religious. He
checked their list interestedly, adding items of his own. After the
Infirmarian had withdrawn he gave John generous absolution, to cover
lapses by the way; for he did not hold with chance-bought Indulgences.
“And what seek you _this_ journey?” he demanded, sitting on the bench
beside the mortar and scales in the little warm cell for stored drugs.
“Devils, mostly,” said John, grinning.
“In Spain? Are not Abana and Pharphar----?”
John, to whom men were but matter for drawings, and well-born to boot
(since he was a de Sanford on his mother’s side), looked the Abbot
full in the face and--“Did _you_ find it so?” said he.
“No. They were in Cairo too. But what’s your special need of ’em?”
“For my Great Luke. He’s the master-hand of all Four when it comes to
devils.”
“No wonder. He was a physician. You’re not.”
“Heaven forbid! But I’m weary of our Church-pattern devils. They’re
only apes and goats and poultry conjoined. ’Good enough for plain
red-and-black Hells and Judgment Days--but not for me.”
“What makes you so choice in them?”
“Because it stands to reason and Art that there are all musters of
devils in Hell’s dealings. Those Seven, for example, that were haled
out of the Magdalene. They’d be she-devils--no kin at all to the beaked
and horned and bearded devils-general.”
The Abbot laughed.
“And see again! The devil that came out of the dumb man. What use is
snout or bill to _him_? He’d be faceless as a leper. Above all--God
send I live to do it!--the devils that entered the Gadarene swine.
They’d be--they’d be--I know not yet what they’d be, but they’d be
surpassing devils. I’d have ’em diverse as the Saints themselves. But
now, they’re all one pattern, for wall, window, or picture-work.”
“Go on, John. You’re deeper in this mystery than I.”
“Heaven forbid! But I say there’s respect due to devils, damned tho’
they be.”
“Dangerous doctrine.”
“My meaning is that if the shape of anything be worth man’s thought to
picture to man, it’s worth his best thought.”
“That’s safer. But I’m glad I’ve given you Absolution.”
“There’s less risk for a craftsman who deals with the outside shapes of
things--for Mother Church’s glory.”
“Maybe so, but John”--the Abbot’s hand almost touched John’s
sleeve--“tell me, now, is--is she Moorish or--or Hebrew?”
“She’s mine,” John returned.
“Is that enough?”
“I have found it so.”
“Well--ah well! It’s out of my jurisdiction but--how do they look at it
down yonder?”
“Oh, they drive nothing to a head in Spain--neither Church nor King,
bless them! There’s too many Moors and Jews to kill them all, and if
they chased ’em away there’d be no trade nor farming. Trust me, in the
Conquered Countries, from Seville to Granada, we live lovingly enough
together--Spaniard, Moor, and Jew. Ye see, _we_ ask no questions.”
“Yes--yes,” Stephen sighed. “And always there’s the hope, she may be
converted.”
“Oh yes, there’s always hope.”
The Abbot went on into the hospital. It was an easy age before Rome
tightened the screw as to clerical connections. If the lady were
not too forward, or the son too much his father’s beneficiary in
ecclesiastical preferments and levies, a good deal was overlooked. But,
as the Abbot had reason to recall, unions between Christian and Infidel
led to sorrow. None the less, when John with mule, mails, and man,
clattered off down the lane for Southampton and the sea, Stephen envied
him.
* * * * *
He was back, twenty months later, in good hard case, and loaded down
with fairings. A lump of richest lazuli, a bar of orange-hearted
vermilion, and a small packet of dried beetles which make most glorious
scarlet, for the Sub-Cantor. Besides that, a few cubes of milky marble,
with yet a pink flush in them, which could be slaked and ground down
to incomparable background-stuff. There were quite half the drugs
that the Abbot and Thomas had demanded, and there was a long deep-red
cornelian necklace for the Abbot’s Lady--Anne of Norton. She received
it graciously, and asked where John had come by it.
“Near Granada,” he said.
“You left all well there?” Anne asked. (Maybe the Abbot had told her
something of John’s confession.)
“I left all in the hands of God.”
“Ah me! How long since?”
“Four months less eleven days.”
“Were you--with her?”
“In my arms. Childbed.”
