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So I sat considering for a while; not terrified, but with a brain exceedingly blank and hopeless. It never occurred to me that, if I sat still and held on, steeplejacks would be summoned and ladders brought to me; and I am glad that it did not, for this would have taken hours, and I know now that I could not have held out for half an hour inactive. But another thought came.
He also added to what has already been set forth, as a point making the man a less worthy object of compassion, that according to latest accounts he had gone to his work under the influence of drink. "So do all steeplejacks," said the King, and quoted the Encyclopedia: "It is only when they are drunk that they can do it. I know." He spoke as though he had tried it.
And when the volume was brought to him the King sat down and read all about steeplejacks and climbing irons, and cranks, and pulleys, and all the other various appliances requisite for the driving of that dreadful trade; read also how the men were inclined to prime themselves for the task in ever-increasing measure, and so one day having over-primed to be found at the bottom instead of at the top, knowing nothing themselves of how they got there.
It was not the right and dignified way for a royal accident to happen: falling down-stairs suggested the same failing as that to which steeplejacks were prone. He picked himself up, and aware now of a sharp pain in the middle of his spine as well as at the back of his head, crawled slowly and in a rather doubled-up attitude toward the royal apartments.
Mallathorpe my old master, Mr. John Mallathorpe, I'm talking of he got an idea from two or three little things, d'ye see, that it wasn't as safe as it ought to be. And he got a couple of these professional steeplejacks to examine it. They made a thorough examination, too so far as one could tell by what they did. They'd been at the job several days when the accident happened.
"But nothing! nothing!" he went on, "no power on earth except it were a whole army of steeplejacks " At that word the flow of his eloquence ceased; his mouth remained open but no sound came from it. Suddenly his staring eyes puckered and closed, wincing as from a blow; and his face flushed to a fiery red, then paled.
So with men who work in high places or where there is risk, such as steeplejacks, bridge builders, iron workers, engineers; let an accident happen to them, or let there occur an exhausting disease with its aftermath of neurasthenia, and the self-esteem and self-confidence disappear so that in many cases they have to give up their job.
As he could not have the society he craved he chose solitude, and wandered out into the deepening dusk of the November garden; and there, gazing up through its now thinned foliage at the quiet and misty heavens above him, thought of steeplejacks and the death of kings, and how at the root of every great downfall in history there had probably been some poor human heart like his own, conscious of failure, longing for the kindred touch which pride of place makes so impossible.
In the eighteenth century a leaden casket was discovered by some workmen high in the spire, containing a relic of our Lady, to whom the Cathedral is dedicated. In the summer of 1921 the steeplejacks employed to test the lightning conductor found that the iron cramps had rusted to such an extent as to split the stonework.
But why is it that these scientific gentlemen who account for genius by eye-strain do not reprove the poets for their sensibility to the sound of words, the shape and cadences of the phrase? It appears that only prose-men are the culpable ones when they hear the harping of invisible harps from Ibsen steeplejacks, or recognise the colour of Zarathustra's thoughts.
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