THE OLD STONE MASON
Of well-flavoured men, I know none better than those who live close to
the soil or work in common things. Men are like roses and lilacs,
which, too carefully cultivated to please the eye, lose something of
their native fragrance. One of the best-flavoured men I know is my
friend, the old stone mason.
To-day I rode over with the old stone mason to select some wide stones
for steps in my new building. The old man loves stones. All his life
long—he is now beyond seventy years old—he has lived among stones,
lifted stones, fitted stones. He knows all the various kinds, shapes,
sizes, and where they will go best in a wall. He can tell at a glance
where to strike a stone to make it fit a particular place, and out of a
great pile he can select with a shrewd eye the stone for the exact
opening he has to fill. He will run his stubby rough hand over a stone
and remark:
“Fine face that. Ye don’t see many such stones these days,” as though
he were speaking of the countenance of a friend.
I veritably believe there are stones that smile at him, stones that
frown at him, stones that appear good or ill-humoured to him as he
bends his stocky strong body to lift or lay them. He is a slow man, a
slow, steady, geologic man, as befits one who works with the elemental
stuff of nature. His arms are short and his hands powerful. He has been
a servant of stones in this neighbourhood alone for upward of fifty
years.
He loves stones and can no more resist a good stone than I a good book.
When going about the country, if he sees comely stones in a wayside
pile, or in a fine-featured old fence he will have them, whether or no,
and dickers for them with all the eagerness, sly pride, and
half-concealed cunning with which a lover of old prints chaffers for a
Seymour Haden in a second-hand book shop. And when he has bought them
he takes the first idle day he has, and with his team of old horses
goes into the hills, or wherever it may be, and brings them down. He
has them piled about his barn and even in his yard, as another man
might have flower beds. And he can tell you, as he told me to-day, just
where a stone of such a size and such a face can be found, though it be
at the bottom of a pile. No book lover with a feeling sense for the
place in his cases where each of his books may be found has a sharper
instinct than he. In his pocket he carries a lump of red chalk, and
when we had made our selections he marked each stone with a broad red
cross.
I think it good fortune that I secured the old stone mason to do my
work, and take to myself some credit for skill in enticing him. He is
past seventy years old, though of a ruddy fresh countenance and a clear
bright eye, and takes no more contracts, and is even reluctantly
persuaded to do the ordinary stone work of the neighbourhood. He is
“well enough off,” as the saying goes, to rest during the remainder of
his years, for he has lived a temperate and frugal life, owns his own
home with the little garden behind it, and has money in the bank. But
he can be prevailed upon, like an old artist who has reached the time
of life when it seems as important to enjoy as to create, he can
sometimes be prevailed upon to lay a wall for the joy of doing it.
So I had the stone hauled onto the ground, the best old field stone I
could find, and I had a clean, straight foundation dug, and when all
was ready I brought the old man over to look at it. I said I wanted his
advice. No sooner did his glance light upon the stone, no sooner did he
see the open and ready earth than a new light came in his eye. His step
quickened and as he went about he began to hum an old tune under his
breath. I knew then that I had him! He had taken fire. I could see that
his eye was already selecting the stones that should “go down,” the
fine square stones to make the corners or cap the wall, and measuring
with a true eye the number of little stones for the fillers. In no time
at all he had agreed to do my work; indeed, would have felt aggrieved
if I had not employed him.
I enjoyed the building of the wall, I think, as much as he did, and
helped him what I could by rolling the larger stones close down to the
edge of the wall. As the old man works he talks, if any one cares to
listen, or if one does not care to listen he is well content to remain
silent among his stones. But I enjoyed listening, for nothing in this
world is so fascinating to me as the story of how a man has come to be
what he is. When we think of it there are no abstract adventures in
this world, but only your adventure and my adventure, and it is only as
we come to know a man that we can see how wonderful his life has been.
He told me all about the great walls and the little walls—miles and
miles of them—he has built in the course of fifty years. He told of
crude boyhood walls when he was a worker for wages only, he told of
proud manhood walls when he took contracts for foundations, retaining
walls, and even for whole buildings, such as churches, where the work
was mostly of stone; he told me of thrilling gains and profits, and of
depressing losses; and he told me of his calm later work, again on
wages, for which he is chosen as a master of his craft. A whole long
lifetime of it—and the last years the best of all!
As we drove up yesterday to select the steps from his piles of old
field stone, riding behind his great, slow, hairy-hoofed horse, in the
battered and ancient wagon, he pointed with his stubby whip to this or
that foundation, the work of his hands.
“Fine job, that,” said he, and I looked for the first time in my life
at the beautiful stonework beneath the familiar home of a friend. I had
seen the house a thousand times, and knew well the people in it, but my
unobservant eye had never before rested consciously upon that bit of
basement wall. How we go through life, losing most of the beauties of
it from sheer inability to see! But the old man, as he drives about,
rarely sees houses at all, especially wooden houses, and for all modern
stucco and cement work he entertains a kind of lofty contempt. Sham
work of a hasty and unskilled age! He never, I think, put in a
shovelful of cement except in the place where it belongs, as a mortar
for good walls, and never will do so as long as he lives. So long as he
lives the standards of high art will never be debased!