“And?”
“The boy too. There is nothing now.”
Anne of Norton caught her breath.
“I think you’ll be glad of that,” she said after a while.
“Give me time, and maybe I’ll compass it. But not now.”
“You have your handwork and your art and--John--remember there’s no
jealousy in the grave.”
“Ye-es! I have my Art, and Heaven knows I’m jealous of none.”
“Thank God for that at least,” said Anne of Norton, the always ailing
woman who followed the Abbot with her sunk eyes. “And be sure I shall
treasure this,” she touched the beads, “as long as I shall live.”
“I brought--trusted--it to you for that,” he replied, and took leave.
When she told the Abbot how she had come by it, he said nothing, but as
he and Thomas were storing the drugs that John handed over in the cell
which backs on to the hospital kitchen-chimney, he observed, of a cake
of dried poppy-juice: “This has power to cut off all pain from a man’s
body.”
“I have seen it,” said John.
“But for pain of the soul there is, outside God’s Grace, but one drug;
and that is a man’s craft, learning, or other helpful motion of his own
mind.”
“That is coming to me, too,” was the answer.
John spent the next fair May day out in the woods with the monastery
swineherd and all the porkers; and returned loaded with flowers and
sprays of spring, to his own carefully kept place in the north bay of
the Scriptorium. There with his travelling sketch-books under his left
elbow, he sunk himself past all recollections in his Great Luke.
Brother Martin, Senior Copyist (who spoke about once a fortnight)
ventured to ask, later, how the work was going.
“All here!” John tapped his forehead with his pencil. “It has been
only waiting these months to--ah God!--be born. Are ye free of your
plain-copying, Martin?”
Brother Martin nodded. It was his pride that John of Burgos turned to
him, in spite of his seventy years, for really good page-work.
“Then see!” John laid out a new vellum--thin but flawless. “There’s no
better than this sheet from here to Paris. Yes! Smell it if you choose.
Wherefore--give me the compasses and I’ll set it out for you--if ye
make one letter lighter or darker than its next, I’ll stick ye like a
pig.”
“Never, John!” the old man beamed happily.
“But I will! Now, follow! Here and here, as I prick, and in script of
just this height to the hair’s-breadth, ye’ll scribe the thirty-first
and thirty-second verses of Eighth Luke.”
“Yes, the Gadarene Swine! ‘_And they besought him that he would not
command them to go out into the abyss. And there was a herd of many
swine_’”----Brother Martin naturally knew all the Gospels by heart.
“Just so! Down to ‘_and he suffered them_.’ Take your time to it. My
Magdalene has to come off my heart first.”
Brother Martin achieved the work so perfectly that John stole some soft
sweetmeats from the Abbot’s kitchen for his reward. The old man ate
them; then repented; then confessed and insisted on penance. At which
the Abbot, knowing there was but one way to reach the real sinner, set
him a book called _De Virtutibus Herbarum_ to fair-copy. St. Illod’s
had borrowed it from the gloomy Cistercians, who do not hold with
pretty things, and the crabbed text kept Martin busy just when John
wanted him for some rather specially spaced letterings.
“See now,” said the Sub-Cantor reprovingly. “You should not do such
things, John. Here’s Brother Martin on penance for your sake----”
“No--for my Great Luke. But I’ve paid the Abbot’s cook. I’ve drawn him
till his own scullions cannot keep straight-faced. _He_’ll not tell
again.”
“Unkindly done! And you’re out of favour with the Abbot too. He’s made
no sign to you since you came back--never asked you to high table.”
“I’ve been busy. Having eyes in his head, Stephen knew it. Clement,
there’s no Librarian from Durham to Torre fit to clean up after you.”
The Sub-Cantor stood on guard; he knew where John’s compliments
generally ended.
“But outside the Scriptorium----”
“Where I never go.” The Sub-Cantor had been excused even digging in the
garden, lest it should mar his wonderful book-binding hands.
“In all things outside the Scriptorium you are the master-fool of
Christendie. Take it from me, Clement. I’ve met many.”
“I take everything from you,” Clement smiled benignly. “You use me
worse than a singing-boy.”
They could hear one of that suffering breed in the cloister below,
squalling as the Cantor pulled his hair.
