The Weigher of Sorrows

by Oscar Wilde, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Over the west door of the cathedral stood the statue of Saint Michael, and in his left hand he held a pair of scales.

He had been carved four hundred years before by a mason who had a sad face, and who had given it to him, as masons do, because it was the only one he could get by heart. In his right hand he held a sword. The Dean and Chapter had had the sword gilded in the year of the Jubilee, for a sword is a thing that a Chapter understands. The scales they had left grey. Nobody had ever asked what was weighed in them, and nobody had put anything in them for a very long time, except the Jackdaw, who had built his nest in the left-hand pan.

The Jackdaw was a person of fashion. He had lived for three winters in the Bishop's chimney, and knew in consequence everything that was not true about everybody in the town. He had stolen a silver thimble from the Precentor's wife, a gold pencil-case from the Archdeacon, and a letter from the Mayor's daughter that he could not read but valued very highly, because she had cried when she lost it. He kept them all in his nest, and they made the left-hand pan a little lower than the right, which he considered a mark of distinction.

"It is the only thing in this town," he would say, "that is weighed in my favour."

Now the Angel never spoke in summer, nor in autumn, nor in the soft wet weather of the spring. But on nights of hard frost, when the stone grew so cold that it rang if you touched it, he could speak a little, in a voice like a bell heard from the other side of a river. And on the first night of hard frost that winter he said to the Jackdaw, "What is the town talking of?"

"Sorrow," said the Jackdaw. "Sorrow is very much worn this season. Last season it was Japanese fans."

"Whose sorrow?" said the Angel.

"Mr. Julian Ormesby's, of course. You must have heard of Mr. Ormesby. He is our poet. He has a house on the Close, with a peacock-blue front door, and he takes his luncheon at two, which is thought very daring. His friend Mr. Hugo Delane died of a fever at Naples in the summer, and Mr. Ormesby has written a book about it. It is called Threnos. It is bound in white vellum with a black ribbon, and costs a guinea, and it has gone into four editions. The Duchess wept over it at the Deanery on Tuesday. She wept a whole page, from O thou that wert to the lilies of thy rest. The Dean's wife wept two lines, but then she is a Low Churchwoman. Everybody has bought grey gloves. The draper in the High Street has sold out of crape and is having more sent from Manchester. It is a great success."

"I was made to weigh," said the Angel. "I have weighed nothing for four hundred years. Bring me this sorrow, that I may weigh it."

"With pleasure," said the Jackdaw, who liked to be useful to people in good positions. "But you must understand that a sorrow is not a thimble. It is not a thing one can simply take."

"You took the letter from the Mayor's daughter," said the Angel.

"That was different," said the Jackdaw. "She had only one."

However, he flew off over the frozen roofs to the Duchess's lodgings, where the window had been left an inch open because the Duchess believed in fresh air for other people, and he came back before midnight with a copy of Threnos in his beak. It was the fourth edition, and the black ribbon had come a little loose.

The Jackdaw moved his thimble and his pencil-case and his letter into the right-hand pan, and laid the book in the left, in the nest itself. Then he sat on the Angel's shoulder and waited.

The pan went down. It went down by about as much as it would have gone down for one feather from a very young swan, and there it stopped.

"That cannot be right," said the Jackdaw. "It is in vellum."

"The scale is true," said the Angel.

"Then there is something wrong with the sorrow," said the Jackdaw, and he began to compose in his head the account of it that he would give in the Bishop's chimney. It was a great deal more amusing than Threnos.

"No," said the Angel slowly. "I do not think there is anything wrong with it. I weigh what is in a thing, and not what is on it. Your poet has put his sorrow into four editions. If each edition was of five hundred copies, that is two thousand books, and the Duchess has one of them, and the Dean's wife another, and the draper's wife, I daresay, has borrowed a third. Each of them has carried off a little of it in her grey gloves. What lies in my scale is the two-thousandth part of a sorrow. It may have been a very great one."

"Or a very small one, very handsomely distributed," said the Jackdaw.

"Or that," said the Angel. "The scale cannot tell. That is the trouble with scales. They will tell you how much, and never of what." He was silent a while, and the frost tightened on his wings. "I should like to weigh a sorrow that has not been printed," he said, "so that I may know what one weighs when it is all in one place."

"I do not know any," said the Jackdaw. "In my circle sorrows are always printed. Otherwise how would anyone know one had them?"

"Then go out of your circle," said the Angel.

The Jackdaw thought this a very extraordinary request to make of a person of his position. But it was cold, and he was curious, and he was a little annoyed about the swan's feather; so he flew down from the west front and over the Close, past the peacock-blue door, where there was still a light, and down the hill, past the shops and past the gasworks, until he came to the river-stairs, where the streets grow narrow and the houses lean together as if they were trying to keep each other warm and had forgotten how.

At the bottom of the river-stairs there was a cellar with a grating at the level of the pavement, and there was a light in the cellar too. The Jackdaw looked through the grating.

A woman was ironing. Her name was Hannah Pask, and she took in the fine linen of the houses on the Close, because the houses on the Close liked their linen washed by the river, which is softer than the town water, and did not like to think about who washed it. There were two irons on the stove. When one grew cool she set it on the hob and took up the other, and she did it without looking, as a man who has prayed all his life tells his beads. On the table in front of her was a pile of handkerchiefs of the finest French cambric, each with a border of black a full inch wide, and in the corner of each was worked a little J.O. in white silk.

"Why," said the Jackdaw to himself, "those are Mr. Ormesby's. I have seen him weep into them at the Deanery."

