The Kneeling Stair

For three Days, Inquirer and Pliable-Gloss walked north across the flat country outside Mine-Own-Meaning. The pilgrims tell me it’s a dull stretch, low hedges and grey grass and not much else, and the worst of it for a man raised among mirrors is that he doesn’t know where to put his eyes. Pliable kept turning his head as if he expected to catch himself in a puddle or a window. Inquirer, at first, hardly dared look up. But every evening he opened the old Book in front of the iron lantern, and the little white flame came up and showed him a stone of the road and then another, and that steadied him more than he could explain.

On the fourth morning the land started to climb, and by noon they were standing at the foot of a wall of rock that ran off east and west out of sight. It went up so high that the clouds lay against it like sheep bunched against a fence. The road ran straight to the bottom of it and stopped.

Or it seemed to stop. Coming closer, they saw it went in.

There was a gap in the cliff no taller than a child, and over it someone had cut in old square capitals:

If Any Of You Lack Wisdom, Let Him Ask.

Inquirer held up the lantern and looked in. A stair went up into the rock, steep and narrow, under a roof so low that nobody could have climbed it standing, or even stooping. You would have to go up it on your knees.

“Oh, no,” said Pliable. “Surely not. Master, there has to be another way. Nobody climbs a mountain on his knees.”

Inquirer didn’t answer straight away. He was reading the letters over the door a second time, and his heart was going down. There had been prayers of a sort in Mine-Own-Meaning. Before the Lord’s Day reading the Master of the Company would shut his eyes and say, very sweetly, “Let each of us find what this passage means to us,” and that was the end of it. Nobody had ever asked the Book anything, or asked its Author. There had seemed no need. If a text means whatever you bring to it, what is there to ask for?

“I think,” he said slowly, “this is the first step of the road. I think nobody reads the Book rightly who hasn’t first gone to its Author and owned that he can’t read it on his own.”

“But you can read,” Pliable said. “You read better than anyone in the city. You could gloss a Psalm before I’d found the page.”

“I know my letters. I’ve just found out I’ve never read anything. A blind man can know every letter by the feel of it and still not see.” He sat down on a stone at the foot of the cliff. “Let me think a minute.”

He hadn’t been thinking long when there came a clanking of chains and creaking of timber from round a shoulder of the cliff to their left, and an odd contraption swung into view.

It was a big wooden cage painted green and gold, hanging from a chain that ran up the rock face until it disappeared. Beside it, working a lever, stood a solid man in a leather apron with brass calipers poking out of his breast pocket and a roll of drawings under his arm. Every pull of the lever made the cage lurch and sway and set the chain singing.

This was Mr. Competence, the engineer. He had no title, but every college on the plain knew his name.

“Good day, good day!” he called. “Pilgrims? For the City? Splendid. I see you’ve found the old stair. Dreadful thing. Medieval. It’ll have the knees out of your breeches in the first hundred steps, and there are ten thousand.” He gave the cage a pat. “Now this, gentlemen, is the modern way up. The Lift of Method. Built it myself, out of the best materials going: lexicons, grammars, concordances, historical surveys, the finest tools of scholarship. In you get, and I’ll have you at the top by supper. No kneeling.”

Pliable lit up. “None at all?”

“Not a bit. Have a look.” Mr. Competence spread one of his drawings on a flat rock. It showed the cage and its chain, and every link of the chain had a label in a neat hand: Philology. Textual Criticism. Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Syntax. Rhetoric. Comparative Religion. “Every link sound, you see, and every one of them something a man can learn by his own diligence. You go up on your own competence, like a gentleman. Why should a grown man crawl to anybody for what he can get by honest study?”

Inquirer looked at the drawing for a good while. It was beautifully done, and he couldn’t fault a single link. They were good things, all of them. He had seen already in the old Book how many words he didn’t know and how many customs were foreign to him, and he knew he would need every one of those links before he was through.

“Sir, I think these are all good tools. I expect I’ll want every one before the road’s done. But I don’t see a hook at the top of your chain. What’s it fastened to?”

Mr. Competence laughed. “Fastened? To the top, naturally.”

“To what at the top?”

“To the rock. To the… well, to the mountain.” He frowned and rolled up the drawing rather fast. “Look here, I’m an engineer, not a philosopher. It goes up and it comes down. Hundreds have ridden it.”

“And where do they get out?”

“At the top!” Mr. Competence was going red. “At the topmost ledge. The Ledge of Learned Opinion. Very fine place. A great many distinguished people live there. Libraries, lecture halls, wonderful views of the City.”

“Views of the City,” said Inquirer. “Is the Ledge in the City, though?”

Mr. Competence didn’t answer. He took out his calipers and started measuring something on the cage that didn’t need measuring.