“God love you! So I do! But have you ever thought how I lie and steal
daily on my travels--yes, and for aught you know, murder--to fetch you
colours and earths?”
“True,” said just and conscience-stricken Clement. “I have often
thought that were I in the world--which God forbid!--I might be a
strong thief in some matters.”
Even Brother Martin, bent above his loathed _De Virtutibus_, laughed.
* * * * *
But about mid-summer, Thomas the Infirmarian conveyed to John the
Abbot’s invitation to supper in his house that night, with the request
that he would bring with him anything that he had done for his Great
Luke.
“What’s toward?” said John, who had been wholly shut up in his work.
“Only one of his ‘wisdom’ dinners. You’ve sat at a few since you were a
man.”
“True: and mostly good. How would Stephen have us----?”
“Gown and hood over all. There will be a doctor from Salerno--one
Roger, an Italian. Wise and famous with the knife on the body. He’s
been in the Infirmary some ten days, helping me--even me!”
“’Never heard the name. But our Stephen’s _physicus_ before _sacerdos_,
always.”
“And his Lady has a sickness of some time. Roger came hither in chief
because of her.”
“Did he? Now I think of it, I have not seen the Lady Anne for a while.”
“Ye’ve seen nothing for a long while. She has been housed near a
month--they have to carry her abroad now.”
“So bad as that, then?”
“Roger of Salerno will not yet say what he thinks. But----”
“God pity Stephen!... Who else at table, beside thee?”
“An Oxford friar. Roger is his name also. A learned and famous
philosopher. And he holds his liquor too, valiantly.”
“Three doctors--counting Stephen. I’ve always found that means two
atheists.”
Thomas looked uneasily down his nose. “That’s a wicked proverb,” he
stammered. “You should not use it.”
“Hoh! Never come you the monk over me, Thomas! You’ve been Infirmarian
at St. Illod’s eleven years--and a lay-brother still. Why have you
never taken orders, all this while?”
“I--I am not worthy.”
“Ten times worthier than that new fat swine--Henry
Who’s-his-name--that takes the Infirmary Masses. He bullocks in with
the Viaticum, under your nose, when a sick man’s only faint from being
bled. So the man dies--of pure fear. Ye know it! I’ve watched your face
at such times. Take Orders, Didymus. You’ll have a little more medicine
and a little less Mass with your sick then; and they’ll live longer.”
“I am unworthy--unworthy,” Thomas repeated pitifully.
“Not you--but--to your own master you stand or fall. And now that my
work releases me for a while, I’ll drink with any philosopher out of
any school. And Thomas,” he coaxed, “a hot bath for me in the Infirmary
before vespers.”
* * * * *
When the Abbot’s perfectly cooked and served meal had ended, and the
deep-fringed naperies were removed, and the Prior had sent in the keys
with word that all was fast in the Monastery, and the keys had been
duly returned with the word: “Make it so till Prime,” the Abbot and
his guests went out to cool themselves in an upper cloister that took
them, by way of the leads, to the South Choir side of the Triforium.
The summer sun was still strong, for it was barely six o’clock, but the
Abbey Church, of course, lay in her wonted darkness. Lights were being
lit for choir-practice thirty feet below.
“Our Cantor gives them no rest,” the Abbot whispered. “Stand by this
pillar and we’ll hear what he’s driving them at now.”
“Remember all!” the Cantor’s hard voice came up. “This is the soul
of Bernard himself, attacking our evil world. Take it quicker than
yesterday, and throw all your words clean-bitten from you. In the loft
there! Begin!”
The organ broke out for an instant, alone and raging. Then the voices
crashed together into that first fierce line of the “_De Contemptu
Mundi_.”[5]
“_Hora novissima_--_tempora pessima_”--a dead pause till, the assenting
_sunt_ broke, like a sob, out of the darkness, and one boy’s voice,
clearer than silver trumpets, returned the long-drawn _vigilemus_.
“_Ecce minaciter, imminet Arbiter_” (organ and voices were leashed
together in terror and warning, breaking away liquidly to the
“_ille supremus_”). Then the tone-colours shifted for the prelude
to--“_Imminet, imminet, ut mala terminet_----”
“Stop! Again!” cried the Cantor; and gave his reasons a little more
roundly than was natural at choir-practice.
