The Crock of Gold, James Stephens [best mobile ebook reader txt] 📗

“SHE does not deserve to be rescued,” said the Philosopher, “but I will rescue her. Indeed,” he thought a moment later, “she does not want to be rescued, and, therefore, I will rescue her.”

As he went down the road her shapely figure floated before his eyes as beautiful and simple as an old statue. He wagged his head angrily at the apparition, but it would not go away. He tried to concentrate his mind on a deep, philosophical maxim, but her disturbing image came between him and his thought, blotting out the latter so completely that a moment after he had stated his aphorism he could not remember what it had been. Such a condition of mind was so unusual that it bewildered him.

“Is a mind, then, so unstable,” said he, “that a mere figure, an animated geometrical arrangement can shake it from its foundations?”

The idea horrified him: he saw civilisation building its temples over a volcano...

“A puff,” said he, “and it is gone. Beneath all is chaos and red anarchy, over all a devouring and insistent appetite. Our eyes tell us what to think about, and our wisdom is no more than a catalogue of sensual stimuli.”

He would have been in a state of deep dejection were it not that through his perturbation there bubbled a stream of such amazing well-being as he had not felt since childhood. Years had toppled from his shoulders. He left one pound of solid matter behind at every stride. His very skin grew flexuous, and he found a pleasure in taking long steps such as he could not have accounted for by thought. Indeed, thought was the one thing he felt unequal to, and it was not precisely that he could not think but that he did not want to. All the importance and authority of his mind seemed to have faded away, and the activity which had once belonged to that organ was now transferred to his eyes. He saw, amazedly, the sunshine bathing the hills and the valleys. A bird in the hedge held him—beak, head, eyes, legs, and the wings that tapered widely at angles to the wind. For the first time in his life he really saw a bird, and one minute after it had flown away he could have reproduced its strident note. With every step along the curving road the landscape was changing. He saw and noted it almost in an ecstasy. A sharp hill jutted out into the road, it dissolved into a sloping meadow, rolled down into a valley and then climbed easily and peacefully into a hill again. On this side a clump of trees nodded together in the friendliest fashion. Yonder a solitary tree, well-grown and clean, was contented with its own bright company. A bush crouched tightly on the ground as though, at a word, it would scamper from its place and chase rabbits across the sward with shouts and laughter. Great spaces of sunshine were everywhere, and everywhere there were deep wells of shadow; and the one did not seem more beautiful than the other. That sunshine! Oh, the glory of it, the goodness and bravery of it, how broadly and grandly it shone, without stint, without care; he saw its measureless generosity and gloried in it as though himself had been the flinger of that largesse. And was he not? Did the sunlight not stream from his head and life from his finger-tips? Surely the well-being that was in him did bubble out to an activity beyond the universe. Thought! Oh! the petty thing! but motion! emotion! these were the realities. To feel, to do, to stride forward in elation chanting a paean of triumphant life!

After a time he felt hungry, and thrusting his hand into his wallet he broke off a piece of one of his cakes and looked about for a place where he might happily eat it. By the side of the road there was a well; just a little corner filled with water. Over it was a rough stone coping, and around, hugging it on three sides almost from sight, were thick, quiet bushes. He would not have noticed the well at all but for a thin stream, the breadth of two hands, which tiptoed away from it through a field. By this well he sat down and scooped the water in his hand and it tasted good.

He was eating his cake when a sound touched his ear from some distance, and shortly a woman came down the path carrying a vessel in her hand to draw water.

She was a big, comely woman, and she walked as one who had no misfortunes and no misgivings. When she saw the Philosopher sitting by the well she halted a moment in surprise and then came forward with a good-humoured smile.

“Good morrow to you, sir,” said she.

“Good morrow to you too, ma’am,” replied the Philosopher. “Sit down beside me here and eat some of my cake.”

“Why wouldn’t I, indeed,” said the woman, and she did sit beside him.

The Philosopher cracked a large piece off his cake and gave it to her and she ate some.

“There’s a taste on that cake,” said she. “Who made it?”

“My wife did,” he replied.

“Well, now!” said she, looking at him. “Do you know, you don’t look a bit like a married man.”

“No?” said the Philosopher.

“Not a bit. A married man looks comfortable and settled: he looks finished, if you understand me, and a bachelor looks unsettled and funny, and he always wants to be running round seeing things. I’d know a married man from a bachelor any day.”

“How would you know that?” said the Philosopher.

“Easily,” said she, with a nod. “It’s the way they look at a woman. A married man looks at you quietly as if he knew all about you. There isn’t any strangeness about him with a woman at all; but a bachelor man looks at you very sharp and looks away and then looks back again, the way you’d know he was thinking about you and didn’t know what you were thinking about him; and so they are always strange, and that’s why women like them.”

“Why!” said the Philosopher, astonished, “do women like bachelors better than married men?”

“Of course they do,” she replied heartily. “They wouldn’t look at the side of the road a married man was on if there was a bachelor man on the other side.”

“This,” said the Philosopher earnestly, “is very interesting.”

“And the queer thing is,” she continued, “that when I came up the road and saw you I said to myself ‘it’s a bachelor man.’ How long have you been married, now?”

“I don’t know,” said the Philosopher. “Maybe it’s ten years.”

“And how many children would you have, mister?”

“Two,” he replied, and then corrected himself, “No, I have only one.”

“Is the other one dead?”

“I never had more than one.”