CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

AT first Goldmund lived in a guest-cell within the enclosure. Then, on his own demand, they gave him a lodging, facing the smithy, on one of the many outbuildings which surrounded the great courtyard, wide as a marketplace.

This return held such potent memories that sometimes he would feel himself bewitched. These folk, both monks and laymen, were at work, and left him in peace. They lived their own strong well-ordered life around him. But the trees in the courtyard knew him, the arched doors and pointed windows, the flagstones in every passage, the shrivelled rose trees in the cloister, the storks' nests on refectory roof and granary. Every stick and stone held some gentle memory of his boyhood, and his love impelled him to seek out each, listen again for every cloister-sound, the Sunday bells, and bells to offices, the rushing of the dark millstream between its narrow walls, green with moss, the clatter of sandals, the evening jingle of keys, as the brother-porter went his rounds for the night. By the stone gutter into which, from the roof of the laymen's refectory, rainwater dripped, just as of old, there sprouted still the same small herbs, crane's-bill and plantain. The apple tree in the smith's garden spread wide, gnarled branches, just as before. But more than any other sound or sight, it rejoiced him to hear the little tinkling school-bell and, in a play-hour, watch the cloister schoolboys come clattering down the steps into the yard. How young and fresh and foolish they all looked. Could he ever really have been so young, so coltish, so apple-cheeked, so callow?

And, within this cloister he knew so well, he found another, scarcely known to him. On the very first day he had been struck by it, and its beauty and significance increased, so that it took some time before it grew to be part of the other. This new cloister had no new features in it; each object stood exactly where he had known it as a boy, and where it had stood a hundred years before him. It was he who no longer saw with boy's eyes. He could feel and admire the massing of these buildings, the strength of the vaultings in the church, the beauty of the old paintings, of the figures in wood and stone on the altars, and in every niche above the doors. And yet he had known them all before. Now he had eyes for their beauty, and for the beauty of the spirit that had made them.

He would stand in the upper chapel before the old stone Mother of God. Even in his boyhood she had pleased him, and he had tried to copy her many times. But only now, with open eyes, did he grow aware that she was a masterpiece, such a work as he could never surpass, even with his best and happiest craftsmanship. And there were many more such wonders in Mariabronn, though none stood alone as a happy accident, and all were born of the one spirit. Each had its own place under these vaultings, between these walls and ancient pillars, as though they formed its natural home.

All that many centuries had built, chiselled, painted, thought, lived, taught here, sprang of one stem, was born of the one spirit, as related as are the branches of a tree.

Goldmund felt small indeed in this ordered world, and never smaller than when he saw Narziss, the Abbot John, his oldest friend, sway and control this mighty unity. Whatever wide difference between persons marked off this learned, thin-lipped Abbot John from the gentle, simple, homely Abbot Daniel, each of them was serving the same whole, the same thought, the same role of life; had brought it his body as an offering, taken from it his dignity and worth. It made them as alike as did their habit.

Here, in the midst of his own cloister, Narziss grew to a giant in Goldmund's eyes, although he managed still to treat him as his pleasant host and good companion. Soon he scarcely dared to call him Narziss.

'Listen, Abbot John,' he said to him once, 'I shall have to learn to call you that in the end! I must tell you I find it pleasant to live with you. You almost tempt me to make my general confession, and then, when my penance is done, bed me to take you in as your lay brother. But hear me – it would mean the end of our friendship. You would be the abbot, and I the lay brother. And to live forever as I am, and watch your labours, and be nothing myself, and do nothing – that is more than I can bear any longer. I want to work, and show you what I really am, so that then you can judge for yourself if you think me worth saving from the gallows.'

'I rejoice to hear it,' said Narziss, more formally and precisely even than usual. 'I will send for the smith and carpenter at once, and tell them they are to be at your orders. Use anything you can find in the cloister, and whatever else you may need, make out a list for me, and I will have it fetched for you by carriers. Now you shall hear what I think of you and your purposes. You must give me a little time to tell you my mind. I am a scholar, and would strive to set forth the matter as I conceive it, and I have no other language but the philosopher's. Will you hear me again, as patiently as you used?'

'I will try to follow you, Narziss.'

'Do you recollect how, even in our school days, I often told you you were a poet? In those days I considered you a poet, since both in what you wrote and liked best to read, there was always a sense of impatience with anything abstract and conceptual. Sounds were what you loved most in language, or any word which conveyed some sensible image; that is to say, a word which could give a picture.'

