The Best Short Stories of 1915 Part 27

I woke at dawn to the boisterous, bold boom of the batteries of Metz.

They seemed to speak in glorious wide-mouthed joy of Til Eulenspiegel and the young Siegfried.

I thanked G.o.d for the Germans.

THE WEAVER WHO CLAD THE SUMMER[11]

BY HARRIS MERTON LYON

From _The Ill.u.s.trated Sunday Magazine_

[11] Copyright, 1915, by The Ill.u.s.trated Sunday Magazine. Copyright, 1916, by Harris Merton Lyon.

I had always felt vaguely that there must be at times an intense pathos which overcame the master-worker in perishable materials--the actor in his supreme moment; the singer, the musician--I thought--must feel a bitter regret that his glory cannot live but must die, _in articulo gloriae_, with the sound, the effect he has created. Bernhardt seemed to me to have that in the back of her mind when she exulted over her appearance in the moving pictures. "I am immortal," she cried, dramatically--always dramatic, that old lady--"I am a film." So thin a bridge to immortality!

The actor, the singer, the musician; struggling through years and over obstacles to attain perfection--and then what? A brief triumph in a perishable art; a transient, fugitive gracing of a day, an hour, a moment ... and then another forgotten mortal artist. I remembered Gautier's decision, "The coin outlasts Tiberius." Paint, chisel, then, or write if you wish your work to endure.

No doubt here was wisdom in a little box; and I fell to wondering stupidly what there could possibly be in being a worker at the other, the evanescent thing. I remembered a certain kind of moth that dies soon after it is born. Are these people moths?

And then one night a ragtag ghost came and answered me.

I

It was eleven o'clock. Outside it was snowing, and so I remained in Pigalle's, loath to leave, and killing the time with a book. Pigalle's was one of those bas.e.m.e.nt eating places in New York's West Thirties, a comfy, tight, cosy sort of a cellar. An Italian table d'hote, of course, though not like the usual; it had more character and less popularity.

You seldom saw a blond skin there, the place being unknown to the night-tramping hordes of avid New Yorkers who crowd into all the "foreign" places and devour all the foreign food they can find. Mostly the _habitues_ were French and Italian, gentle, noisy people who did, in their way, slight damage to the fine arts. By nine-thirty, they were done eating and gone; almost all the lights were turned out and chairs were piled up on the tables, out of the way of the early morning mop.

By ten Pigalle and his wife and several others, mostly sculptors, scene painters and musicians, were gathered beneath the light at the main table and had begun their nightly game of poker. From then on it was slim gambling and loud, staccato chatter in French and Italian.

At eleven, then, this night, the cautious door-bell tinkled. Some kind of a world knocking at mine and wanting to get in, I thought. Some kind of an adventure out there, demanding to be encountered; some kind of a soul pounding at the walls of my soul. Every time the doorbell tinkles, whoever has this Show is setting a new scene. Or, no. The wall opens and the genie slips through, spreads his rug on the ground and begins to make new magic before your very eyes. Never a doorbell rang yet, I thought, that didn't bring a bit of heaven or h.e.l.l--or mere purgatory--with it.

At eleven the doorbell tinkled and the fat little waitress-maid-scrubwoman-second cook, a Lombard wench by the name, the sweet ineffable name of Philomene, waddled over and opened the door a tiny s.p.a.ce. Pigalle occasionally sold liquor without a license; hence his caution as to visitors. She let in an odd apparition; with doubts, I thought; certainly with mutterings and rolling of her black eyes. At any rate she knew him, whether for well or ill.

The man cast his eyes around, saw that the only open table save the poker table was the one I held, and came and sat down opposite me. With a slightly insolent motion he dragged his chair around sidewise, turned his shoulder to me and stared across the room at a gaudy lithograph of the good ship Isabella bound for Naples, eighty-five dollars first cla.s.s. Philomene, with a porky look, asked him what he wished.

He announced in French that he desired of all things to "strangle a parrokeet." This was some absurd slang for saying he wanted an absinthe.

He was a gaunt, tall, round-shouldered, queer old fellow with a gray beard and a matted moustache, colored with the brown stain of cigarette smoke. As ugly, I thought, as ugly as--oh, Socrates. And yet with something lovable about him. And his combination of dress was certainly odd enough: a frayed, cutaway coat with extremely long tails, dripping wet and dangling cylindrically like sections of melted stovepipe; mussy, baggy old gray trousers; a blue plush waistcoat; a black, but clean m.u.f.fler pinned tight up under his chin with a safety pin of the bra.s.siest; and a broad-brimmed black slouch hat, so broad of brim that he walked forever in its shadow. This hat he kept on all the time. His hands were long and clean and white--the virile, sensitive hands of a poet, I thought. The eyes were the fascinating feature of the man. I said to myself right away, "This man is a mystic." Though they burned brightly in their sockets, they had a trick of turning abruptly dim; a sort of film or veil, closed over them. "Druid or old Celt," I murmured.

"Give him a bit of mistletoe and he'd call his G.o.ds right down into my _demi-ta.s.se_ and scare the poker game into fits."

He swallowed his whole gla.s.s of absinthe in five gulps--a performance that it would make a cow shudder to watch--threw back his head, and, with a hoa.r.s.e burr, called for another. This time he spoke English; but the burr was decidedly Scotch. Pigalle now looked around at him--gross, pleasant, Provencal Pigalle--and nodded; then went on placidly shuffling the tiny cards in his great fat hands.