“Ah! Pity o’ man’s vanity! He’s guessed we are here. Come away!” said
the Abbot. Anne of Norton, in her carried chair, had been listening
too, further along the dark Triforium, with Roger of Salerno. John
heard her sob. On the way back, he asked Thomas how her health stood.
Before Thomas could reply the sharp-featured Italian doctor pushed
between them. “Following on our talk together, I judged it best to tell
her,” said he to Thomas.
“What?” John asked simply enough.
“What she knew already.” Roger of Salerno launched into a Greek
quotation to the effect that every woman knows all about everything.
“I have no Greek,” said John stiffly. Roger of Salerno had been giving
them a good deal of it, at dinner.
“Then I’ll come to you in Latin. Ovid hath it neatly. ‘_Utque malum
late solet immedicabile cancer_----’ but doubtless you know the rest,
worthy Sir.”
“Alas! My school-Latin’s but what I’ve gathered by the way from fools
professing to heal sick women. ‘_Hocus-pocus_----’ but doubtless you
know the rest, worthy Sir.”
Roger of Salerno was quite quiet till they regained the dining-room,
where the fire had been comforted and the dates, raisins, ginger, figs,
and cinnamon-scented sweetmeats set out, with the choicer wines, on the
after-table. The Abbot seated himself, drew off his ring, dropped it,
that all might hear the tinkle, into an empty silver cup, stretched his
feet towards the hearth, and looked at the great gilt and carved rose
in the barrel-roof. The silence that keeps from Compline to Matins had
closed on their world. The bull-necked Friar watched a ray of sunlight
split itself into colours on the rim of a crystal salt-cellar; Roger
of Salerno had re-opened some discussion with Brother Thomas on a type
of spotted fever that was baffling them both in England and abroad;
John took note of the keen profile, and--it might serve as a note for
the Great Luke--his hand moved to his bosom. The Abbot saw, and nodded
permission. John whipped out silver-point and sketch-book.
“Nay--modesty is good enough--but deliver your own opinion,” the
Italian was urging the Infirmarian. Out of courtesy to the foreigner
nearly all the talk was in table-Latin; more formal and more copious
than monk’s patter. Thomas began with his meek stammer.
“I confess myself at a loss for the cause of the fever unless--as Varro
saith in his _De Re Rustica_--certain small animals which the eye
cannot follow enter the body by the nose and mouth, and set up grave
diseases. On the other hand, this is not in Scripture.”
Roger of Salerno hunched head and shoulders like an angry cat. “Always
_that_!” he said, and John snatched down the twist of the thin lips.
“Never at rest, John,” the Abbot smiled at the artist. “You should
break off every two hours for prayers, as we do. St. Benedict was no
fool. Two hours is all that a man can carry the edge of his eye or
hand.”
“For copyists--yes. Brother Martin is not sure after one hour. But when
a man’s work takes him, he must go on till it lets him go.”
“Yes, that is the Demon of Socrates,” the Friar from Oxford rumbled
above his cup.
“The doctrine leans toward presumption,” said the Abbot. “Remember,
‘Shall mortal man be more just than his Maker?’”
“There is no danger of justice”; the Friar spoke bitterly. “But at
least Man might be suffered to go forward in his Art or his thought.
Yet if Mother Church sees or hears him move anyward, what says she?
‘No!’ Always ‘No.’”
“But if the little animals of Varro be invisible”--this was Roger of
Salerno to Thomas--“how are we any nearer to a cure?”
“By experiment”--the Friar wheeled round on them suddenly. “By reason
and experiment. The one is useless without the other. But Mother
Church----”
“Ay!” Roger de Salerno dashed at the fresh bait like a pike. “Listen,
Sirs. Her bishops--our Princes--strew our roads in Italy with carcasses
that they make for their pleasure or wrath. Beautiful corpses! Yet if
I--if we doctors--so much as raise the skin of one of them to look at
God’s fabric beneath, what says Mother Church? ‘Sacrilege! Stick to
your pigs and dogs, or you burn!’”