'Forgive me,' Goldmund interrupted, 'but are not these concepts and abstractions which you say you prefer to images, pictures in their own way? Or do you really need to use words which can give no clear image of anything? How can you think, unless you picture something?'

'Good that you should ask! Most certainly we can think without images. Thought and imagery have nothing at all to do with one another. Thinking is not done in pictures, but in concepts, and formulae. There where poetry ends begins philosophy. That was what we quarrelled over so often, long ago. For you the world was composed of pictures, for me of concepts. I always said we should never make a scholar of you, and I said, too, that this was not a lack in you, since you were master in the realm of images. Now listen, and I will make it all plain to you. If you, instead of escaping into the world, had remained on here as a scholar, the end might have been your own undoing. You would have turned into a mystic. And mystics, to put it plainly and rather bluntly, are those thinkers who cannot free their minds of images, and so not thinkers at all. They are secret poets, poets without verses, painters without a brush, musicians without any notes. There are many good and highly gifted mystics, but almost without exception they are unhappy. You might have been just such a one. But instead, God be praised, you are a craftsman; you have conquered your own world, in which you can be lord and creator, instead of having remained an imperfect thinker.'

'I fear,' said Goldmund, 'I shall never have a right idea of your way of thinking without images.'

'Oh yes, I will give it you, now at once. Listen; a thinker strives to find out the essence of the world by means of logic, and so to define it. He knows that our understanding, and logic, its instrument, are imperfect tools with which to work – just as any skilled craftsman knows very well that no brush or chisel ever made, could give the perfect, shining form of a saint or angel. Yet both these – the thinkers and craftsmen – strive to do it, each in his own way. That is all they can do, or dare to do. These are the highest, most significant human activities, since both are striving to fulfil themselves by means of the talents nature gave them. That is why I used so often to say to you: “Don't try to ape ascetics and scholars, but be yourself; seek to fulfil yourself”.'

'I can half understand what you mean. But what is this saying - “fulfil yourself”?'

'That is a philosopher's concept, which I cannot express in any other words. For us, the disciples of Aristotle and St Thomas, the highest of all concepts is perfect being. Perfect being is God. All else that is, is only half. It is imperfect and forever becoming, is mixed, and composed of possibilities. But God is whole. He is One, has no possibilities, and for us there is no perfection, no final being. But in all by which we pass on, from potentiality into action, from possibility to fulfilment, we have our share in this true being of God. That is what I mean when I say, “to fulfil oneself”. Your own experience must have taught you this, and you have carved many figures in your time. Now, when any such work seems to you really achieved, when you have set forth a human shape, freed from its inessentials, and held within its own clear and perfect form, you as a craftsman have “fulfilled” the image of that man.'

'I understand you now.'

'You see me, amice, here in a cloister, in an office which makes it relatively easy for such a nature as mine to fulfil itself. I live in a community and tradition which further my effort. A monastery is not a heaven; it is full of imperfection and sin: yet nonetheless, for men of my kind, a rule well followed is far better than the life of the world. I do not merely speak of manners and customs, and morality, though, even in practice, abstract thought, which I, by my vocation, must use and teach, demands a certain protection from worldly things. So that here, in Mariabronn, I have had a far easier task to fulfil myself, than have you in the life outside. I much admire you for having found your way and made yourself a craftsman and an artist. Your life has been far harder than mine.'

Goldmund flushed to hear this praise, and yet it rejoiced him. He interrupted, to change their theme.

'Though I understood most of what you were saying, there is one thing I cannot get into my head. This thing you have just called “abstract thought” must be a kind of thought with nothing in it; or else in words conveying nothing.'

'Well, here's an example to make it clear. Think of mathematics. What pictures do you get from numerals? Or from plus and minus signs? Or from an equation? None at all. When you solve an arithmetical or algebraic problem no image in the world will help you to do it. All that you do is to carry out a formal task, by means of a certain method which you have learned.'

'That's true, Narziss. When you write me down a row of figures or signs, I can work my way through without any images, and let myself be helped by plus and minus, by square roots, and brackets, and so forth. That is to say, I could once! Today I've forgotten all about it. But I can't see how such a formal task can be of use to anyone at all, except as a mental exercise for schoolboys. No doubt it's very good to learn to reckon. But I should think it senseless for a man to sit all his life doing sums, and covering sheets of paper with rows of figures.'