He built that foundation, and this chimney, he worked on the tower of
the Baptist church in the town, “and never yet has there been a crack
in her, winter or summer”; and more than forty years ago he laid the
cornerstone of the old schoolhouse, the foundation walls of which stand
to-day as sound and strong as they were when they were put down.
In dry walls I think the old stone mason takes the greatest pride of
all: for it is in the dry wall—I mean by that a wall laid without
mortar—that the sheer art of the mason comes most into play. Any one
can throw a wall together if he has mortar to make it stick, but a dry
wall must stand out for what it is, built solid from the bottom up,
each stone resting securely upon those below it, and braced and nested
in by the sheer skill of the mason. The art of the dry wall is the
ancient heritage of New England and speaks not only of the sincerity
and the conscientiousness of the old Puritan spirit but strikes the
higher note of beauty. Many of the older walls I know are worth going
far to see, for they exhibit a rare sense of form and proportion, and
are sometimes set in the landscape with a skill that only the
Master-Artist himself could exceed. Those old, hard-wrought stone
fences of the Burnham Hills and Crewsbury, the best of them, were
honestly built, and built to last a thousand years. A beautiful art—and
one that is passing away! It is the dry wall that stands of itself that
the old stone mason loves best of all.
As we drove along the road the old man pointed out to me with his
stubby whip so many examples of his work that it seemed finally as if
he had borne a hand in nearly everything done in this neighbourhood in
the last half-century. He has literally built himself into the country
and into the town, and at seventy years of age he can look back upon it
all with honest pride. It stands. No jerry-work anywhere. No cracks. It
stands.
I never realized before how completely the neighbourhood rests upon the
work of this simple old man. He _founded_ most of the homes here, and
upon his secure walls rest many of the stores, the churches, and the
schools of the countryside. I see again how important each man is to
the complete fabric of civilization and know that we are to leave no
one out, despise no one, look down upon no one.
He told me stories of this ancient settler and of that.
He was a powerful queer man—he wanted the moss left on his stones when
I put ’em in; never a hammer touched the facings of _his_ wall...
“That is properly a woman’s wall. She was the boss, you might call it,
and wanted stone, but _he_ wanted brick. So you see the front, where
people can see it, is of stone, but the sides is all brick.”
Thus like the true artist that he is, he has not only built himself his
own honesty, truth, skill, into the town, but he has built in the
inexhaustible peculiarities, the radiant charm, the hates and the
loves, of the people of this place. He has mirrored his own little age
in stone. He knows the town, indeed, better than most of us, having a
kind of stone-age knowledge of it—the fundamental things men build in
when they set about building permanently.
“And that is what you might call a spite-wall,” said he, showing me a
long wall leading between two shady homes, making one of them a prison
on the south, and the other a prison on the north. He told me the story
of an ancient and bitter quarrel between two old friends, a story which
sounded to-day among spring blossoms like the account of some ancient
baronial feud.
But if the old stone mason has built walls to keep enemies apart how
many more walls has he built to keep friends together? How many times
has he been consulted by shy lovers seeking a foundation for a new
home, a new family, how many times by Darby and Joan planning a resting
place for the sunny closing years of their lives! He could point,
indeed, to one wall that symbolized hatred; all the others meant homes,
roof-trees, families, or they were the foundations for the working
places of men, or else, like the tower of the church, they pointed
heavenward and were built to the glory of God.
The old stone mason has not the slightest idea that he has done
anything unusual or wonderful. He is as simple and honest a man as ever
I knew; and if he has pride, simple and honest also in that. He was
anxious not to charge me too much for the stone I bought—in an age like
this! I have never talked with him about God, or about religion: I had
no need to.
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He has done his duty in other ways by his time and his place. He has
brought up a large family of children; and has known sorrow and loss,
as well as happiness and contentment. Two of his children were taken in
one day with pneumonia. He told me about it with a quaver in his old
voice.
“How long ago was it?” I asked.
“Twenty-seven years.”
He has sons and daughters left, and two of the sons he has well trained
as stone masons after him. They are good as young men go in a
degenerate age. They insist on working in cement! He has grandchildren
in school, and spoils them.
He is also a man of public interests and upon town-meeting day puts on
his good clothes and sits modestly toward the back of the hall. Though
he rarely says anything he always has a strong opinion, an opinion as
sound and hard as stones and as simple, upon most of the questions that
come up. And he votes as he thinks, though the only man in meeting who
votes that way. For when a man works in the open, laying walls true to
lines and measurements, being honest with natural things, he comes
clear, sane, strong, upon many things. I would sooner trust his
judgment upon matters that are really important as between man and man,
and man and God, than I would trust the town lawyer. And if he has
grown a little testy with some of the innovations of modern life, and
thinks they did everything better forty years ago—and says so—he
speaks, at least, his honest conviction.
If I can lay my walls as true as he does, if I can build myself a third
part as firmly into any neighbourhood as he has into this, if at
seventy years of age—if ever I live to lay walls with joy at that time
of life—if I can look back upon _my_ foundations, _my_ heaven-pointing
towers, and find no cracks or strains in them, I shall feel that I have
made a great success of my life....
I went out just now: the old man was stooping to lift a heavy stone.
His hat was off and the full spring sunshine struck down warmly upon
the ruddy bald spot on the top of his head, the white hair around about
it looking silvery in that light. As he placed the stone in the wall,
he straightened up and rubbed his stubby hand along it.
“A fine stone that!” said he.
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