“And not Mother Church only!” the Friar chimed in. “_Every_ way we are
barred--barred by the words of some man, dead a thousand years, which
are held final. Who is any son of Adam that his one say-so should close
a door towards truth? I would not except even Peter Peregrinus, my own
great teacher.”
“Nor I Paul of Aegina,” Roger of Salerno cried. “Listen Sirs! Here is a
case to the very point. Apuleius affirmeth, if a man eat fasting of the
juice of the cut-leaved buttercup--_sceleratus_ we call it, which means
‘rascally’”--this with a condescending nod towards John--“his soul will
leave his body laughing. Now this is the lie more dangerous than truth,
since truth of a sort is in it.”
“He’s away!” whispered the Abbot despairingly.
“For the juice of that herb, I know by experiment, burns, blisters, and
wries the mouth. I know also the _rictus_, or pseudo-laughter on the
face of such as have perished by the strong poisons of herbs allied
to this ranunculus. Certainly that spasm resembles laughter. It seems
then, in my judgment, that Apuleius, having seen the body of one thus
poisoned, went off at score and wrote that the man died laughing.”
“Neither staying to observe, nor to confirm observation by experiment,”
added the Friar, frowning.
Stephen the Abbot cocked an eyebrow toward John.
“How think _you_?” said he.
“I’m no doctor,” John returned, “but I’d say Apuleius in all these
years might have been betrayed by his copyists. They take shortcuts to
save ’emselves trouble. Put case that Apuleius wrote the soul _seems
to_ leave the body laughing, after this poison. There’s not three
copyists in five (_my_ judgment) would not leave out the ‘seems to.’
For who’d question Apuleius? If it seemed so to him, so it must be.
Otherwise any child knows cut-leaved buttercup.”
“Have you knowledge of herbs?” Roger of Salerno asked curtly.
“Only, that when I was a boy in convent, I’ve made tetters round my
mouth and on my neck with buttercup-juice, to save going to prayer o’
cold nights.”
“Ah!” said Roger. “I profess no knowledge of tricks.” He turned aside,
stiffly.
“No matter! Now for your own tricks, John,” the tactful Abbot broke in.
“You shall show the doctors your Magdalene and your Gadarene Swine and
the devils.”
“Devils? Devils? _I_ have produced devils by means of drugs; and have
abolished them by the same means. Whether devils be external to mankind
or immanent, I have not yet pronounced.” Roger of Salerno was still
angry.
“Ye dare not,” snapped the Friar from Oxford. “Mother Church makes Her
own devils.”
“Not wholly! Our John has come back from Spain with brand-new ones.”
Abbot Stephen took the vellum handed to him, and laid it tenderly on
the table. They gathered to look. The Magdalene was drawn in palest,
almost transparent, grisaille, against a raging, swaying background of
woman-faced devils, each broke to and by her special sin, and each, one
could see, frenziedly straining against the Power that compelled her.
“I’ve never seen the like of this grey shadow-work,” said the Abbot.
“How came you by it?”
“_Non nobis!_ It came to me,” said John, not knowing he was a
generation or so ahead of his time in the use of that medium.
“Why is she so pale?” the Friar demanded.
“Evil has all come out of her--she’d take any colour now.”
“Ay, like light through glass. _I_ see.”
Roger of Salerno was looking in silence--his nose nearer and
nearer the page. “It is so,” he pronounced finally. “Thus it is in
epilepsy--mouth, eyes, and forehead--even to the droop of her wrist
there. Every sign of it! She will need restoratives, that woman, and,
afterwards, sleep natural. No poppy-juice, or she will vomit on her
waking. And thereafter--but I am not in my Schools.” He drew himself
up. “Sir,” said he, “you should be of Our calling. For, by the Snakes
of Aesculapius, you _see_!”
The two struck hands as equals.
“And how think you of the Seven Devils?” the Abbot went on.
These melted into convoluted flower- or flame-like bodies, ranging
in colour from phosphorescent green to the black purple of outworn
iniquity, whose hearts could be traced beating through their substance.
But, for sign of hope and the sane workings of life, to be regained,
the deep border was of conventionalised spring flowers and birds, all
crowned by a kingfisher in haste, atilt through a clump of yellow iris.
Roger of Salerno identified the herbs and spoke largely of their
virtues.