'You are mistaken, Goldmund. You imagine such a busy reckoner to go on and on, solving new school-tasks set by a schoolmaster. But he can set himself his own problems, they can grow in his mind to mighty forces. A thinker must have worked over much real and imaginary space, mathematically, and planned it out, before he dares confront the problem of space itself.'

'Yes, but this problem of space, as a subject for thought, does not seem to me an object on which any man should waste his labour and years. To me the word “space” means nothing, and not worth a thought in itself, unless I can picture a real space – let us say the space between the stars. Though certainly to see that, and measure it, would not be a bad way of spending time.'

Narziss interrupted, with a smile:

'What you really mean is that thought itself seems useless to you, but not the application of thought to the visible and practical world. I can answer you there. We shall never lack chances, nor yet the will, to apply our thinking. This thinker, Narziss, for instance, has used the results of his thought a hundred times over, on behalf of Goldmund, his friend, and on that of each of his monks, and does every hour. But how can a thinker apply anything, unless he has learned it, and practised it first? Poets and craftsmen continually practise their eyes and fancy, and we praise their skill, even if they only use it to give us bad and unreal images. You cannot reject thought as such, and then only ask for it “practical uses”. The contradiction is clear. So leave me in peace to think my thoughts, and judge me when I show you their results, just as I will judge your craftsmanship by your works. At present you are restless and moody because there are still obstacles set between you and your craft. Clear them away, then! Find or build yourself a workshop, and set to work. Many cares will resolve themselves with that.'

Goldmund asked nothing better.

He chose a shed beside the courtyard gate, at present empty and good enough for a workshop. From the carpenter he ordered a drawing-table, and other furnishings, for which he set down the exactest measurements. He made out a list of all that the cloister carriers were to bring him, piece by piece, from the neighbouring cities – a long list. He picked out blocks, at the carpenter's shop, or in the forest, of every kind of wood already cut, had these set aside, and piled one above the other, to dry, on the grass plot behind his shop, where, with his own hands, he built a roof over them. To the smith also he gave much work, whose son, a young and dreamy boy, he had charmed completely, and won over to him. Together, for half the day, they would stand in the forge, at anvil or whetstone, hammering out all the many curved and straight-bladed chiselling-knives, gimlets, and shaving-irons they needed to work on the wood. The smith's son, Erich, a lad of twenty, became Goldmund's friend, and helped him in everything. He was eager to learn, and at times when the sight of Narziss and his cloister filled Goldmund's heart with shame for his idleness, he could always find his solace in Erich, who shyly loved and made a hero of him. The boy would beg for tales of the bishop's city and Master Nicholas, and these Goldmund told very gladly, until suddenly he would feel surprised to find himself sitting there, like an old man, full of tales of deeds and journeyings long ago, when his own life was only just beginning.

No-one, since none had known him before, could perceive how these last months had aged and altered him, making him far older than his years. The hazards and needs of vagrants' lives may already have begun to sap his strength, when he met the plague, with all its terrors, and experienced imprisonment by the count, with the horror of that night in the castle cellar. These things had shaken him to the depths, and many signs of his suffering still remained; grey hairs in his yellow beard, thin lines in his face, nights when his sleep was troubled, with, at times, a certain weariness in his heart, a slackening-off of desire and curiosity, the dim and drab sensation of satiety. But youth came back in all his talks with Erich, in the hours when he could loiter in the smithy and carpenter's shop. Then he was full of life, and beloved by them all, though at other times he would sit for an hour together, dreaming and smiling to himself, full of the strangest apathy and indifference.

Hardest of all was to decide which figure he should first set out to carve. This, the beginning of his work, done to repay the cloister's hospitality, must be no chance and idle product, quickly achieved to excite the curious, but must spring from the very heart and life of Mariabronn, and, like those ancient carvings in the church, be a worthy part of the very fabric. He would have liked best of all to carve a pulpit or an altar, but for neither was there need, nor any space. Yet he thought of something equally good. A high niche had been built into the wall of the Fathers' refectory, in which, at meals, a younger brother stood, to read out the Lives of the Saints. This niche was without any ornament, and Goldmund made up his mind to clothe the stairway up to the lectern, and the desk itself from which they read, in a wooden garment of decoration, with many figures, like those around a pulpit, some in half-relief, and others almost freed from the wood. He had told the abbot his plan, who praised and welcomed it. When at last the work could be begun, Christmas was past, and the ground covered in snow.

