Selected
Quotes
(continued) |
As
the sounds of the bells died away a voice began to speak from somewhere
high up in the gloomy shadows above their heads. The magicians
strained their ears to hear it. Many of them were now in such
a state of highly-strung nervousness that they imagined that instructions
were being given to them as in a fairy-tale. They thought
that perhaps mysterious prohibitions were being related to them.
Such instructions and prohibitions, the magicians knew from the
fairy-tales, are usually a little queer, but not very difficult
to conform to - or so it seems at first sight. They generally
follow the style of: "Do not eat the last candied plum in the
blue jar in the corner cupboard," or "Do not beat your
wife with a stick made from wormwood." And yet, as all
fairy-tales relate, circumstances always conspire against the person
who receives the instructions and they find themselves in the middle
of doing the very thing that was forbidden to them and a horrible
fate is thereby brought upon their heads.
At the very least the magicians supposed
that their doom was being slowly recited to them. But it was
not at all clear what language the voice was speaking. Once
Mr Segundus thought he heard a word that sounded like "maleficent"
and another time "interficere" a Latin word meaning
"to kill." The voice itself was not easy to
understand; it bore not the slightest resemblance to a human voice
- which only served to increase the gentlemen's fear that fairies
were about to appear. It was extraordinarily harsh, deep and
rasping; it was like two rough stones being scraped together and
yet the sounds that were produced were clearly intended to be speech
- indeed were speech.
The gentlemen peered up
into the gloom in fearful expectation, but all that could be seen
was the small, dim shape of a stone figure that sprang out from
one of the shafts of a great pillar and jutted into the gloomy void.
As they became accustomed to the queer sound they recognized more
and more words; old English words and old Latin words all mixed
up together as if the speaker had no conception of these being two
distinct languages. Fortunately, this abominable muddle presented
few difficulties to the magicians, most of whom were accustomed
to unravelling the ramblings and writings of the scholars of long
ago. When translated into clear, comprehensible English
it was something like this: Long, long ago, (said the
voice), five hundred years ago or more, on a winter's day at
twilight, a young man entered the Church with a young girl with
ivy leaves in her hair. There was no one else there but the
stones. No one to see him strangle her but the stones.
He let her fall dead upon the stones and no one saw but the stones.
He was never punished for his sin because there were no witnesses
but the stones. The years went by and whenever the man entered
the Church and stood among the congregation the stones cried out
that this was the man who had murdered the girl with the ivy leaves
wound into her hair, but no one ever heard us. But it is not
too late! We know where he is buried! In the corner
of the south transept! Quick! Quick! Fetch picks!
Fetch shovels! Pull up the paving stones. Dig up his
bones! Let them be smashed with the shovel! Dash his
skull against the pillars and break it! Let the stones have
vengeance too! It is not too late! It is not too late!
Hardly had the magicians
had time to digest this and to wonder some more who it was that
spoke, when another stony voice began. This time the voice
seemed to issue from the chancel and it spoke only English; yet
it was a queer sort of English full of ancient and forgotten words.
This voice complained of some soldiers who had entered the Church
and broken some windows. A hundred years later they had come
again and smashed a rood screen, erased the faces of the saints,
carried off plate. Once they had sharpened their arrowheads
on the brim of the font; three hundred years later they had fired
their pistols in the chapter house. The second voice did not
appear to understand that, while a great Church may stand for millennia,
men cannot live so long. "They delight in destruction!"
it cried. "And they themselves deserve only to be destroyed!"
Like the first, this speaker seemed to have stood in the Church
for countless years and had, presumably, heard a great many sermons
and prayers, yet the sweetest of Christian virtues - mercy, love,
meekness - were unknown to him. And all the while the first
voice continued to lament the dead girl with ivy leaves in her hair
and the two gritty voices clashed together in a manner that was
very disagreeable.
Mr Thorpe, who was a valiant
gentleman, peeped into the chancel alone, to discover who it was
that spoke. "It is a statue," he said.
And then the gentlemen
of the York society peered up again into the gloom above their heads
in the direction of the first unearthly voice. And this time
very few of them had any doubts that it was the little stone figure
that spoke, for as they watched they could perceive its stubby stone
arms that it waved about in its distress.
Then all the other statues
and monuments in the Cathedral began to speak and to say in their
stony voices all that they had seen in their stony lives and the
noise was, as Mr Segundus later told Mrs Pleasance, beyond description.
