Chapter 12

I touched. My machine ran along, bumping over hundreds of bodies lightly covered by the new snow. I got out, stumbled over them at my feet, felt them. They were not long dead. I looked about me at the dark, silent city of Mannheim. A panic took me. I ran to my machine, tried to get it off, but failed and sat numb and transfixed, vainly groping in the darkness of my mind for the thought that would not form, till my comrades came to me with blanched faces and bit by bit in swift succession pieced for me the words that could not find utterance, having never been uttered in the world's life before.

The rest--a flowing phantasmagoria that tore me too far out of human experience, even of dream--to tell again. The thousands crumpled up in full-dress uniform, stained and tattered, beneath the new snow of the parade-ground, fallen at a moment, at a word, hands here and there stiffened in salute to the flag slow moving in the graying winter's dawn. Death we had seen,--but here in the streets and in the houses, in all corners and in all byways, the vivid faces of those who had sought death freely, each face telling with ghastly eloquence a tale that had never been told in the life of man, of a race self-destroyed at a moment, at a word, for a vision which it alone had understood, leaving its epitaph in the words on the poison vials which a government machine efficient to the last had supplied--"_Der Tag ist zu uns_"--"The Day is Ours."

Then through the blenching words that flashed along the closed circle of steel in all the tongues of Europe, the shrinking thought leaped to our dumb, numb mind and throbbed upon them like the insistent resounding clangor of a titanic brazen shield, as if beaten by a grimacing god:

Germany is yours, O sons of men! What now?

* * * * *

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 God for the Germans.

THE WEAVER WHO CLAD THE SUMMER[11]

BY HARRIS MERTON LYON

From _The Illustrated Sunday Magazine_

[11] Copyright, 1915, by The Illustrated 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 gloriæ_, 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 basement eating places in New York's West Thirties, a comfy, tight, cosy sort of a cellar. An Italian table d'hôte, 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 _habitués_ 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 hell--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 Philomène, waddled over and opened the door a tiny space. 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 class. Philomène, 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 muffler pinned tight up under his chin with a safety pin of the brassiest; 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 gods right down into my _demi-tasse_ and scare the poker game into fits."

He swallowed his whole glass of absinthe in five gulps--a performance that it would make a cow shudder to watch--threw back his head, and, with a hoarse burr, called for another. This time he spoke English; but the burr was decidedly Scotch. Pigalle now looked around at him--gross, pleasant, Provençal 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? Damnation, 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 pronounced 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 Glastonbury; 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 nobody, 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.

"Now I will eat a snack here," Andy said to himself, "and afterward, may God have mercy on my soul, I will lie down and nap under the pine and try to sleep off whatever it is that is bothering me."

And he did so, lying down beneath the pine--

He closed one eye gently and slowly (like letting a lid down on a box of playthings) and then he closed the other eye the same way; and then he knew nothing at all until suddenly a Voice came clap out of the blue sky, calling his name, "Andy Gordon, man! Andy Gordon!" over the hills and far.

Andy was amazed, of course, and said: "Here I am," with all his might, but without making a bit of sound (just as we all do in dreams).

"The thing the matter with you," went on the great Voice, without any introduction or anything of the sort but coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, "is that you need Work. You are tired to death with work; work-with-a-little-'w' is killing the soul out of you, Andy; work-with-a-little-'w' always does that to men, if you give it the whole chance. But that can't be helped. You're bound to have a whole lot of it in your life But--_if_ you don't mix some Big-'W' Work in with it, then indeed and indeed your life will be disastrous and your days will be dead."

Andy did not know but what he was a-dreaming, though his eyes were now wide open and he could see a robin hopping on the sod. "What is it you mean by Big-'W' Work?" he asked.

"Of course, that's the Work you love for the Work's sake. It's Work you do because you love the thing itself you're working for."

"You make that hard to understand," said Andy.

"Well, and it will be hard for people to understand _you_ when you're at that sort of Work. They know well enough what you're about as long as you turn 'em out yards of flannel down at Glastonbury, don't they?"

"Oh, yes, indeed," said Andy.

"And it would be the same way if you were a smith and turned 'em out horse shoes, or a bill clerk and turned 'em out bills. They'd understand _that_."

"Oh, yes, indeed," said Andy.

"But the trouble with that work-with-a-little-'w' is that you do it only for the pay there is in it--never for the love of it--that's why it seems to you a shame to waste your whole life at it, you know."

"Indeed it does, and that's why I'm here away from it all," said Andy.

"All very well for a while," said the Voice. "But you'll have to keep on at it somewhat--say, half your life at work-with-a-little-'w,' sitting at your machine down yonder at the mill, turning 'em out the stuff they know to be useful."

At that Andy fell silent and was sad again. Where would he find a beginning at the Big-"W" Work? he asked himself.

But the Voice seemed to know what was in his mind, and answered him: "I can give you that sort of Work. But it will take the best there is in you to do that sort of Work; and the Work will surely die as soon as you've accomplished it. And there will be no money in it for you, at all, and a great deal of pain, care and weariness. But you will find great love in your Work, and for your Work; and though it all vanishes at once you will experience so wonderful a joy that it will seem as if, night and day, God is whispering the secrets of life in your ear."

"What is the Work like?" asked Andy.