While they stood there a second man came wandering round the other shoulder of the cliff, from the right, and he could hardly have been less like the engineer. He was soft and pink and smiling, in a loose robe the color of a sunset, with a big embroidered cushion under one arm and his eyes half shut as though he were listening to music a long way off.

This was Mr. Mood, of the pleasant village of Warm-Feeling that lies at the cliff’s foot.

“Peace, brothers, peace,” said Mr. Mood. “I heard you talking and I felt led to come over. Oh, that dreadful machine!” He flapped a plump hand at the Lift of Method. “All those dusty books and dead languages. My dear friends, the Author is alive. Why would you need grammar to hear Him? Why history? Just kneel down here,” he dropped the cushion on the grass, “close your eyes, open the Book anywhere you like, and wait. Wait till you feel it. The meaning comes straight to you, warm, right into the heart. That’s what prayer is for. It’s the shortcut round all that drudgery.”

Pliable looked from one to the other, lost. “But he says kneel,” he whispered to Inquirer. “Isn’t that what the letters say? Let him ask?”

Inquirer looked at the cushion and the pink smiling face, and to be honest it pulled at him harder than the Lift had. There was something very sweet in the idea that the Author might just drop the meaning into his heart, warm and whole, without any work.

Then his hand went to the lantern at his belt, and he remembered: every last one will offer to save you trouble.

“Mr. Mood, when you kneel on your cushion and the meaning comes, how do you know it’s the Author’s meaning and not yours?”

Mr. Mood smiled. “Because it feels so right.”

“Where I come from, everything I ever thought about the Book felt right. That was the trouble. I’ve just walked out of a city of mirrors, sir. I don’t want to kneel down in a field and find another mirror on the inside of my eyelids.”

The smile set a little. “You have a very unspiritual mind, brother.”

“Maybe. But listen to this.” Inquirer opened the old Book before the lantern and hunted until he found the place he half remembered, and read it out. “’If thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding; if thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord.’ You hear? Cry after it. That’s prayer. But it also says seek her as silver, search for her as for hid treasures, and that’s digging. Mr. Competence wants me to dig without crying out, and you want me to cry out without digging. The Book says do both.”

The two men eyed each other across the foot of the cliff. They had plainly been rivals a long time, and neither cared to be answered in the same breath as the other.

It was Pliable who spoke up.

“Master, I think you’re right. I think you’re probably right. Only…” He looked at the black mouth of the stair, and then at the bright green-and-gold cage. “Ten thousand steps on my knees. I’m not built for it. I’m built for… for gleaming, you know I am. And he says there’s a fine view of the City from the Ledge, and libraries. I could learn all the tools up there and then come down and meet you at the top of the stair after, couldn’t I?”

“There’s no stair down from the Ledge,” said a voice from inside the cliff.

They all turned round. A little way up inside the stair a small light was burning, not a lantern like Inquirer’s but a lamp in a niche cut in the wall, the first of a long line of them. Kneeling beside it was a girl of fourteen or so, barefoot and brown-faced, in a plain smock, with a long taper in one hand and a jar of oil hooked on her belt.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was lighting the stair and I couldn’t help hearing. I’m Perspicuity. I keep the lamps. And it’s true, what I said. The Ledge of Learned Opinion is very high and very grand, but it doesn’t join on to the top. They can see the City from up there, and they write books about it, and some of the books are good. But they can’t get in from there. They’d have to come all the way down and start again at the bottom of the stair, and most of them never do. It’s too humbling.”

Mr. Competence snorted. “Ignorant child. What would you know about it?”

“Not much,” Perspicuity said, quite cheerfully. “I’m only the lamplighter. But I’ve been up and down this stair every day for longer than you’d guess to look at me.”

Pliable looked at the girl, and at the long dark stair, and then at the shining cage and Mr. Competence’s confident face. I’m sorry to have to write that he picked the cage.

“I’ll find you,” he said, not quite looking Inquirer in the eye. “I’m sure there’s a way across. And if there isn’t, I’ll write to you from the Ledge and tell you all the best opinions.” He stepped in. Mr. Competence threw the lever with a flourish, the chain sang, and the cage went swaying up the cliff, smaller and smaller, until the clouds took it and Pliable’s waving hand along with it.

Inquirer stayed looking up long after there was nothing to see.

“He’ll be very happy there,” said Perspicuity. “That’s the worst of it. Most of them are.”

Mr. Competence strolled off whistling to wait for the next pilgrim. Mr. Mood gathered up his cushion with an injured air and went home to Warm-Feeling. That left Inquirer alone with the lamplighter at the bottom of the Kneeling Stair.

“Well,” said Perspicuity. “Are you coming?”

He got down on the first step. The stone was cold and hard as iron. He set the lantern on the step above and the old Book beside it, and since he didn’t know what to say, he said the only thing that came to him, the line from the Psalm that had undone him in his workshop.

“Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.”

He shifted up to the second step and said it again, and then the third.

When I asked him on the wall what the stair had been like, he didn’t answer for a while. Then he said it was the hardest thing on the whole road and also the plainest. There was nothing to fight in there; the enemies of the road can’t stand the low roof. There was cold stone and sore knees, his own breathing loud in the passage, and the words at every step, and every few hundred steps one of Perspicuity’s lamps burning in its niche.

She went on ahead of him, and sometimes came back down, relighting lamps that had gone out and trimming the ones that smoked. She talked the whole time. She was a tremendous talker.

“You’re from Mine-Own-Meaning,” she said, somewhere round the four-hundredth step. “I can tell from your spectacles. Amber, aren’t they? They’re very common there.”

“You can see them?”

“Oh, yes. I can always see other people’s. Never my own.” She laughed. “That’s how it goes, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid the Book is very dark,” Inquirer said, between steps. “I scraped the silver off and found it wasn’t saying what I’d always thought. Now I’m afraid it isn’t saying anything I can understand. It’s old languages and strange customs from one end to the other. Mr. Competence was right that I’ll need years of study. And perhaps even then…”

Perspicuity stopped and turned round on her knees to look at him. She had a very direct way of looking.

“Now that’s the other lie. The first one’s down in your city: the Book means whatever you like, so you needn’t bother reading it. The second one’s up on the Ledge: the Book’s so dark nobody but scholars can read it, so you needn’t bother trying. They’re both lies, and they both end up in the same spot, which is nobody reading.”

“Some of it is hard, though. There were places I couldn’t make anything of.”

“Of course some of it’s hard. Peter said himself some of Paul’s letters were hard to understand. I’m not saying every verse is easy. I’m saying this.” She shut her eyes, the way a child recites something learned very young. “All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all. Yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.”

She opened her eyes again. “That’s my name, really. It means clearness. Not that every bit of the Book is clear, but that the things you most need are, and the clear bits give you light for the hard ones. My lamps don’t light up the whole mountain. They light the stair, and the stair’s all a pilgrim needs.”

“In a due use of the ordinary means,” Inquirer said. “What are the ordinary means?”

“Reading it. Hearing it preached. Studying. Putting one part next to another. Praying over it. All the steps of the road you’re on. There’s no magic in them; that’s why they’re called ordinary. A farmer’s wife can use them as well as any professor if she’ll go to the trouble. The professors on the Ledge just like to think they own them.”

Inquirer went up three more steps, praying at each, and turned this over.

“Then the farmer’s wife,” he said finally, “the one Mr. Felt-Meaning was talking about in the Hall, she doesn’t have to skip straight to what it means to her. She can find out what it means, and then take that home to her kitchen.”

“That’s it exactly,” said Perspicuity, delighted. “Who’s Mr. Felt-Meaning?”

He told her, and her face went serious. “Oh, him. He rides about a good deal, that one. Keep an eye out. He’s never where you left him.”

The stair went on. I won’t pretend it was all conversation. There were long hours, Inquirer told me, when Perspicuity was far ahead and he was alone between lamps, with the dark pressing in and the words of his prayer gone stale in his mouth. He’d catch himself muttering open thou mine eyes the way a man mutters a sum, while thinking about his supper. Then he would feel ashamed and stop and start over, and try to mean it.

About halfway up he was badly tempted. A side passage opened off the stair, high-roofed, so a man could stand straight in it, and a warm breeze came out of it smelling of incense and woodsmoke. For The Advanced, said the carving over its mouth. His knees were bleeding by then. He had stopped at the entrance and was halfway to his feet when Perspicuity’s voice floated down from somewhere above.

“Don’t! That one goes round to Warm-Feeling. It’s Mr. Mood’s back door. Everybody who’s sick of kneeling thinks he’s advanced.”

He knelt again and kept going.

Another time he came on a pile of books some earlier pilgrim had left on the stair, and good ones too: a Hebrew grammar, a Greek lexicon, a great atlas of the ancient world. A note on top said Too heavy. Will come back for them. He stood over them in two minds. He wanted them badly. But there was no way to get them up the stair on his knees along with the lantern and the old Book.

“Leave them,” said Perspicuity, turning up at his elbow with her taper. “You’ll find better copies further on, where you can use them. Every tool comes in its season on this road. That’s where Mr. Competence goes wrong. It isn’t that he loves the tools. It’s that he wants them all first, before the kneeling. You’ll need every one of them. Just not before you’ve knelt. You learn to ask, and after that you learn to dig.”

I can’t tell you how long the stair took him. He said he lost count of the days. But at last the steps got shallower and the roof a little higher, and a breath of clean cold air came down from above, and at the very top, cut into the living rock, there was a door.