“And now, the Gadarene Swine,” said Stephen. John laid the picture on
the table.
Here were devils dishoused, in dread of being abolished to the Void,
huddling and hurtling together to force lodgment by every opening
into the brute bodies offered. Some of the swine fought the invasion,
foaming and jerking; some were surrendering to it, sleepily, as
to a luxurious back-scratching; others, wholly possessed, whirled
off in bucking droves for the lake beneath. In one corner the freed
man stretched out his limbs all restored to his control, and Our
Lord, seated, looked at him as questioning what he would make of his
deliverance.
“Devils indeed!” was the Friar’s comment. “But wholly a new sort.”
Some devils were mere lumps, with lobes and protuberances--a hint of a
fiend’s face peering through jelly-like walls. And there was a family
of impatient, globular devillings who had burst open the belly of their
smirking parent, and were revolving desperately towards their prey.
Others patterned themselves into rods, chains and ladders, single or
conjoined, round the throat and jaws of a shrieking sow, from whose
ear emerged the lashing, glassy tail of a devil that had made good his
refuge. And there were granulated and conglomerate devils, mixed up
with the foam and slaver where the attack was fiercest. Thence the eye
carried on to the insanely active backs of the downward-racing swine,
the swineherd’s aghast face, and his dog’s terror.
Said Roger of Salerno, “I pronounce that these were begotten of drugs.
They stand outside the rational mind.”
“Not these,” said Thomas the Infirmarian, who as a servant of
the Monastery should have asked his Abbot’s leave to speak. “Not
_these_--look!--in the bordure.”
The border to the picture was a diaper of irregular but balanced
compartments or cellules, where sat, swam, or weltered, devils in
blank, so to say--things as yet uninspired by Evil--indifferent, but
lawlessly outside imagination. Their shapes resembled, again, ladders,
chains, scourges, diamonds, aborted buds, or gravid phosphorescent
globes--some well-nigh star-like.
Roger of Salerno compared them to the obsessions of a Churchman’s mind.
“Malignant?” the Friar from Oxford questioned.
“‘Count everything unknown for horrible,’” Roger quoted with scorn.
“Not I. But they are marvellous--marvellous. I think----”
The Friar drew back. Thomas edged in to see better, and half opened his
mouth.
“Speak,” said Stephen, who had been watching him. “We are all in a sort
doctors here.”
“I would say then”--Thomas rushed at it as one putting out his life’s
belief at the stake--“that these lower shapes in the bordure may not be
so much hellish and malignant as models and patterns upon which John
has tricked out and embellished his proper devils among the swine above
there!”
“And that would signify?” said Roger of Salerno sharply.
“In my poor judgment, that he may have seen such shapes--without help
of drugs.”
“Now who--_who_”--said John of Burgos, after a round and unregarded
oath--“has made thee so wise of a sudden, my Doubter?”
“I wise? God forbid! Only John, remember--one winter six years ago--the
snowflakes melting on your sleeve at the cookhouse-door. You showed me
them through a little crystal, that made small things larger.”
“Yes. The Moors call such a glass the Eye of Allah,” John confirmed.
“You showed me them melting--six-sided. You called them, then, your
patterns.”
“True. Snow-flakes melt six-sided. I have used them for diaper-work
often.”
“Melting snow-flakes as seen through a glass? By art optical?” the
Friar asked.
“Art optical? _I_ have never heard!” Roger of Salerno cried.
“John,” said the Abbot of St. Illod’s commandingly, “was it--is it so?”
“In some sort,” John replied, “Thomas has the right of it. Those shapes
in the bordure were my workshop-patterns for the devils above. In _my_
craft, Salerno, we dare not drug. It kills hand and eye. My shapes are
to be seen honestly, in nature.”
The Abbot drew a bowl of rose-water towards him. “When I was prisoner
with--with the Saracens after Mansura,” he began, turning up the fold
of his long sleeve, “there were certain magicians--physicians--who
could show--” he dipped his third finger delicately in the water--“all
the firmament of Hell, as it were, in--” he shook off one drop from his
polished nail on to the polished table--“even such a supernaculum as
this.”
“But it must be foul water--not clean,” said John.