When the second absinthe came the old man took it slowly; settled himself back on his shoulder-blades and the tail of his spine, and pulled his hat down level with his eyes, as if he intended to spend a considerable time with us. He called for a package of French cigarettes--_cigarettes jaunes_--and proceeded to color his moustache a riper brown. "Now my adventure has knocked and come in," I thought.

"If he is my adventure, I cannot help him--nor can I keep him off. He is the _primum mobile_. It is up to him."

Suddenly my ears were shocked with a sharp argument between two young fellows at the poker table. No, it was not about the game. One said something; the other shrieked his answer; the first shouted back; the second in a violent burst that had a finality about it slammed down his cards and said something curt, with a solemn rolling of his eyes.

To my amazement, the odd old fish across from me boomed out with equal violence: "_Ben trovato_!" None of them paid any attention to him.

I may have shown some of my surprise at his action, for he turned suddenly to me, and asked: "Did you understand what he said?"

I replied that I did not.

"He said, roughly translated: 'Sufficient unto eternity is the glory of the hour.' Yes. And it is true. Sufficient unto eternity is the glory of the hour, young man. There's many an artist who must--" he stopped short and began biting his finger ends.

My mind reverted to Bernhardt's film and the question about the moth.

"Who must--what?" I prodded. "Content himself with this catch phrase?"

"Content himself? d.a.m.nation, no! Must feel the keener triumph in a piece of work, young man, just because it _is_ perishable." He thumped the table and breathed hard. I got the full paregoric reek of his drink.

"What is this stork-legged Verlaine going to say?" I thought to myself.

But he contented himself with breathing for a few moments and that odd film dropped over his eyes. "Just because the thing is ended, and dies out of men's minds almost as soon as it is ended"--he seemed to be feeling slowly for the words--"_if_ the work was right, was masterly done, there's a sort of higher joy in knowing that it triumphed--and was suddenly gone--like a sunset, like a light on the water, like a summer."

He asked abruptly: "You think I have 'spiders on my ceiling'--you think I am crazy?"

"On the contrary. Can you make this clearer to me, this--?"

"My agreement that sufficient unto eternity is the glory of the hour?"

He sipped his absinthe. "With your patience. Let me see. I can give you a favorite example of mine, about a friend of mine named Andy Gordon--something like a story?" Now in his eyes there was an eager shine.

"Go on."

"You know, my friend, I am Highland Scotch." (He p.r.o.nounced it Heeland.) "I may be queer. That all depends. But don't be alarmed at the way I put things. I am not out of my head. Now this yarn about Andy Gordon.

Remember," said he, tapping the table with his long white finger, and smiling at me in a charming manner, "sufficient unto eternity is the glory of the hour. By the way, that young fellow over there who said that is a violoncellist. 'Grand ducal 'cello to the imperial violin,'

you know."

I reconsidered him in the wink of an eye. He is not Socrates and he is not Verlaine, I said to myself. This old lovable scarecrow is the Ancient Mariner, and he is going to hold me with his glittering eye and I am going to listen like a three years' child. The very fellow: the "skinny hand," the "long gray beard"--and doubtless, too, the true Ancient Mariner smelled of tobacco and drink. Certainly he talked poetry. And so did my old man, miraculously, almost without effort. So I sat back and listened, while he told his story.

II

Andy Gordon was for all his years a weaver in the mills at Glas...o...b..ry; just an ordinary human stick or stone, as you might call it, doing his mechanical work at the machine like a machine--until one day he drew his pay, before you could say Jack Robinson, and started off walking anywhere. He did it of a sudden and without seeming cause, but inwardly there was a pressing retraction upon his soul that told him to get away from the mechanical actualities.

He was feeling himself tired to death that day he drew his money; and, of course, he was still young. And when a young man really wants very much to die, he always comes out of that valley (at any rate, so people say) with something new in his heart. Andy walked off anywhere, just so he got to the hills.

And when he arrived at the hills, it was all very, very sweet. They were just coming light yellow and the bluebirds were there before him, touring the air just for the fun of it. And he made right away a queer discovery--he knew for the first time that New Year's is not the first day of January, at all. It's the first day of spring. Men are right silly, Andy thought, calling some dead and sodden day in mid-winter by the fancy, saucy name of New. The thing that is New, of course, is the Green. The New Year is the Green Year.

Well, he had a hunk of bread in his pocket and some onions, and a man can walk a long way upon the strength of that; so he went along up a road when he felt like it and over a hill when he felt like that. But most of the time his heart was very sad in his body and his mind took no pleasure of the bluebirds. For he was thinking that his life wasn't very much. He could see nothing in working year after year at the mill.

And yet that was all he was good for (so he thought).

On and on and on walked Andy. There were parts of those hills where he walked that probably n.o.body, not even the Indian, ever traversed.

Anything could happen there--where the woods are dark with pine or sunny with birch, and where echoes are the only memory (and they never last long). It was so far away, up in through there; as I've said, anything could happen there and we would never hear of it. All day long the cold brooks run down, brown from the juices of the hemlock bark, over browned stones--but of course they never talk and tell anything.

About noon, Andy found himself upon an old disused and overgrown road, that for years had been traveled only by rabbits and skunks and woodchucks and deer. And in a clearing at one side he saw an old log cabin which had not been lived in for years and years. There was a bit of brook at the back and an old wind-break of pine trees.