Goldmund's life took on another shape. Now he might have left the cloister. None ever saw him now; no longer did he await the end of a lesson to watch the boys troop down into the court; he strayed no more in the woods, nor loitered idle in the cloister. His meals were eaten with the miller – though not that miller he visited as a boy – none now could come into his workshop, save only his assistant, Erich, though sometimes, for days together, even he would never hear a word from him.

For the winding gallery round the lectern he had thought out the following plan: of the two halves into which the work should be divided, one was to set forth the world, the other the word of God. The lower half, the stairs up to the desk, growing out of a strong oak, and winding about it, should figure all creation, the works of nature, the simple lives of patriarchs and prophets. The upper, the parapet of the desk, would have figures of the Four Evangelists. To one of these he would give the face of Abbot Daniel; another should be his successor, the dead Pater Martin, and in the figure of Luke he would carve Master Nicholas, for all time.

He had many stubborn obstacles to surmount, far harder than he ever would have guessed. This grieved him, but with a pleasant grief. He wooed and enticed his work, as full of despair and delight as though he had been courting a difficult woman, struggling with it, tenderly and firmly, as a fisherman angles a great pike, learning from every difficulty, and making his fingers still more delicate. Everything else was forgotten – the cloister, and almost even Narziss. Though the abbot inquired several times he managed to see nothing but drawings.

But then, one day, in compensation, Goldmund surprised him with the demand to have himself shriven and assoiled.

'Till now,' he said, 'I could never bring myself to ask it of you. I felt small enough before you already. Now I am not so small. I have my work, and am not a cipher any more. After all, since I live in a cloister, I feel I ought to submit, like all the others.'

He would not wait, since now he felt the hour had come for it. Moreover in his first weeks of meditation here, plunged as he had been in sudden memories, born of all these sights of his youth – and later, too, as he told his tales to Erich – he had seen, in looking back over his life, a certain shape and order in his days.

Narziss shrived him without ceremony. His confession lasted two whole hours. The abbot, with an unmoved face, heard all the adventures, griefs, and sins of his friend, asking many questions, but never breaking in on what he heard, listening, as unperturbed as ever, when Goldmund affirmed that he lacked all faith, admitting that he had ceased to believe either in God's justice or His mercy. He was struck by many things the penitent said to him; could see how deeply he had been shaken, how scarred he had been, how near at times to utter shipwreck. But then again he was forced to smile at the childlike innocence of this friend, whom he found so remorseful and afflicted, so full of despair at what he deemed his sacrilegious thoughts, though these were harmless enough, compared with some of those that haunted his confessor – to the dark chasms of doubt in Narziss's mind.

Goldmund was surprised, disappointed even, that Narziss should take his sins so lightly, though this priest admonished and punished him without stint for his neglect of prayer and of the sacraments. He laid on him the penance to live chaste, and fast for a month, before he took the Host again. He must hear the first mass every morning, and each night say a Pater Noster, and canticle to Mary.

Then he said: 'I beg and adjure you not to take this penance lightly. I do not know if you can still remember the text of the mass. You should follow it word for word, letting its sense sink into your mind. The Pater, and some canticles I will give you, we can go through together today, and I will show you passages and words in them whose worth to you I would have you mark very clearly. We should never speak God's words, or listen to them as we speak and listen to those of other men. If you find yourself saying them by rote (and this will happen very often to you) you must think of what I tell you now. Then you should start the prayer afresh, saying the words in such a guise that you feel them in your very heart. And now I will tell you how to do it.'

Whether by some fortunate chance or because the abbot's knowledge of souls went deep enough to contrive such an issue, his time of penance and assoilment brought Goldmund many days of peace and harmony, days which rejoiced his mind, in the midst of the cares and obstacles of his work. He would find himself refreshed each morning and evening by the light, yet precise and carefully chosen spiritual exercise: freed from the anxious striving of his days, his heart and mind drawn back from the dangerous solitude of his craft, into kinship with a higher order – to a certainty which freed his mind, and led him as a child into God's kingdom

Forced as he was to struggle in utter solitude with his images, giving them his whole strength and his senses, this one hour's gentle withdrawal led him back, again and again, into contentment. Often, as he worked, he would chafe with rage, or else be filled with mad delight: this quiet penance laid on him by his friend was like a plunge into deep, cold water, cleansing him of the pride of his desire, the other pride of his despair. But it did not always succeed. Often, after a day of restless work, he could find no calm, and no appeasement. Several times he forgot these prayers altogether. Often, as he strove to plunge down again into their peace, he would find himself hindered and tormented by the thought that all prayers, in the end, are nothing but our childish striving to find a God who does not really exist, or, if He does, can never help us. He complained to his friend of it.