“Show us then--all--all,” said Stephen. “I would make sure--once more.”
The Abbot’s voice was official.
John drew from his bosom a stamped leather box, some six or eight
inches long, wherein, bedded on faded velvet, lay what looked like
silver-bound compasses of old box-wood, with a screw at the head which
opened or closed the legs to minute fractions. The legs terminated, not
in points, but spoon-shapedly, one spatula pierced with a metal-lined
hole less than a quarter of an inch across, the other with a half-inch
hole. Into this latter John, after carefully wiping with a silk rag,
slipped a metal cylinder that carried glass or crystal, it seemed, at
each end.
“Ah! Art optic!” said the Friar. “But what is that beneath it?”
It was a small swivelling sheet of polished silver no bigger than a
florin, which caught the light and concentrated it on the lesser hole.
John adjusted it without the Friar’s proffered help.
“And now to find a drop of water,” said he, picking up a small brush.
“Come to my upper cloister. The sun is on the leads still,” said the
Abbot, rising.
They followed him there. Half way along, a drip from a gutter had made
a greenish puddle in a worn stone. Very carefully, John dropped a drop
of it into the smaller hole of the compass-leg, and, steadying the
apparatus on a coping, worked the screw in the compass-joint, screwed
the cylinder, and swung the swivel of the mirror till he was satisfied.
“Good!” He peered through the thing. “My Shapes are all here. Now look,
Father! If they do not meet your eye at first, turn this nicked edge
here, left or right-handed.”
“I have not forgotten,” said the Abbot, taking his place. “Yes! They
are here--as they were in my time--my time past. There is no end to
them, I was told.... There _is_ no end!”
“The light will go. Oh, let me look! Suffer me to see, also!” the Friar
pleaded, almost shouldering Stephen from the eye-piece. The Abbot gave
way. His eyes were on time past. But the Friar, instead of looking,
turned the apparatus in his capable hands.
“Nay, nay,” John interrupted, for the man was already fiddling at the
screws. “Let the Doctor see.”
Roger of Salerno looked, minute after minute. John saw his blue-veined
cheek-bones turn white. He stepped back at last, as though stricken.
“It is a new world--a new world and--Oh, God Unjust!--I am old!”
“And now Thomas,” Stephen ordered.
John manipulated the tube for the Infirmarian, whose hands shook, and
he too looked long. “It is Life,” he said presently in a breaking
voice. “No Hell! Life created and rejoicing--the work of the Creator.
They live, even as I have dreamed. Then it was no sin for me to dream.
No sin--O God--no sin!”
He flung himself on his knees and began hysterically the _Benedicite
omnia Opera_.
“And now I will see how it is actuated,” said the Friar from Oxford,
thrusting forward again.
“Bring it within. The place is all eyes and ears,” said Stephen.
They walked quietly back along the leads, three English counties laid
out in evening sunshine around them; church upon church, monastery upon
monastery, cell after cell, and the bulk of a vast cathedral moored on
the edge of the banked shoals of sunset.
When they were at the after-table once more they sat down, all except
the Friar who went to the window and huddled bat-like over the thing.
“I see! I see!” he was repeating to himself.
“He’ll not hurt it,” said John. But the Abbot, staring in front of him,
like Roger of Salerno, did not hear. The Infirmarian’s head was on the
table between his shaking arms.
John reached for a cup of wine.
“It was shown to me,” the Abbot was speaking to himself, “in Cairo,
that man stands ever between two Infinities--of greatness and
littleness. Therefore, there is no end--either to life--or----”
“And _I_ stand on the edge of the grave,” snarled Roger of Salerno.
“Who pities _me_?”
“Hush!” said Thomas the Infirmarian. “The little creatures shall be
sanctified--sanctified to the service of His sick.”
“What need?” John of Burgos wiped his lips. “It shows no more than the
shapes of things. It gives good pictures. I had it at Granada. It was
brought from the East, they told me.”
Roger of Salerno laughed with an old man’s malice. “What of Mother
Church? Most Holy Mother Church? If it comes to Her ears that we have
spied into Her Hell without Her leave, where do we stand?”
“At the stake,” said the Abbot of St. Illod’s, and, raising his voice a
trifle. “You hear that? Roger Bacon, heard you that?”
