"Well, David," she said, "I warned you that you could buy a helve cheaper than you could make it."
"So I can buy a book cheaper than I can write it," I responded.
I felt somewhat pleased with my return shot, though I took pains not to show it. I squinted along my hickory stick which was even then beginning to a.s.sume, rudely, the outlines of an axe-handle. I had made a prodigious pile of fine white shavings and I was tired, but quite suddenly there came over me a sort of love for that length of wood. I sprung it affectionately over my knee, I rubbed it up and down with my hand, and then I set it in the corner behind the fireplace.
"After all," I said, for I had really been disturbed by Harriet"s remark--"after all, power over one thing gives us power over everything.
When you mend socks prospectively--into futurity--Harriet, that is an evidence of true greatness."
"Sometimes I think it doesn"t pay," remarked Harriet, though she was plainly pleased.
"Pretty good socks," I said, "can be bought for fifteen cents a pair."
Harriet looked at me suspiciously, but I was as sober as the face of nature.
For the next two or three evenings I let the axe-helve stand alone in the corner. I hardly looked at it, though once in a while, when occupied with some other work, I would remember, or rather half remember, that I had a pleasure in store for the evening. The very thought of sharp tools and something, to make with them acts upon the imagination with peculiar zest. So we love to employ the keen edge of the mind upon a knotty and difficult subject.
One evening the Scotch preacher came in. We love him very much, though he sometimes makes us laugh--perhaps, in part, because he makes us laugh. Externally he is a sort of human cocoanut, rough, brown, s.h.a.ggy, but within he has the true milk of human kindness. Some of his qualities touch greatness. His youth was spent in stony places where strong winds blew; the trees where he grew bore thorns; the soil where he dug was full of roots. But the crop was human love. He possesses that quality, unusual in one bred exclusively in the country, of magnanimity toward the unlike. In the country we are tempted to throw stones at strange hats! But to the Scotch preacher every man in one way seems transparent to the soul. He sees the man himself, not his professions any more than his clothes. And I never knew anyone who had such an abiding disbelief in the wickedness of the human soul. Weakness he sees and comforts; wickedness he cannot see.
When he came in I was busy whittling my axe-helve, it being my pleasure at that moment to make long, thin, curly shavings so light that many of them were caught on the hearth and bowled by the draught straight to fiery destruction.
There is a noisy zest about the Scotch preacher: he comes in "stomping"
as we say, he must clear his throat, he must strike his hands together; he even seems noisy when he unwinds the thick red tippet which he wears wound many times around his neck. It takes him a long time to unwind it, and he accomplishes the task with many slow gyrations of his enormous rough head. When he sits down he takes merely the edge of the chair, spreads his stout legs apart, sits as straight as a post, and blows his nose with a noise like the falling of a tree.
His interest in everything is prodigious. When he saw what I was doing he launched at once upon an account of the methods of axe-helving, ancient and modern, with true incidents of his childhood.
"Man," he exclaimed, "you"ve clean forgotten one of the preenciple refinements of the art. When you chop, which hand do you hold down?"
At the moment, I couldn"t have told "to save my life, so we both got up on our feet and tried.
"It"s the right hand down," I decided; "that"s natural to me."
"You"re a normal right-handed chopper, then," said the Scotch preacher, "as I was thinking. Now let me instruct you in the art. Being right-handed, your helve must bow out--so. No first-cla.s.s chopper uses a straight handle."
He fell to explaining, with gusto, the mysteries of the bowed handle, and as I listened I felt a new and peculiar interest in my task This was a final perfection to be accomplished, the finality of technique!
So we sat with our heads together talking helves and axes, axes with single blades and axes with double blades, and hand axes and great choppers" axes, and the science of felling trees, with the true philosophy of the last chip, and arguments as to the best procedure when a log begins to "pinch"--until a listener would have thought that the art of the chopper included the whole philosophy of existence--as indeed it does, if you look at it in that way. Finally I rushed out and brought in my old axe-handle, and we set upon it like true artists, with critical proscription for being a trivial product of machinery.
"Man," exclaimed the preacher, "it has no character. Now your helve here, being the vision of your brain and work of your hands, will interpret the thought of your heart."
Before the Scotch preacher had finished his disquisition upon the art of helve-making and its relations with all other arts, I felt like Peary discovering the Pole.
In the midst of the discourse, while I was soaring high, the Scotch preacher suddenly stopped, sat up, and struck his knee with a tremendous resounding smack.
"Spoons!" he exclaimed.
Harriet and I stopped and looked at him in astonishment.
"Spoons," repeated Harriet.
"Spoons," said the Scotch preacher. "I"ve not once thought of my errand; and my wife told me to come straight home. I"m more thoughtless every day!"
Then he turned to Harriet:
"I"ve been sent to borrow some spoons," he said.
"Spoons!" exclaimed Harriet.
"Spoons," answered the Scotch preacher. "We"ve invited friends for dinner to-morrow, and we must have spoons."
"But why--how--I thought--" began Harriet, still in astonishment.
The Scotch preacher squared around toward her and cleared his throat.
"It"s the baptisms," he said: "when a baby is brought for baptism, of course it must have a baptismal gift. What is the best gift for a baby?
A spoon. So we present it with a spoon. To-day we discovered we had only three spoons left, and company coming. Man, "tis a proleefic neighbourhood."
[Ill.u.s.tration: "LET MY AXE FALL"]
He heaved a great sigh.
Harriet rushed out and made up a package. When she came in I thought it seemed suspiciously large for spoons, but the Scotch preacher having again launched into the lore of the chopper, took it without at first perceiving anything strange. Five minutes after we had closed the door upon him he suddenly returned holding up the package.
"This is an uncommonly heavy package," he remarked; "did I say table-spoons?"
"Go on!" commanded Harriet; "your wife will understand."
"All right--good-bye again," and his st.u.r.dy figure soon disappeared in the dark.
"The impractical man!" exclaimed Harriet. "People impose on him."
"What was in that package, Harriet?"
"Oh, I put in a few jars of jelly and a cake of honey."
After a moment Harriet looked up from her work.
"Do you know the greatest sorrow of the Scotch preacher and his wife?"
"What is it?" I asked.
"They have no chick nor child of their own," said Harriet.
It is prodigious, the amount of work required to make a good axe-helve--I mean to make it according to one"s standard. I had times of humorous discouragement and times of high elation when it seemed to me I could not work fast enough. Weeks pa.s.sed when I did not touch the helve but left it standing quietly in the corner. Once or twice I took it out and walked about with it as a sort of cane, much to the secret amus.e.m.e.nt, I think, of Harriet. At times Harriet takes a really wicked delight in her superiority.
Early one morning in March the dawn came with a roaring wind, sleety snow drove down over the hill, the house creaked and complained in every clapboard. A blind of one of the upper windows, wrenched loose from its fastenings, was driven shut with such force that it broke a window pane.
When I rushed up to discover the meaning of the clatter and to repair the damage, I found the floor covered with peculiar long fragments of gla.s.s--the pane having been broken inward from the centre.
"Just what I have wanted," I said to myself.