Page 285 of The Pillars of the Earth

On the second day three cartloads of flour arrived from one of the priory’s outlying mills. The carts were escorted by men-at-arms: flour was as precious as gold nowadays. It was checked in by Brother Jonathan, who was deputy cellarer under old Cuthbert Whitehead. Jack watched Jonathan count the sacks. To Jack there was something oddly familiar about Jonathan’s face, as if he resembled someone Jack knew well. Jonathan was tall and gangling, with light brown hair—nothing like Philip, who was short and slight and black-haired; but in every way other than physically Jonathan took after the man who was his surrogate father: the boy was intense, high-principled, determined and ambitious. People liked him despite his rather rigid attitude to morality—which was very much how they felt about Philip.

While Philip was refusing to talk, a word with Jonathan would be the next best thing.

Jack watched while Jonathan paid the men-at-arms and the carters. He was quietly efficient, and when the carters asked for more than they were entitled to, as they always did, he refused them calmly but firmly. It occurred to Jack that a monastic education was a good preparation for leadership.

Leadership. Jack’s shortcomings in that area had been revealed rather starkly. He had let a problem become a crisis by maladroit handling of his men. Every time he thought of that meeting he cursed his ineptitude. He was determined to find a way to put matters right.

As the carters left, grumbling, Jack walked casually by and said to Jonathan: “Philip is terribly angry about the strike.”

For a moment Jonathan looked as if he was about to say something unpleasant—he was clearly fairly angry himself—but finally his face relaxed and he said: “He seems angry, but underneath he’s wounded.”

Jack nodded. “He takes it personally.”

“Yes. He feels the craftsmen have turned on him in his hour of need.”

“I suppose they have, in a way,” Jack said. “But Philip made a major error of judgment in trying to alter working practices by fiat.”

“What else could he do?” Jonathan retorted.

“He could have discussed the crisis with them first. They might even have been able to suggest some economies themselves. But I’m in no position to blame Philip, because I made the same mistake myself.”

That pricked Jonathan’s curiosity. “How?”

“I reported the schedule of cuts to the men as bluntly and tactlessly as Philip announced it to me.”

Jonathan wanted to be outraged, like Philip, and blame the strike on the perfidy of the men; but he was reluctantly seeing the other side of the coin. Jack decided to say no more. He had planted a seed.

He left Jonathan and returned to his tracing floor. The trouble, he reflected as he picked up his drawing implements, was that the town’s peacemaker was Philip. Normally, he was the judge of wrongdoers and the arbiter in disputes. It was disconcerting to find Philip a party in a quarrel, angry and bitter and unrelenting. Someone else was going to have to make peace this time. And the only person Jack could think of to do it was himself. As master builder he was the go-between who could talk to both parties, and his motivation was indisputable—he wanted to continue building.

He spent the rest of the day thinking about how to handle this task, and the question he asked himself again and again was: What would Philip do?

On the following day he felt ready to confront Philip.

It was a cold, wet day. Jack lurked around the deserted building site in the early afternoon, with the hood of his cloak pulled over his head to keep him dry, pretending to study the cracks in the clerestory (a problem that was still unsolved), and waited until he saw Philip hurry across to his own house from the cloisters. When Philip was inside, Jack followed.

Philip’s door was always open. Jack tapped on it and went in. Philip was on his knees in front of the small altar in the corner. You’d think he’d get enough praying done, in church most of the day and half the night, without doing it at home too, Jack thought. There was no fire: Philip was economizing. Jack waited silently until Philip rose and turned around. Then Jack said: “This has got to come to an end.”

Philip’s normally amiable face was set in hard lines. “I see no difficulty about that,” he said coldly. “They can come back to work as soon as they like.”

“On your terms.”

Philip just looked at him.

Jack said: “They won’t come back on your terms, and they won’t wait forever for you to see reason.” He added hastily: “Or what they think is reason.”

“Won’t wait forever?” Philip said. “Where will they go when they get tired of waiting? They won’t find work elsewhere. Do they think this is the only place that is suffering from the famine? It’s all over England. Every building site is having to cut back.”

“So you’re going to wait for them to come crawling back to you, begging forgiveness,” Jack said.

Philip looked away. “I won’t make anyone crawl,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve ever given you reason to expect such behavior from me.”

“No, and that’s why I’ve come to see you,” Jack said. “I know you don’t really want to humiliate these men—it’s not in your nature. And besides, if they returned feeling beaten and resentful, they’d work badly for years to come. So from my point of view as well as yours, we must let them save face. And that means making concessions.”

Jack held his breath. That had been his big speech, and this was his make-or-break moment. If Philip remained unmoved now, the future looked bleak.

Philip looked hard at Jack for a long moment. Jack could see reason struggling with emotion in the prior’s face. Then at last his expression softened and he said: “We’d better sit down.”

Jack suppressed a sigh of relief as he took a seat. He had planned what he was going to say next: he was not going to repeat the spontaneous tactlessness he had shown with the builders. “There’s no need to modify your freeze on purchase of supplies,” he began. “Similarly, the moratorium on new hiring can stand—no one objects to that. I also think they can be persuaded to accept that there will be no work on saint’s days, if they gain concessions in other areas.” He paused to let that sink in. So far he was giving everything and asking for nothing.