The Friar turned from the window, clutching the compasses tighter.
“No, no!” he appealed. “Not with Falcodi--not with our English-hearted
Foulkes made Pope. He’s wise--he’s learned. He reads what I have put
forth. Foulkes would never suffer it.”
“‘Holy Pope is one thing, Holy Church another,’” Roger quoted.
“But I--_I_ can bear witness it is no Art Magic,” the Friar went on.
“Nothing is it, except Art optical--wisdom after trial and experiment,
mark you. I can prove it, and--my name weighs with men who dare think.”
“Find them!” croaked Roger of Salerno. “Five or six in all the world.
That makes less than fifty pounds by weight of ashes at the stake. I
have watched such men--reduced.”
“I will not give this up!” The Friar’s voice cracked in passion and
despair. “It would be to sin against the Light.”
“No, no! Let us--let us sanctify the little animals of Varro,” said
Thomas.
Stephen leaned forward, fished his ring out of the cup, and slipped it
on his finger. “My sons,” said he, “we have seen what we have seen.”
“That it is no magic but simple Art,” the Friar persisted.
“’Avails nothing. In the eyes of Mother Church we have seen more than
is permitted to man.”
“But it was Life--created and rejoicing,” said Thomas.
“To look into Hell as we shall be judged--as we shall be proved--to
have looked, is for priests only.”
“Or green-sick virgins on the road to sainthood who, for cause any
mid-wife could give you----”
The Abbot’s half-lifted hand checked Roger of Salerno’s outpouring.
“Nor may even priests see more in Hell than Church knows to be there.
John, there is respect due to Church as well as to Devils.”
“My trade’s the outside of things,” said John quietly. “I have my
patterns.”
“But you may need to look again for more,” the Friar said.
“In my craft, a thing done is done with. We go on to new shapes after
that.”
“And if we trespass beyond bounds, even in thought, we lie open to the
judgment of the Church,” the Abbot continued.
“But thou knowest--_knowest_!” Roger of Salerno had returned to the
attack. “Here’s all the world in darkness concerning the causes of
things--from the fever across the lane to thy Lady’s--thine own
Lady’s--eating malady. Think!”
“I have thought upon it, Salerno! I have thought indeed.”
Thomas the Infirmarian lifted his head again; and this time he did not
stammer at all. “As in the water, so in the blood must they rage and
war with each other! I have dreamed these ten years--I thought it was a
sin--but my dreams and Varro’s are true! Think on it again! Here’s the
Light under our very hand!”
“Quench it! You’d no more stand to roasting than--any other. I’ll give
you the case as Church--as I myself--would frame it. Our John here
returns from the Moors, and shows us a hell of devils contending in the
compass of one drop of water. Magic past clearance! You can hear the
faggots crackle.”
“But thou knowest! Thou hast seen it all before! For man’s poor sake!
For old friendship’s sake--Stephen!” The Friar was trying to stuff the
compasses into his bosom as he appealed.
“What Stephen de Sautré knows, you his friends know also. I would have
you, now, obey the Abbot of St. Illod’s. Give to me!” He held out his
ringed hand.
“May I--may John here--not even make a drawing of one--one screw?” said
the broken Friar, in spite of himself.
“Nowise!” Stephen took it over. “Your dagger, John. Sheathed will
serve.”
He unscrewed the metal cylinder, laid it on the table, and with the
dagger’s hilt smashed some crystal to sparkling dust which he swept
into a scooped hand and cast behind the hearth.
“It would seem,” said he, “the choice lies between two sins. To deny
the world a Light which is under our hand, or to enlighten the
world before her time. What you have seen, I saw long since among
the physicians at Cairo. And I know what doctrine they drew from it.
Hast _thou_ dreamed, Thomas? I also--with fuller knowledge. But this
birth, my sons, is untimely. It will be but the mother of more death,
more torture, more division, and greater darkness in this dark age.
Therefore I, who know both my world and the Church, take this Choice
on my conscience. Go! It is finished.”
He thrust the wooden part of the compasses deep among the beech logs
till all was burned.
[5] Hymn No. 226, A. and M., “The world is very evil.”