It was plain grey oak, iron-bound and very old, with no handle on the outside and no keyhole. Carved deep in the lintel were the words:

Ask, And It Shall Be Given You; Seek, And Ye Shall Find; Knock, And It Shall Be Opened Unto You.

Perspicuity was sitting on the top step with her oil jar, swinging her bare feet. “This is as far as I go. I’m the stair’s lamplighter. But you’ll see me again. I turn up wherever anybody’s reading. You’ll know me.”

“How do I open it? There’s no handle.”

“There never is, on this side. Knock.”

So he knocked. His knuckles were raw from the stair and the knock came out feeble, and nothing happened. He knocked harder. Still nothing. He looked round at Perspicuity, who only nodded at the door.

Then he understood, or thought he did. He put the lantern down and opened the old Book in front of it, and knelt on the top step, the last of ten thousand, with both palms flat on the grey wood. He didn’t say open thou mine eyes this time. He had said it ten thousand times and it had worn into a chant. What he said instead, very low, was this:

“I don’t know how to read Your Book. All my life I’ve made it say whatever I wanted. I’m sorry. I want to hear what You actually said. Please teach me.”

The door swung inward.

Behind it was a small round room cut into the top of the cliff, with a window to the north and a fire in a little grate. Beside the fire, in a plain wooden chair, sat an old woman in a grey shawl, and she wore no spectacles.

He knew her immediately. It was the old woman who had carried the black-boarded Book into his shop on that wet afternoon when everything began.

“You!”

“Me,” she said. “Come in and shut the door. The draught off the Ledge is cruel this time of year.”

He came in and stood by the fire, wet through and with his knees bloody, and she looked him over with deep satisfaction, the way a gardener looks at a seedling that has come up where she put it.

“My name is Supplication. I keep this door. I’m the first of the road’s true servants a pilgrim meets, and I’ll be the last as well; if you get to the end you’ll find me there same as here. Now and then I go into the cities with an old Book in a basket and leave it with somebody whose hands look as though they might be ready to scrape. Usually I’m wrong. I wasn’t wrong about you.”

“But why me? And why the stair? Why not let me ride the Lift, or bring me straight here?”

She poured him something hot from a kettle on the hob before she answered.

“Because you’re going to spend the rest of your life studying the Book. If you reach the end of the road, you’ll be a better student of it than you can imagine now. You’ll learn the languages and the history and the grammar and all the rest, and you’ll learn them properly. And the great danger for a man who studies the Book properly is that he forgets Whose it is. He starts to think of it as a puzzle he solved and not a voice he heard. The Lift of Method turns out good scholars. Mr. Mood’s cushion turns out happy dreamers. Only the stair turns out hearers. You have to learn on your knees, right at the start, that the Book isn’t yours and that understanding it is a gift. If you don’t, the rest of the road will only make you proud.”

She tapped the old Book on his knee. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. Your neighbors back home aren’t stupid. Some of them are very clever indeed. But cleverness can’t see what the Spirit hasn’t opened, and the Spirit opens the eyes of the ones who ask. So the first step of every reading, every time you open that Book from now till you die, is this room. You’ll be back here every morning, in a manner of speaking, long after you’ve forgotten what the stair was like.”

“Every time? Even when I know the passage well?”

“Especially then. That’s when you need it most.”

When he had finished his cup and his knees had stopped bleeding, she took him over to the north window. The mountain fell away beyond it in long green slopes to a wide country of fields and woods and rivers, with the King’s Highway running down into it, white and plain. Far off on the horizon was the great steady light, the same one he had seen from his workshop window, only nearer. It looked a shade less amber than before.

“The City of the Word,” said Supplication. “There’s a long way to go yet. The next house on the road belongs to a friend of mine, and you’ll see it before dark, a tall white tower on a headland over the sea. That’s the Lighthouse. The keeper there is the One who answered your knock.”

“I thought you answered it.”

The old woman smiled. “I only keep the door. Prayer is the knocking. It isn’t prayer that opens. Go on to the Lighthouse and He’ll show you what I mean. And mind,” she said, as he picked up the lantern, “you’ve been on your knees a long time and the next stretch is downhill and easy. That’s when people forget. Keep asking.”

He thanked her and went out through a second door on the north side, which had a handle on the inside and opened without any trouble, and started down the green slopes in the evening light.

Behind him and far below, a green-and-gold cage was swinging slowly back down its chain, empty, to wait for the next pilgrim. Above it, on the Ledge of Learned Opinion, lights were coming on in a great many windows. In one of them a slight young man sat at a desk with a clean sheet of paper and began a letter to his old master, full of all the best opinions. He wrote all evening. When he had finished, he found there was no post from the Ledge to anywhere.