On a shelf by the stove there was a shirt, folded. It was not a shirt from the Close. It was coarse and grey, and it had been washed so often that it had worn soft, like an old letter, and it had been ironed into a square so exact that it looked as though it had been cut out of a block. Every so often, when she changed her iron, the woman put out her hand and touched it. Then she went back to the handkerchiefs.

She did not weep. She did not speak, not even to the cat, which sat on the fender and looked at her as cats look at people they have given up trying to understand.

The Jackdaw did not understand her either, so he went up to the street and listened, which is how persons of fashion find things out. He sat on a chimney-pot and heard the night-watchman talking to the man from the coal-wharf, and between them, in a quarter of an hour, he had the whole of it. Her son Tom had been found in the coal-barges on a wet night in November, with a sack that held perhaps twenty pounds of coal, because the cellar was cold and his mother had a cough. The magistrate, who had a very good fire, had given him six months' hard labour, because the theft of coal was becoming common and must be made an example of. He had been taken to the county gaol a fortnight since. The shirt on the shelf was his other shirt. She had sewn a new button on it the day before he was taken, because the old one had come off and he had said that it did not matter, and she had said that it did.

"Well!" said the Jackdaw. "This is very sad, no doubt. But it is a sorrow one could never get into four editions. She has done nothing with it. She has not even cried. One cannot weigh nothing."

But he had promised, and besides, he was a thief by profession and it seemed a pity to come all that way and take nothing. So when the woman turned to the stove, he slipped through the grating, quick and black as a thought one has been trying not to have, and pecked the new button off the folded shirt, and was out and up the river-stairs before the cat had made up its mind.

It was a common brass button, and not even a new one: she had taken it off the coat of her husband, who had been dead eleven years.

The Jackdaw flew back up the hill with it, past the gasworks, past the peacock-blue door, where the light was out now, and up the west front of the cathedral. He took Threnos out of the nest and put it on the ledge, and dropped the button in its place.

The pan went down.

It went down as a bucket goes down a well when the rope is let go. The stone groaned in the Angel's wrist. A long crack ran down the grey arm, and frost-dust fell from his fingers in a little glittering shower on the steps below, and the Jackdaw's thimble and pencil-case and letter were flung up in the right-hand pan and went tumbling over the edge into the Close, where the night-watchman found the thimble in the morning and was given sixpence for it by the Precentor's wife, who had long since accused her maid.

The left-hand pan stayed down.

"So," said the Jackdaw, when he had got his breath, "she is the sadder of the two. I always thought that poem was overpraised."

"No," said the Angel. "She has given none of it away. That is all the scale can say."

"But surely it is the same thing."

"Is it?" said the Angel. "If she had a little of his art, she might put her sorrow into a book, and the Duchess might carry some of it home in her gloves, and the woman would be lighter by so much. And the Duchess, perhaps, would be a little heavier, which would do her no harm at all. And if he had a little of her silence, he might have nothing to sell, and he might be sitting up tonight with something on his shelf that he could not bear to look at and could not leave alone. I do not know which of them is in the right. I was carved to weigh. The judging is done inside, where the Bishop is, and the Bishop has a cold."

The Jackdaw said nothing for some time, which was so unusual that the Angel looked down at him, as far as a stone angel can.

"I shall take it back," said the Jackdaw at last. "She will look for it in the morning."

He hopped down into the pan and took the button in his beak. He was a strong bird, and he had once carried a teaspoon from the Deanery to the top of the spire without stopping. He pulled. He set his feet against the rim of the pan and pulled again. The button did not move. It lay in the bottom of the scale as though it had been there since the cathedral was built, and the Jackdaw, who had stolen everything in the town that was worth stealing, found that he could not steal this one thing back.

"It is too heavy," he said.

"Yes," said the Angel. "I thought it would be."

Then the frost broke, and a wind came up off the river with rain in it, and the Angel could say no more.

In the morning the Dean came out of the west door with his umbrella, and looked up, and saw that Saint Michael's scales were crooked.

"Dear me," said the Dean. "The left-hand pan has dropped. It must be the frost." And at the next meeting of the Chapter it was resolved that the scales of a saint should hang level, and the matter was referred to the Fabric Committee, which sat on it until the spring, as Fabric Committees do.

In the spring Mr. Ormesby published a new book. It was called Consolations. It was bound in pale green vellum, which was thought to mark a very proper stage in the progress of grief, and it went into three editions, and the draper in the High Street sold out of lavender gloves. Mr. Ormesby, walking across the Close with the Duchess on the day it came out, looked up at the west front and said that the mason had been a careless fellow; the scales were all awry, and it spoilt the composition. The Duchess said that it did, and that nothing was so distressing as a want of symmetry.

The Fabric Committee sent up a man with a ladder and a chisel. He found a nest of twigs and a brass button lying in the left-hand pan. He threw the nest down into the Close, and he put the button in his pocket, thinking it might do for his waistcoat; and as soon as it was gone the pan rose of itself, and the scales hung as level as the Chapter could have wished. The man mended the crack in the Angel's arm with a little cement, and was paid fifteen shillings, and the Dean said it was money well spent.

Down at the bottom of the river-stairs, Hannah Pask had sewn another button on the grey shirt. It was a bone one, and did not match the others, and she had been sorry about that all through the winter.

Tom came home in May. He was thinner, and he did not say very much, and he sat a long time by the stove although the weather was warm. When she gave him the shirt he put it on and did not notice that the button was different. He did not notice anything very much, after that.

And the Jackdaw built a new nest in the scales that spring. He built it in the right-hand pan, where nothing had ever been weighed, and he put nothing in it at all.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (19 October 2026), ab Oscare Wilde per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Oscar Wilde, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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