For York Cathedral had many little carved people and strange animals
that flapped their wings.
Many complained of their
neighbours and perhaps this is not so surprizing since they had
been obliged to stand together for so many hundreds of years.
There were fifteen stone kings that stood each upon a stone pedestal
in a great stone screen. Their hair was tightly curled as
if it had been put into curl papers and never brushed out - and
Mrs Honeyfoot could never see them without declaring that she longed
to take a hairbrush to each of their royal heads. From the
first moment of their being able to speak the kings began quarrelling
and scolding each other - for the pedestals were all of a height,
and kings - even stone ones - dislike above all things to be made
equal to others. There was besides a little group of queer
figures with linked arms that looked out with stone eyes from atop
an ancient column. As soon as the spell took effect each of
these tried to push the others away from him, as if even stone arms
begin to ache after a century or so and stone people begin to tire
of being shackled to each other.
One statue spoke what
seemed to be Italian. No one knew why this should be, though
Mr Segundus discovered later that it was a copy of a work by Michael
Angel. It seemed to be describing an entirely different church,
one where vivid black shadows contrasted sharply with brilliant
light. In other words it was describing what the parent-statue
in Rome saw.
Mr Segundus was pleased
to observe that the magicians, though very frightened, remained
within the walls of the Church. Some were so amazed by what
they saw that they soon forgot their fear entirely and ran about
to discover more and more miracles, making observations, writing
down notes with pencils in little memorandum books as if they had
forgotten the perfidious document which from today would prevent
them from studying magic. For a long time the magicians of
York (soon, alas, to be magicians no more!) wandered through the
aisles and saw marvels. And at every moment their ears were
assaulted by the hideous cacophony of a thousand stone voices all
speaking together.
In the chapter house there
were stone canopies with many little stone heads with strange headgear
that all chattered and cackled together. Here were marvellous
stone carvings of a hundred English trees: hawthorn, oak, blackthorn,
wormwood, cherry, and bryony. Mr Segundus found two stone
dragons no longer than his forearm, which slipped one after the
other, over and under and between stone hawthorn branches, stone
hawthorn leaves, stone hawthorn roots and stone hawthorn tendrils.
They moved, it seemed, with as much ease as any other creature and
yet the sound of so many stone muscles moving together under a stone
skin, that scraped stone ribs, that clashed against a heart made
of stone - and the sound of stone claws rattling over stone branches
- was quite intolerable and Mr Segundus wondered that they could
bear it. He observed a little cloud of gritty dust, such as
attends the work of a stonecutter, that surrounded them and rose
up in the air, and he believed that if the spell allowed them to
remain in motion for any length of time they would wear themselves
away to a sliver of limestone.
Stone leaves and herbs
quivered and shook as if tossed in the breeze and some of them so
far emulated their vegetable counterparts as to grow. Later,
when the spell had broken, strands of stone ivy and stone rose briars
would be discovered wound around chairs and lecterns and prayer-books
where no stone ivy or briars had been before.
But it was not only the
magicians of the York society who saw wonders that day. Whether
he had intended it or not Mr Norrell's magic had spread beyond the
Cathedral close and into the city. Three statues from the
west front of the Cathedral had been taken to Mr Taylor's workshops
to be mended. Centuries of Yorkshire rain had worn down these
images and no one knew any longer what great personages they were
intended to represent. At half past ten one of Mr Taylor's
masons had just raised his chisel to the face of one of these statues
intending to fashion it into the likeness of a pretty saintess;
at that moment the statue cried out aloud and raised its arm to
ward off the chisel, causing the poor workman to fall down in a
swoon. The statues were later returned to the exterior of
the Cathedral untouched, their faces worn as flat as biscuits and
as bland as butter.
Then all at once there
seemed a change in the sound and one by one the voices stopped until
the magicians heard the bells of St Michael-le-Belfrey ring for
the half hour again. The first voice (the voice of the little
figure high up in the darkness) continued for some time after the
others had fallen silent, upon its old theme of the undiscovered
murderer (It is not too late! It is not too late!)
until it too fell silent.
The world had changed while the magicians
had been inside the Church. Magic had returned to England
whether the magicians wished it to or not. Other changes of
a more prosaic nature had also occurred: the sky had filled with
heavy, snow-laden clouds. These were scarcely grey at all,
but a queer mixture of slate-blue and sea-green. This curious
coloration made a kind of twilight such as one imagines is the usual
illumination in fabled kingdoms under the sea."
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