Chapter 28

The water in the well alone remained the same, cold and plenteous, and that sufficed to draw about Jean eternal youth and eternal gaiety.

Only youth had grown mocking for Jean. For him gaiety had now become scoffing.

"Ah, Master Jean! Does not your furnace burn any more? Your wheel, Master Jean, does it scarcely ever turn? When shall we see your amazing pot which will be as beautiful as everything which is beautiful, blooming like the rose, beaded like the raspberry, and speaking--if we must believe what you say about it--like our lips?"

Now Jean is ageing; Jean is old. He sits upon his stone seat beside the well, under the lace-like shade of the olive tree, in front of his empty field, all the soil of which is good clay but which no longer produces either raspberries or roses.

Jean said formerly: "There are three things: roses, raspberries, lips."

All the three have forsaken him.

The lips of the young girls, and even those of the children, have become scoffing.

"Ah, Father Jean! Do you live like the grasshoppers? Nobody ever sees you eat, Father Jean! Father Jean lives on cold water. The man who grows old becomes a child again!

"What will you put into your beautiful vase, if you ever make it, silly old fellow? It will not hold even a drop of water from your well. Go and paint the hen-coops and make water-jugs!"

Jean silently shakes his head, and only replies to all these railleries by a kindly smile.

He is good to animals, and he shares his dry bread with the poor.

It is true that he eats scarcely anything, but he does not suffer in consequence. He is very thin, but his flesh is all the more sound and wholesome. Under the arch of his eyebrows his old eyes, heedful of the world, continue to sparkle with the clearness of the spring which reflects the light.

IV

One bright morning, upon his wheel, which turns to the rhythmic motion of his foot, Jean sets himself to model a vase, the vase which he has long seen with his mind's eye.

The horizontal wheel turns like a sun to the rhythmic beating of his foot. The wheel turns. The clay vase rises, falls, swells, becomes crushed into a shapeless mass, to be born again under Jean's hand. At last, with one single burst, it springs forth like an unlooked-for flower from an invisible stem.

It blooms triumphantly, and the old man bears it in his trembling hands to the carefully prepared furnace where fire must add to its beauty of form the illusive, decisive beauty of color.

All through the night Jean has kept up and carefully regulated the furnace-fire, that artisan of delicate gradations of color.

At dawn the work must be finished.

And the potter, old and dying, in his deserted field, raises toward the light of the rising sun the dainty form, born of himself, in which he longs to find, in perfect harmony, the dream of his long life.

In the form and tint of the frail little vase he has wished to fix for all time the ephemeral forms and colors of all the most beautiful things.

Oh, god of day! The miracle is accomplished. The sun lights the round and slender curves, the colorations infinitely refined, which blend harmoniously, and bring back to the soul of the aged man, by the pathway of his eyes, the sweetest joys of his youth, the skies of daybreak and the mournful violet waves of the sea beneath the setting sun.

Oh, miracle of art, in which life is thus epitomized to make joy eternal!

* * * * *

The humble artist raises toward the sun his fragile masterpiece, the flower of his simple heart; he raises it in his trembling hands as though to offer it to the unknown divinities who created primeval beauty.

But his hands, too weak and trembling, let it escape from them suddenly, even as his tottering body lets his soul escape--and the potter's dream, fallen with him to the ground, breaks and scatters into fragments.

Where is it now, the form of that vase brought to the light for an instant, and seen only by the sun and the humble artist? Surely, it must be somewhere, that pure and happy form of the divine dream, made real for an instant!