'Keep to it still,' said Narziss, 'you have promised, and you must stay it out. It is not for you to think whether God is listening to your prayers, or whether, indeed, a God exists at all, as you would imagine Him. Nor have you to fret or puzzle as to whether all this is so much child's play. In comparison with the God whom we petition, all our human strivings are those of children. You must forbid yourself utterly all such silly, childish thoughts during your exercise. Say your Pater Noster, and your canticle, and give yourself up to the words, filling yourself, and letting them penetrate, just as though you were singing or playing a lute. If you sang or played you would not let your mind go hunting after clever thoughts and speculations, but would strive to give out each tone and fingering as clearly and perfectly as you could. When we sing we don't hinder ourselves with asking if our singing is really a waste of time. We sing, and that is all! That is how you must pray.'

It succeeded again. Again his fretful, covetous self was merged into the wide-arched hierarchy of this cloister, the fair words poured down into his heart, and ascended through his body like so many stars.

The abbot watched with deep delight how Goldmund, even after his time of penance, and now that he had taken God's Body, still followed the daily exercise he had set, and continued so for months and weeks together.

Meanwhile his work progressed. From the wide block, cut into spiral steps, there jutted forth a world of sprouting shapes, plants, beasts, and men, entwined together, and in their midst stood Father Noah, among his vines with clustering grapes on them – a picture-book and song of living thanks from all God's creatures in their beauty, each free after his own kind, yet led by nature and secret law.

In all these moths Erich alone might see the work, who was taken to do prentices' labour on it, and so had now no other thought except to be a carver himself. But even he, on many days, was forbidden to enter the workshop, though on others Goldmund was his friend, instructing him, and letting him try his hand, delighted at heart to have found a pupil and disciple. When the work was done, if it were a good one, he meant to beg Erich of his father, and take him as his regular journeyman.

At the figures of the Four Evangelists he could only work on his best days, when all was peace, and no pain or scruple teased his mind. The best among them, he felt, was the figure he had taken from Abbot Daniel, and he loved it deeply, since innocence and gentleness shone in the face. His image of Master Nicholas pleased him less, though Erich admired it most of all. It showed too much grief and conflict, seemed full of noble projects to create, yet desperate with the secret knowledge that all our works are as nought, tormented for its lost unity and innocence.

When Abbot Daniel was quite ready he bade Erich sweep out the workshop. All the other figures he wound in cloths, leaving only this one full in the light. Then he went off to find Narziss, but, since the abbot had no time for him, waited in patience till the morning. Towards midday he led Narziss into the workshop.

His friend stood and gazed. He took his time, examining the figure before him with all the care and attention scholars use. Goldmund waited behind him in silence, trying to quell the storm in his heart.

'Oh,' he thought, 'if one of us fails now it will be bad! If my work is not good, or else he cannot understand it, then all my labour will have no meaning. I should have waited, after all.'

These minutes seemed like hours. He remembered the day when Master Nicholas had stood there holding his first drawing, and waited, pressing his damp and burning hands together.

But when Narziss turned, he knew he was safe. He could see how something had flowered in that spare, keen face; some blossom of delight he had never seen in it since their days together in his boyhood: a smile, almost shy and fearful, flickered about those eyes, all will and intellect, the smile of an undying love, a shimmer, as though its pride and solitude had been in that instant broken up, and only the heart, with all its love, were visible.

'Goldmund,' said Narziss, very softly, and, even now, weighing his words, 'you will not ask me suddenly to become a critic of statues. That I am not, as well you know. I could tell you nothing about your art which would not sound like prattle in your ears. But let me say only this – at my first glance I knew this apostle for Abbot Daniel, not only as he was, but as all that he meant to us in those days; his dignity, his gentleness, his simplicity. And even as our own dead Abbot Daniel stood before our eyes and our young reverence, so do I see him here again, and with him all that was holy to us in those days, all that has made that time so unforgettable. You have repaid my friendship most richly, Goldmund, since not only have you given me Abbot Daniel, but have shown me your whole self for the first time, now. I have seen you as you are. Let us say no more of it – I dare not. Oh, Goldmund, that this hour should ever have come for us.'

The wide room was very still. Goldmund saw how deeply his friend rejoiced. Yet a kind of discomfort choked his answer.

'Yes,' he said shortly, 'I am glad of this. But now it is time you went to the refectory.'