The Best Short Stories of 1915 Part 29

"You must see by now, Andy, it's just as I told you. You've no money now, have you? You have spent it all, buying stuff to weave her garments from. And she has worn the garments and has thrown them away; so there is nothing left. Nothing left except the joy of good work well done, and the feeling that G.o.d has really whispered in your ear. Now you'll have to go back down to Glas...o...b..ry and the work with-the-little-'w.' You'll have to stay there through the winter, Andy, and save your pay. But when the time comes again, I'll call you."

So Andy put a padlock on the old log cabin where his loom was set up and went back down to the mill-town. And being as he was a clever man, he was put back on his job right away. And the gray mists of winter packed down on the gray town and on the little gray people in the town. And Andy worked at his machine.

The next spring he got the call, just as the Voice had said he would.

He drew his pay and, now that he knew a bit of what was required of him, he laid in a fair supply of what he should need. Then he was off into the hills. And one day there came the birds riding up on the winds like cavaliers with feathers dancing about; and when they began their keen bugling it pierced here and there and everywhere and made the walls of Winter to tumble down the same as Jericho's did. And sure enough, there a new babe teetered on her toes in the midst of the gra.s.s. Naked as a flower she was, and she smiled up at him.

So he wove for her with the lightest heart you can ever imagine. But, afterward, she went away in tears, the same as the other had done and as all Summers do; and Andy picked out a new pine tree and guessed she was keeping it green.

"Shall I be weaving _this_ la.s.s her shroud?" he had asked again. But again the Voice had made no answer.

So, naturally, the Summers came and came; and Andy wove and Worked and clad them. In time he became, as you may well believe, the finest hand-weaver (of Summer things, I mean) that was on earth in his day.

He became so good at his hand-work that in winter, at the mill, he was actually clumsy at his machine! So it was just 'tother way round, as you see, from what it was when he started. He was so clumsy then with his hands that he thought everything had to be done by machine you remember.

But now he could outdo with his mortal hands anything that was ever done by machine.

And another queer thing happened to him; he got so he had a totally different idea of what work was. For his mates down in Glas...o...b..ry told him, "You work only during the winter, don't you?"

Whereas, he found himself answering: "Why, no. 'Tis just the other way around. I can work only during the summer. I can't work at all during the winter. I'm dead all winter long--like all the Green Things." Then his comrades spoke wildly of him and touched their heads. They had learned the American idea, you see. Andy was crazy and he was lazy; and he didn't know when he had a good job; and there was no money in loafing. And all that sort of thing.

Now, I could keep you here all night telling you what all went on with Summer after Summer, and Summer after Summer, and Summer after Summer; until Andy grew old and wrinkled and ugly and very sweet in his mind and cleverer and defter and finer in his finger-weaving. But the main carry of it all is just as I've been telling you--So we have him coming along, year after year, loving his little la.s.ses and his blues and greens and yellows and the way he could put 'em together and make Beauty.

That was the way he lived. And now this is the way he died.

Always, I think I told you, Andy asked the question: "And shall I be weaving this la.s.s a shroud?"

And never had the Voice answered him.

Well, came one Summer that lived a long, long time and ran and tried to hide in far places when told she had to die; and to Andy it seemed he loved that Summer so fond and fair, more than any and all. Andy was sixty-eight then and for full forty years had done his winter stint and his Big 'W' Work in the hills. But he did not feel tired that year. No; he simply felt odd-like, as if it might be something unforeseen was going to happen to him and it would not tell its name to him first. (You know how you feel that way sometimes--as if wings were flying over your head and you think you see their shadows on the gra.s.s; but you look up and see no wings at all in the sky. Then you say: "Isn't the sky a queer color to-day?" and you feel uneasy.)

So it came about that while that Summer lingered and hid and ran, Andy again asked the old, old question he had always asked and to which he had never received an answer:

"Shall I be weaving _this_ la.s.s her shroud?"

And, lo and behold, the Voice, very soft and full of kindness, said: "If 'twill please you, you might as well, Andy. Your Work is done. But--a question first. Have you ever once regretted the labor and the loss I have put upon you?"

Andy said to himself, "I am about to die." In a loud, clear tone though he answered: "Not once, O Voice! The joy I felt, the triumph I felt as I handed her a bit of master-work and she flung it to the idle winds was in itself enough. As I look back at it, there has been no labor and there has been no loss. I have heard G.o.d's whisper in my ears, and that will be sufficient for me until the end of eternity."

So the Voice said: "You know all there is to know. Weave the shroud."

Andy took steel-blue floss and at right angles he shot it with white; and he made it so thin and fine that a million miles of it would not weigh a hundred pounds. And he said to himself, "I will weave a hundred pounds of it; and I'll wrap her in it myself, all softly, around and around, like as if she was a dead bride of the Green Folk's king, I will."

