CHAPTER IX

THE ART OF HIEROGLYPHICS

The bell of the ticket-puncher rang, the tiny slips of paper were torn off the roll and exchanged hands. For that day, at least--so long as they chose to sit there--the little penny chairs belonged to them; indisputably to them.

You feel you have bought something when you pay for it with your last penny. John leant back with a breath of relief as the chair man walked away. It had been a terrible moment. In this life, you never lose that sense that it is only the one friend in the world who does not judge you by the contents of your pocket; and when an acquaintance is but of a few moment's standing--even if it be a Lady of St. Joseph--it is hazarding everything to have to admit to the possession of only one penny.

Do you wonder his breath was of relief? Would you wonder if, wrapped up in that breath, there had been a prayer of thanks to St. Joseph? Only a little prayer, not even spoken in the breath, hardly expressed in the thought that accompanied it--but still a prayer--as much a prayer in his heart, as you might say there was a butterfly in the heart of a cocoon. We know that there is only a chrysalis--sluggish, inert, incapable of the light and dainty flight of a butterfly's wings--but still it will be a butterfly one day. That was just about the relation of John's breath to a prayer.

Under his eyes, he stole a look at her. She was not thinking of pennies! Not she! Once you make a woman curious--pennies won't buy back her peace of mind. She was beginning her tricks again with the ferrule of her umbrella. Why is it that a woman can so much better express herself with the toe of an elegant shoe or the point of a fifteen and six-penny umbrella? Nothing less dainty than this will serve her. Give her speech and she ties herself into a knot with it like a ball of worsted and then complains that she is not understood. But with the toe of an elegant shoe--mind you, if it is not elegant, you must give her something else--she will explain a whole world of emotion.

She had begun scratching up the mould again. John watched the unconscious expression of her mind with the point of that umbrella. One figure after another she scratched and then crossed out. First it was a ship, rigged as no ship has ever been rigged before or since. The _Albatross_, of course. Then a dome, the dome of a building. He could not follow that. He would have had to know that she had once had a picture book in which was a picture of Santa Maria della Salute--otherwise the meaning of that dome was impossible to follow. He thought it was a beehive. Really, of course, you understood this from the first yourself, it meant Venice. Then she began carving letters. The first was G. The second was R. She thought she felt him looking, glanced up quickly, but he was gazing far away across the round pond. It is always as well not to look. Women are very shy when they are expressing their emotions. It is always as well not to look; but you will be thought a dullard if you do not see. John was gazing across the pond. But nevertheless, she scratched those first two letters out. When he saw that, he took pity.

"Shall I tell you what the secret papers are?" said he, with a smile.

Ah, the gratitude in her eyes.

"Do!" she replied.

"It's a short story."

"A short story! You write? Why didn't you tell me that before?"

"But it's only a short story," said John, "that no one'll ever read."

"Won't it be published?"

"No--never."

"Why?"

"Because people won't like it."

"How do you know?"

"I'm sure of it. I know what they like."

"Read it to me and I'll tell you if I like it."

Read it to her! Sit in Kensington Gardens and have his work listened to by the Lady of St. Joseph! He took it out of his pocket without another word and read it then and there.

This is it.

AN IDYLL OF SCIENCE

The world has grown some few of its grey hairs in search of the secret of perpetual motion. How many, with their ingeniously contrived keys, have not worn old and feeble in their efforts to open this Bluebeard's chamber: until their curiosity sank exhausted within them? You count them, from the dilettante Marquis of Worcester, playing with his mechanical toy before a king and his court, Jackson, Orffyreus, Bishop Wilkins, Addeley, with the rest of them, and, beyond arriving at the decision of the French Academy--"that the only perpetual motion possible ... would be useless for the purpose of the devisers," you are drawn to the conclusion that mankind shares curiosity with the beasts below him and calls it science lest the world should laugh.

You have now in this idyll here offered you, the story of one who found the secret, and showed it to me alone. Have patience to let your imagination wander through Irish country lanes, strolling hither and thither, drawn to no definite end, led by no ultimate hope, and the history of the blind beggar, who discovered the secret of perpetual motion, shall be disclosed for you; all the curiosity that ever thrilled you shall be appeased, feasted, satiated.

There was not one in the country-side who knew his name. Name a man in Ireland and you locate him; Murphy, and he comes from Cork--Power, and he comes from Waterford. Why enumerate them all? But this blind beggar had no name. There was no place that claimed him. With that tall silk hat of his which some parish priest had yielded him, with his long black coat which exposure to the sorrowful rains of a sad country had stained a faded green; with his long, crooked stick that tapped its wearisome, monotonous dirge and his colourless, red 'kerchief knotted round his neck, he was a figure well-known in three or four counties.

