dislodged a little cloud of ice crystals; they fell quietly, sparkling against the greyness of the sky.
Third Measure
BROTHER JOHN
The workshop was dim and low-roofed, lit only by a pair of barred and round-topped windows at its farther end. Along the walls of rough-dressed ashlar, stone slabs stood in lines. In one corner of the chamber was a massive sink, fed by crudely fashioned pipes and taps, beside it a bench; there was a faint tang in the air, the raw, sharp smell of wet sand.
At the bench a man was working; he was short and ruddy-faced, slightly portly and robed in the dark crimson of the Adhelmians. As he worked he whistled between his teeth, faintly and tunelessly. The habit had more than once brought down on the tonsured head of Brother John the disapproval of his superiors; but it was a part of his nature, and unstoppable.
On the bench in front of the monk lay a slab of limestone some two feet long by four or more inches thick. Beside it were boxes of silver sand; Brother John was engaged in grinding the surface of the stone, pouring the sand through wells in a circular iron muller which he afterwards spun with some dexterity, whirling an emulsion of water and abrasive across the slab. The job was both tiring and exacting; when finished, the stone must have no trace of bowing in either direction. From time to time he checked it for concavity, laying a steel straightedge across its surface. After some hours the slab was nearing completion, and its most critical stage/The grained texture imparted by the muller must also be free of blemish; Master Albrecht would be certain to detect any irregularity, and Brother John knew very well what would result. From his scrip the master printer would produce a short steel bodkin, kept for the purpose, and with its tip incise a deep cross on the limestone slab, which it would be John’s pleasure to grind away. He had in fact just finished erasing one such insigne of the great man’s disapproval. He washed the stone down carefully, employing a length of hose attached to one of the taps. He checked its flatness once more, working delicately, avoiding all contact of his admittedly greaseless fingers. The slightest suspicion of grease, a smudge of fat from the tympan of a press, the brushing of a sweaty hand, would spell disaster; in fact for their finest work the monks of the lithography section wore linen masks, to avoid contaminating the stones with their breath.
All was in order; John proceeded, still whistling, to apply the last delicate graining, using for the purpose the finest of the stacked grades of sand. The job was finally done; a last critical examination of the beautiful creamy surface and he washed the stone down again, leaning it against the wall to swill the grit from its bottom and sides. Then he carried it puffing across the workshop, edged it onto the platform of a small lift set into the thickness of the wall. A tug at the bellpull beside it, a faint answering jangle from above and the object of his labour was drawn smoothly upward out of sight. He tidied his equipment, returning the trays of sand to their labelled shelves and scrubbing down the sink. The floor drain clogged noisily; he rootled in it with a stick till the last of the water had sluiced away, then followed the stone by a twisting staircase to the upper air. In contrast to the grinding shop, the main litho studio was lofty and bright. Tall windows opened onto a vista of rolling hills, the lush farm country of the Dorset and Somerset border, gay now with April sunshine. Along one wall of the room more stones were stacked; beside another a low dais gave to the desk of Master Albrecht a dignity fitting his position. Behind the desk was- the door to his diminutive office, a cubicle full to overflowing with bills, invoices, receipts for that and this; beside it another door opened into the ink store, where cans of delicious colour were stacked in rows on slatted pinewood shelves. The ink store too had its distinctive smell, rich and sweet. In the centre of the room two long white- scrubbed tables were spread with pulls of a current job; round them four of the half dozen novices attached to the department sat patiently, snipping out the work with scissors. Behind the tables, on a second raised plinth, stood the presses; three of them spaced out along the wall, gleaming clean, Master Albrecht’s pride and chief delight.
