One day I was strolling down the garden among the winding paths, when I
came suddenly upon Father Payne, who was hurrying towards the house. He had
in each of his hands a large roughly spherical stone, and looked at me a
little shamefacedly.
"You look, Father," I said, "as if you were going to stone Stephen."
He laughed, and looked at the stones. "Yes," he said, "they are what the
Greeks called 'hand-fillers,' for use in battle--but I have no nefarious
designs."
"What are you going to do with them?" I said
"That's a secret!" he said, and made as if he were going in. Then he said,
"Come, you shall hear it--you shall share my secret, and be a partner in my
dreams, as the fisherman says in Theocritus." But he did not tell me what
he was going to do, and seemed half shy of doing so.
"It's like Dr. Johnson and the orange-peel," I said. "'Nay, Sir, you shall
know their fate no further.'"
"Well, the truth is," he said at last, "that I'm a perfect baby. I never
can resist looking into a hole in the ground, and I happened to look into
the pit where we dig gravel. I can't tell you how long I spent there."
"What were you doing?" I said.
"Looking for fossils," he said; "I had a great gift for finding them when I
was a child. I didn't find any fossils to-day, but I found these stones,
and I think they contain crystals. I am going to break them and see."
I took one in my hand. "I think they are only fossil sponges," I said;
"there will only be a rusty sort of core inside."
"You know that!" he said, brightening up; "you know about stones too? But
these are not sponges--they would rattle if they were--no, they contain
crystals--I am sure of it. Come and see!"
We went into the stable-yard. Father Payne fetched a hammer, and then
selected a convenient place in the cobbled yard to break the stones. He put
one of them in position, and aimed a blow at it, but it glanced off, and
the stone flew off with the impact to some distance. "Lie still, can't
you?" said Father Payne, apostrophising the stone, and adding, "This is for
my pleasure, not for yours." I recovered the stone, and brought it back,
and Father Payne broke it with a well-directed blow. He gathered up the
pieces eagerly. "Yes," he said, "it's all right--they are blue crystals:
better than I had hoped."
He handed a fragment to me to look at. The inside of the stone was hollow.
It had a coagulated appearance, and was thickly coated with minute bluish
crystals, very beautiful.
"I don't know that I ever saw a stone I liked as well as this," said Father
Payne, musing over another piece. "Think what millions of years this has
been like that,--before Abraham was! It has never seen the light of day
before--it's a splash of some molten stone, which fell plop into a cool
sea-current, I suppose. I wish I knew all about it. The question, is, why
is it so beautiful? It couldn't help it, I suppose! But for whose delight?"
Then he said, "I suppose this was a vacuum in here till it was broken? That
is why it is so clear and fresh. Good Heavens, what would I not give to
know why this thing cooled into these lovely little shapes. It's no use
talking about the laws of matter--why are the laws of matter what they are,
and not different? And odder still, why do I like the look of it?"
"Perhaps that is a law of matter too," I said.
"Oh, shut up!" said Father Payne to me. "But I understand--and of course
the temptation is to believe that this was all done on your account and
mine. That is as odd a thing as the stone itself, if you come to think of
it, that we should be made so that we refer everything to ourselves, and to
believe that God prepared this pretty show for us."
"I suppose we come in somewhere?" I said.
"Yes, we are allowed to see it," said Father Payne. "But it wasn't arranged
for the benefit of a silly old man like me. That is the worst of our
religious theories--that we believe that God is for ever making personal
appeals to us. It is that sort of self-importance which spoils everything."
"But I can hardly believe that we have this sense of self-importance only
to get rid of it," I said. "It all seems to me a dreadful muddle--to shut
up these lovely little things inside millions of stones, and then to give
us the wish to break a couple, only that we may reflect that they were not
meant for us to see at all."
Father Payne gave a groan. "Yes, it is a muddle!" he said. "But one thing I
feel clear about--that a beautiful thing like this means a sense of joy
somewhere: some happiness went to the making of things which in a sense are
quite useless, but are unutterably lovely all the same. Beauty implies
consciousness--but come, we are neglecting our business. Give me the other
stone at once!"
I gave it him, and he cracked it. "Very disappointing!" he said. "I made
sure there was a beautiful stone, but it is all solid--only a flaky sort of
jelly--it's no use at all!"
He threw it aside, but carefully gathered up the fragments of the
crystalline stone. "Don't tell of me!" he said, looking at me whimsically.
"This is the sort of nonsense which our sensible friends won't understand.
But now that I know that you care about stones, we will have a rare hunt
together one of these days. But mind--no stuff about geology! It's beauty
that we are in search of, you and I."