No village owned him. At Clonmel, they denied him, at Dungarvan, they disowned him; yet the whole country-side, at certain seasons of the year, had heard that well-known tapping of the crooked stick, had seen those sightless eyes blinking under the twisted rim of the old silk hat. For a day or so in the place, he was a well-known figure; for a day or so they slipped odd pennies into his sensitively opened palm, but the next morning would find him missing. Where had he gone? Who had seen him go? Not a soul! The rounded cobbles and the uneven pavements that had resounded to the old crooked stick would be silent of that tapping noise for another year, at least.

But had chance taken you out into the surrounding country, and had it taken you in the right direction, you would have found him toiling along by the hedges--oh, but so infinitely slowly!--his shoulders bent, and his hand nodding like some mechanical toy that had escaped the clutches of its inventor and was wandering aimlessly wherever its mechanism directed.

How it came to be known that he sought the secret of perpetual motion, is beyond me. It was one of those facts about him which seem as inseparable from a man as the clothes that belie his trade. You saw him coming up the road towards you and the words "perpetual motion" rushed, whispering, to your mind. About the matter himself, he was sensitively reticent; yet he must have told someone--someone must have told me. Who was it? Some inhabitant of the village of Rathmore must have spread the story. Whom could it have been? Foley, the carpenter? Burke, the fisherman? Fitzgerald, the publican--Troy, the farmer? I can trace it to none of these. I cannot remember who told me: and yet, when each year he came round for the ceremonies of the Pattern day, when they honoured the patron saint, I said as I saw him: "Here is the blind beggar who tried to invent perpetual motion." The idea became inseparable from the man.

With each succeeding year his movements became more feeble, his head hung lower as he walked. You could see Death stalking behind him in his footsteps, gaining on him, inch by inch, until the shadow of it fell before him as he walked.

There were times when I had struggled to draw him into conversation; moments when I had thought that I had won his confidence; but at the critical juncture, those sightless eyes would search me through and through and he would pass me by. There must have been a time when the world had treated him ill. I fancy, in fact, that I have heard such account of him; for he trusted no one. Year after year he came to Rathmore for the festival of the Pattern and, year after year, I remained in ignorance of his secret.

At last, when I saw the hand of Death stretched out almost to touch his shoulder, I spoke--straight to the pith of the matter, lest another year should bring him there no more.

He was walking down from the Holy Well where for the last hour, upon his tremulous knees, he had been making his devotions to a saint whose shrine his unseeing eyes had never beheld. This was the opportunity I seized. For a length of many moments, when first I had seen his bent and ill-fed figure, rocking to and fro with the steps he took, I had made up my mind to it.

As he reached my side, I slipped a shilling into his half-concealed palm. So do we assess our fellow-kind! The instinct is bestial, but ingrained. Honour, virtue and the like--we only call them priceless to ourselves; yet it takes a great deal to convince us that they are not priceless to others. I priced my blind beggar at a shilling! I watched his withered fingers close over it, rubbing against the minted edge that he might know its worth!

"That has won him," I thought.

Ah! What a brutal conception of God's handicraft! A shilling to buy the secret of perpetual motion! Surely I could not have thought that Nature would have sold her mysteries for that! I did. There is the naked truth of it.

"Who gives me this?" he asked, still fingering it as though it yet might burn his hand.

"A friend," said I.

"God's blessing on ye," he answered and his fingers finally held it tight. There he kept it, clutched within his hand. No pocket was safe in the clothes he wore to store such fortune as that. "You're leaving Rathmore after the Pattern, I suppose?" I began.

His head nodded as he tapped his stick.

"There's something I want to ask you before you go," I continued.

He stopped, I with him, watching the suspicions pass across his face.

"Someone has told me----" I sought desperately, clumsily, for my satisfaction now. "Someone has told me that you have found the secret of perpetual motion. Is that true?"

The milk-white, sightless eyes rushed querulously to mine. All the expression of yearning to see seemed to lie hidden behind them. A flame that was not a flame--the ghost of a flame burnt there, intense with questioning. He could not see; I knew he could not see; yet those vacant globes of matter were charged with unerring perception. In that moment, his soul was looking into mine, searching it for integrity, scouring the very corners of it for the true reason of my question.