The machines were simply made. Each bed was lifted to printing height by a tall lever and propelled by a hefty wooden-spoked wheel; over the bed an iron frame supported a leather-covered wedge, adjustable for pressure. A brass tympan, hinged at the farther end of the bed and tensioned by lead screws along its edges, protected the stone from the wedge. The tympans had on one occasion in the past been the cause of a contretemps in which Brother John had figured prominently. They were labelled as bear fat but about the composition of which John had expressed the gravest suspicions. In warm weather it stank abominably; and John, to whose sensitive nostrils bad odours were an offence, had taken it on himself to scrounge from the town’s one garage a tin of the newfangled mineral grease, with which he had anointed the presses. The rage of Master Albrecht had known no bounds; for several weeks afterwards John had had visited on him penances of a peculiarly unpleasant nature, not the least of which had been the removal of the grease and the resubstitution of the time- honoured bear fat. The little Brother had submitted with as good a grace as was possible under the circumstances, though he had vowed privately that were he ever to rise to the dizzy heights of Master of Lithography the noxious compound would be banished utterly from his domain. Beside the presses were more sinks, and the upper outlet of the lift from the grinding shop; by it the stone, approved by Master Albrecht, was propped on its side being fanned dry by a boy armed with a rotating flag of cardboard on a stick. There were wall racks lined with the leather ink rollers, napped and smooth; beneath them more limestone slabs served as pallets. At one of them Brother Joseph was working; a fairhaired novitiate, skull as yet unshaved.
When Brother John entered he was still whistling; the sound died abruptly, scorched out of existence by Master Albrecht’s fiery stare. He threaded his way across the room, stood waiting impatiently while Brother Joseph finished spreading ink and kneading it into a roller. A stone lay ready on the bed of the nearest press, beside it a stack of two-colour pulls. John sponged the slab lightly, dipping water from the bucket alongside the press, stepped back as his assistant advanced with the roller. The image was charged, fed delicately at first then more firmly; John inverted one of the pulls, slipped through the paper the two needles mounted in paintbrush handles with which the prints were located on the crossed register marks. Then down with the tympan, lift to pressure; a small adjustment to the wedge and the job rolled through. John released the bed, hauled it back, raised the tympan, then more carefully the paper sheet, held the design up to the light. The colours glowed cheerfully; a drawing of a buxom country girl holding a sheaf of barley, and the inscription Harvesters Ale; brewed under licence at the monastery of Saint Adhelm, Sherborne, Dorset.
The ringing of the noon bell put an end to further work; the monks, freed temporarily from their vow of silence, filed out chattering to the refectory. John and Brother Joseph took their lunches to a corner table, sat apart while they planned out the afternoon’s operations; later they would lack the benefit of the spoken word and notewriting, as well as being tedious, was somewhat frowned on as an evasion. At two o’clock, as they were rising to return to the litho room, a novice approached bearing a slip of paper. He handed the message to Brother John; the little monk read it, scratched at his pate, showed it fleetingly to Brother Joseph and rolled his eyes in mock distress. He was summoned to the august presence of his Abbott; he scurried off revolving in his mind a list of sins both of omission and commission for which he might be being called to account.
A half hour’s wait in the great man’s antechamber did little to improve his state of mind; John sat and fidgeted and watched the squares of sunlight move across the walls while Master Thomas, the monastery’s accountant, alternately fixed him with a coldly accusing stare and inscribed, with a hideously squeaking pen, the endless rolls of parchment on which the records of the Order were kept. At two-thirty, Brother John was finally admitted to the presence of his spiritual superior.
Events tended to repeat themselves; Father Meredith reading at length from a file of notes, glancing up from time to time over his square-framed spectacles as Brother John fretted and puffed, red in the face now with concern. John’s visits to the sanctum had been few, and the memory of them was not on the whole encouraging. His eyes moved restlessly, taking in the remembered details of the room. The Reverend Father’s study was less austere in character than the rest of the monastery of Saint Adhelm; a carpet of intricate Persian design covered the floor, one wall was lined with books while in a corner stood a globe of the world supported by a group of handsome bronze zephyrs. On the leather-topped desk more books and papers were piled untidily. There too stood the Abbott’s typewriter; a monumental machine, its superstructure framed by Corinthian pillars that ended obnoxiously in cast-iron paws. A cocktail cabinet, its doors partly ajar, displayed well-stocked shelves; a late Renaissance pieta hung above it while over Father Meredith’s desk loomed a grisly Spanish crucifix.