"Would you be willing to try it? Remember, it is difficult and wearying and is dead as soon as it is born."

"Yes, by glory, I would," shouted Andy.

"_Then dress this maid until you die!_" commanded the Voice.

At the words, my friend, there was music of a million armies of all sorts of birds, whistling and whirring over the green earth; and the echoes of their tremendous singing shook all the trillions of tiny new leaves and made the waves of air to dance--how shall I say?--like the waves of a sea of music running out forever.

And there, on the grass, sure enough, was a little naked baby girl just able to stand.

Very quiet, she was, and she looked up at Andy with eyes of a fairy blue--as if they'd been colored by that very same fairy that goes about with a brush coloring all the violets we ever see. (The ones we never see, you know, are never colored.)

"We-e-ell!" cried Andy, puckering up his lips and squinting up his eye-lids. "And who are you?"

"I'm early Summer," she lisped. "And I'm in a dreadful hurry. I'd like some lemon-colored silk--for a mantle, you know?--And some apple-green tassels for my hair. And please do be quick about it. I'm due, you see. So I'll be ever so much obliged if you'll only hurry."

Andy whistled ruefully. "Now, _that_ would take some weaving, miss." He hesitated. "I don't think I'm that skillful."

The little goddess looked hurriedly away over her shoulder as if she were about to depart.

"And then," Andy continued, "I have no loom up here; and no warp; and no filling. Nothing at all to work with, you see. I--"

But while he was stumbling about with his excuses, he saw the little one actually fading away before his eyes; and a pain most bitter caught at his heart, as if he were losing all his life. So he cried out:

"But I'll _try_ miss. Give me a little time, miss. Oh, please, my wee bairn. I have an old handloom of my grandfather's; and I can go and hurry and fetch all the stuff up here somehow and I'll work as fast as I can. Indeed, I'll try my best."

Whereat, you see, the babe came back to him, smiling as sweetly as early Summer ever smiled. "There really isn't such an awful hurry," she said. "We can always have Weather, you know, and hold these things back a bit."

That was the beginning of it.

Andy was about twenty-eight years old then, and he really had an awful time of it at first trying to work out by hand the wonderful stuffs and colors. There was the fern-design, spangled with Sweet William, for instance. It was only to be the edging on a shawl for her, but he spent three days and two nights on it; and then she asked him to make it over with jack-in-the-pulpit inset, because she was sure to grow tired very soon of Sweet William; then she changed her mind about jack-in-the-pulpit and decided on wintergreen berries. This is just a sample of one teeny bit of what she demanded. And Andy was very awkward; so naturally he began complaining of his shuttles being too clumsy for such fine work and the cobwebby filling getting tangled up in his thumbs and after a bit of chewing his nails in despair he swore the thing never could be done by hand.

No sooner had he got that out, than he heard the Voice roar loud like an emperor's voice and say:

"The Big-'W' Work you love to do _must_ be done by hand. It _can't_ be done any other way. That is why you were given thumbs, when the other beasts got none."

So Andy found it was no use quarreling with the tools. He looked at his hands, holding them up before him, and he thought: "Well, the Voice is right. My hands wouldn't be any good without my thumbs. I have hands and thumbs both and surely they were given me for the reason the Voice mentions. At any rate, I know no better."

That made Andy set to work all the harder, for the idea of Thumb-and-Craft was new to him; and that made his craft very interesting to him, so that he became determined to stick to it until he got the beauty out of it. (All the same, it was a frightfully backward Summer that year; and nobody--except Andy--thought very well of her.)

He found indeed that he would have to work as fast as his fingers could go. For the little Summer grew big and bigger in an amazingly short time; and she kept throwing things away as fast as she put them on just as the Voice had foretold.

Her days, though, went happily along, all full of sweet smells out of cups and umbels of flowers and from the liquor of the leaves as they steeped in the hot sun; and Andy himself felt quite happy (when he wasn't terribly interested in his Work, and then he paid attention to nothing at all save what was between his thumb and forefinger). But while he worked and the Summer danced or dozed and grew before him, he noticed something he had never noticed until then--As the Summer grew older, she kept asking him for darker blues. While she was little she had liked light greens, but week by week as time went on she insisted more and more that he put in plenty of blue.

"Bluer and bluer," muttered Andy, and a wee shot of pain hit his heart. "Yes, it's bluer and bluer, all right, I know. And finally some day 'twill all be steel-blue everywhere--in the snow-drifts and in the skies--and neither the lass nor I will be here then."

Well may you believe that the departing of that first Summer was a sad matter to him. He had done his best, you see, and a whole new world of trying had been thrown open to him. And really he was beginning to get the knack of that kind of weaving. And she was a fine big apple-cheeked woman now, and--

"Well, if I do say it myself," growled Andy, "she looks very handsome in those dresses; and for the first time in my life I take a Pride in my Work."

But in spite of all that the Voice came, you must know, and told him this little dream-girl must die, and there would be another, a different little girl next year; and all the weaving must be gone through with again.

"Shall I be weaving this lass her shroud?" asked Andy of the Voice.

But the Voice did not answer him.

When Andy told all this to _her_, his first Summer cried for a whole week in amongst the trees and over the pastures and meadows--

And then one morning, she was no longer there.