I met his gaze. It seemed then to me, that if I failed and my eyes fell before his, he would have weighed and found me wanting. It is one of the few things in this world which I count to my credit, that those empty sockets found me worthy of the trust.

"Who told ye that?" he asked.

I answered him truthfully that I did not know.

"But is it the case?" I added.

He shifted his position. I could see that he was listening.

"There is no one on the road," I said--"We are quite alone."

He coughed nervously.

"'Tis a matter of fifteen years since I first thought the thing out at all. Shure, I dunno what made it come into me head; but 'twas the way I used to be working in a forge before I lost the sight of my eyes. I thought of it there, I suppose."

He stopped and I prompted him.

"What principle did you go on?" I asked--"Was it magnetism? How did you set to work to avoid friction?"

This time, as he looked at me, his eyes were expressionless. I felt that he was blind. He had not understood a word I had said.

"Are ye trying to get the secret out av me?" he asked at length. "Shure, there's many have done that. They all try and get it out av me. The blacksmith--him that was working at the forge where I was myself before I lost the sight in me eyes--he wanted to make the machine for me. But I'd known him before I was blind and I hadn't lost the knowledge with me eyesight."

"Are you making it yourself, then?"

He nodded his head.

"As well as I can," he continued--"but, shure, what can these fingers do with feeling alone--I must see what I'm doing. Faith, I've all the pieces here now in me pocket, only for the putting of 'em together, and glory be to God, I've tried and tried, but they won't go. Ye can't do it with feelin' alone."

Some lump threatened to rise in my throat.

"Good God!" I thought--"this is tragedy----" And I looked in vain for sight in his eyes.

"Would ye like to see the pieces?" he asked.

I assured him that the secret would be safe in my keeping were he so generous.

"No one about?" he asked.

"Not a soul!"

Then, from his pocket--one by one--he took them out and laid them down on a grass bank by our side. I watched each piece as he produced it and, with the placing of them on the bank of grass, I watched his face. These were the parts in the construction of his intricate mechanism that he showed to me--a foot of rod iron, a small tin pot that once perhaps had held its pound of coffee, a strip of hoop iron and an injured lock.

"There," he said proudly--"but if I were to give these to that blacksmith, he'd steal the secret before my face. I wouldn't trust him with 'em and I working these fifteen years."

I thanked God he could not see my face then. The foot of rod iron! The small tin pot! The injured lock! They stared at me in derision. Only they and I knew the secret--only they and I could tell it, as they themselves had told it me. His wits were gone. Perpetual motion! The wretched man was mad.

Perpetual motion out of these rusty old things--rusting for fifteen years in the corners of his pockets! Perpetual motion!

But here the reality of it all broke upon me--burst out with its thundering sense of truth. Mad the blind beggar might be; yet there, before my very eyes, in those motionless objects, was the secret of perpetual motion. Rust, decay, change--the obstinate metal of the iron rod, the flimsy substance of the tin pot, always under the condition of change; rusting in his pocket where they had lain for fifteen years--never quiescent, never still, always moving--moving--moving--in obedience to the inviolable law of change, as we all, in servile obedience to that law as well, are moving continually, from childhood into youth, youth to middle-age--middle-age to senility--then death, the last change of all. All this giant structure of manhood, the very essence of complicated intricacy compared to that piece of rod iron, passing into the dust from which the thousands of years had contrived to make it. What more could one want of perpetual motion than that?

I looked up into his face again.

"You've taught me a wonderful lesson," I said quietly.

"Ah," he replied--"it's all there--all there--the whole secret of it; if only I had the eyes to put it together."

If he only had the eyes? Have _any_ of us the eyes? Have any of us the eyes?

When he had finished, he folded it slowly and put it back in his pocket.

"Well----?" he said.

His heart was beating with anticipation, with apprehension, with exaltation. With one beat he knew she must think it was good. It was his best. He had just done it and, when you have just done it, you are apt to think that. But with another beat, he felt she was going to say the conventional thing--to call it charming--to say--"But how nice." It would be far better if she said it was all wrong, that it struck a wrong note, that its composition was ill. One can believe that about one's work--but that it is charming, that it is nice--never!

For that moment Destiny swung in a balance, poised upon the agate of chance. What was she going to say? It all depended upon that. But she was so silent. She sat so still. Mice are still when you startle them; then, when they collect their wits, they scamper away.

Suddenly she rose to her feet.

"Will you be here in the Gardens to-morrow morning at this time," she said--"Then I'll tell you how very much I liked it."