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."