So Andy set to work, grim as Death himself. He bit his lip hard, and a queer s.h.i.+ne came into his eyes; and he worked day and night, fast and faster, eating nothing and sleeping not at all--smoking away like a demon on his pipe and weaving miles and miles to his heart's desire.

"It shall be my master-bit," he told himself.

He never even looked out the window, so close was he on the heel of his work. "It shall be my master-bit," he kept saying to himself. The light got poorer and dimmer and there was a shorter lasting of it. Less light meant longer work; so it was thirty days and thirty nights before he got it anywhere near finished. No, it wasn't fully done. How could it be?

The Summer Fellows never finished anything complete, you know.

But 'twas beautiful, just the same, all s.h.i.+mmering cold blue, and white like apple blossoms that have blanched and are ready to fall. And there was mile upon mile of it. It was wondrously fine, finer than anything Andy had done until then. It was really his master-bit, as he had said it would be. And he would have kept on and woven more, but--

He looked of a sudden out his window, one morning, in the gray, and he could not see that Summer anywhere!

He went to the door and shaded his eyes with his hands and peered over miles and miles of hills; and far down one gusset of valley he saw her dull-green robes a-trailing. He cried for joy. (You know--when you have lost a thing that you loved and found it again.)

Famished and weak he was, but he gathered the miles and pounds of that shroud in his arms and started down the roads and over the hills after her, calling till his heart would break and his voice went dry:

"Wait for me, la.s.s. I've woven your shroud! Wait for me, la.s.s. I'm coming! I've your beautiful, downy shroud here--"

And he would stumble along, so weak the sweat broke out on him and he scarce could lift a leg. But with the shroud over his arm, he went on and on and on as best he could; his long, ragged gray hair a-flying and a wild glare in his eyes and those eyes fast fixed on the Summer as she slipped away.

'Twas in this fas.h.i.+on he came to the summit of a foothill and could go no further. The cold had smitten to his bones, though the sweat still stood on his skin. He dropped down on the ground and slept a bit--but not sound asleep, and in his sleep he had awful dreams which made him wake.

He started up, crying weakly: "I have your shroud, la.s.s. Wait for me!"

And then he noticed--_It was snowing_!

The soft white flakes he saw, dropping upon the earth like light years, my boy, years that themselves will be dropping and dropping forever and ever by tens of hundreds of thousands of millions and covering everything, all we do, all we are or were, far and wide with a white sameness--a big mound here where a Hero Worked, a flatness there where a zero worked--but all white, and all the same.

Andy put his hand to his forehead as if in a dream, and then--let me see; what did he do?--he wrung his hands and he cried out:

"Look yonder, look yonder! Oh, now I see why the Voice never answered me when I asked about the shroud! Now I see. I see my presumption, and I understand the silence--'tis G.o.d Himself who weaves the shroud for every Summer. Look yonder at the snowflakes a-coming down! I can see G.o.d's shuttle weaving in and out amongst them. In and out amongst the years of snowflakes I can see G.o.d's hand, pus.h.i.+ng the shuttle and weaving the shroud that will wrap the Summers and all and all--And I was so bold with my poor little shroud here, my master-bit of weaving--"

And he broke down and began sobbing and threw himself face down upon the ground, wiping away at his tears with the wonderful weft he had made.

Then the great Voice came out of the wind and the darkening sky, st.u.r.dy as a great captain's, and shouted aloud through the thick of the flakes:

"_Pray, but regret not, Andy. You did the Work of your Hand!_"

So he died in the snow on the top of that hill, the contented artist of a perished dream, the master worker in a fabric that immediately dissolved. What he had told the Voice was true; the triumph he felt as he handed over to the Summer a bit of his best and she threw it away to the drifting winds like a bit of dying music--the joy he felt then was enough to last him till eternity ended. He had heard G.o.d's whisper in his ear; and he never would have heard it if he had stayed in the mill.

He had done what G.o.d wanted him to do, a beautiful thing as beautifully as he knew how--and he felt at last that the beauty of it was somehow not lost at all.

III

Abruptly the old man left and went out into the snowy night. For there were tears in his eyes.

IV

The poker game was finished. Pigalle sauntered slowly over to my table.

"You know Handy?" he asked, slowly, in his broken English.

"Who's that?"

"The hole man that ees just go out. 'Is name ees Handy Gor-don." He rolled his great expressive eyes. "'E's cra-zee man. Also wot you call loafer: 'e do not work wen 'e wish not to. But, _mon Dieu_, 'ow 'e can play, that man!" He made a suave, swelling gesture with his hands and arms and heaved up his great bulk gracefully. "'Ow 'e can play! 'Ow 'e can _play_!"

"He is Andy Gordon!" I exclaimed. "What is he? A weaver?"