The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 25 April 1912, Page 5

The Storyteller

THE WEAVER BY THE ROADSIDE They came up the road at a lagging pace, though neither seemed meant by nature to move except with a swinging enjoyment of healthy and perfectly controlled muscles. Both were young, he being, perhaps, three years under thirty, and she three years above twenty. ; -Her face was flusheda pretty faceand she held her head defiantly high, at once denying by its poise that she longed to cry, and keeping the tears hack by tilting it upward so they could not fall. He struck viciously at the daisy heads as he moved along swinging his walking-stick, freshly cut from a willowy birch tree that morning. Sometimes he seemed to repent of making the innocent blossoms suffer, and stooped to pick up a white head which he had laid low, smoothing it out in the palm of his left hand with a gloomy expression that did not keep him from switching off another head later. ‘ It is not fair to make the daisies scapegoats for your ill-humor,’; said the girl scornfully. ‘ It would be better not to decapitate them than to pity them afterward.’ ‘ They are to blame for encouraging lovers, with their “ loves-me-and-loves-me-not,” ’- he retorted. ‘ Though that isn’t why I flick them. Why shouldn’t they be glad to die before they find out that sunshine and June-time doesn’t last?’ * It lasts all their life"; they never have anything to darken their happiness,’ she said. ‘ Or anyone,’ he amended. ‘ See here, Lucy, I don’t care about trying to talk like a fellow in a story, straining to be cleverly significant and succeeding in being an idiotic idiot ’ v * And it’s particularly out of place now,’ he ended. * Here we’ve been engaged two months ’ ‘ One month and three weeks since the thirtieth of April,’ she'corrected him. ‘ It’s the same thing ’ * It really ipn’t,’ she insisted. * If you had known what love really is you would feel that one week moreOr less of our belonging to each other .mattered,a lot.’ * Oh, there you go again ! “ If I had known what love is!” Viewed by the light of yesterday and to-day, I should say I knew more about it than you did,’ he growled. ‘ What’s a miserable little week when you felt that a girl filled the want of all your previous life and was going to be yours eternally— wife ! I feel that there had never been a beginning of our belonging to each —and I thought there would not be an end!’ : —' >. * Oh, dear she groaned, catching her breath sobbingly. ; ;v ‘ As I Started to say,’ he went on relentlessly, ‘ here we are engaged almost two months, and you are proving

to me at ■ every step what a fool I was to believe that you loved me. There’s no use, Lucy; I can’t say or do anything more to explain this misunderstanding. If you won’t make up—well, then!’ he ended lamely, decapitating four daisies at a- stroke. ‘Jim, I positively will not let you put the blame of this upon me!’ she cried. To herself she added: There may be nothing more you can say, but, oh, there’s a lot more you can do Why don’t you-stop talking and being reasonable and just gather me up and let me cry on your shoulder?’ But naturally, being proud and hurt, she did not say this audibly. Well, Lucy,’ he returned with a sort of exasperated patience, ‘if you can see where else the blame lies except on the person who does not accept an explanation, then I’d be glad to have you point it out.’ ‘ ‘ There are ways and ways of explaining. There are explanations that make the offence worse,’ she said. But if he had eyes to: see it was plain that the retort was made without spirit, with utter weariness of longing to be released from her self-imposed task of maintaining her position. ‘ I’ve explained to the best of my ability,’ he said curtly. And silence fell between them as they walked on, she fighting back her tears, he beheading daisies without recurrent compunction. Up the road, near the top of the hill, stood a small house. It had two rooms on the lower, two on the upper floor, with a small shed obstructing, the view, placed, apparently, to |* that end, in true country oblivion to there being a view to obstruct. At the door of this little house stood a tall woman, remarkably thin and stooped, shading her eyes, unnecessarily, with her gnarled hand as she stood under the trees watching these unhappy young people as they approached up the hill, every movement eloquent of their disunion, - As though it wasn’t hard enough to git through life without putting chain-brakes on your own wheels!’ she muttered. ‘Good-morning, my dears,’ she added, as the pair came up with her. ‘ This is the kind o’ day that makes even a lonely old woman like me glad she’s alive, let alone two'young folks that don’t need anyone but themselves, ain’t it?’ ‘lt is a lovely day,’ agreed Lucy with a smile that proved how much Jim lost when she was offended. ‘ Do you live here alone?’ ‘ Weaving,’ explained the old woman. ‘ I’ve saved enough to build me this little house, and here I live alone, winter and summer. Folks far and near bring me their rags, so I git along.’ ‘Bring you rags?’ inquired Lucy, mystified, and Jim looked up interrogatively. Certain; didn’t I say 1 weaved ? Rags for rag carpets. I’m busier^ in winter than from now on, but there’s always some work goin’ on. Want to come in and see my loom ? . I’ve got a piece of carpet on now maybe you haven’t seen how we weave ’em?’ • • ‘ No, I never have,’ said Lucy, glancing hesitatingly at Jim, He gave her no response; the old woman did not seem to question that her invitation would not be accepted, so Lucy followed her into the little house, and, because he also saw nothing else to do, Jim followed Lucy. Over in the corner, a corner that seemed to include two-thirds of the small room, stood a lumbering rocker, to. which the hostess invited Lucy, leaving the carpet loom enlivened by the gay stripes of a rag carpet winch was resplendent with much red and orange of domestic dye. Piled on the floor beside the loom were several hanks of brown warp. The room was scrupulously- neat, but furnished only with the bare necessities of daily use. There were three chairsone a rocker, to which the hostess invited Lucy, leaving the two straight for Jim and herself. ‘Do you live here alone in winter?’ asked Lucy and her voice said for her: ‘How dreadful!’ - < rru ‘Winter and summer,’ assented the old weaver ~there s some neighbors near enough to visit ’em when it don t drift too much between here and there. I’ve plenty thoughts for company, and when a body works hard all day the light hours ain’t so lonesome, and you re good and ready to go to sleep when the dark ones come—l’m in bed by half-past eight most nights ’

' ' Just when, the curtain goes tip at the theatre !' cried Lucy. r ' I should die of fear.' ' Not if you knew there wasn't a thing to be afraid of/ said the weaver with a kind smile; Nothing ever happens here, and my silver and precious stones won't get me my throat cut.'- She looked about the room whimsically, yet contentedly. \ ; -■' It seems -dreary, but it is better than thinking you have something to trust to, to depend on, and have it fail. It is better to be quite alone than to be lonely with someone who has failed you.' The bitterness of disillusion was in Lucy's young voice, and her inexperience was loudly proclaimed by the worldly wisdom of her manner. :

The weaver glanced at her with smiling eyes—eyes that were, dim* from constant use in a poor light and dull with the blankness of their life-outlook, but they had seen enough to be able to smile at youthful folly. ' Well, I don't know about other folks' failing so much as we think they do,' she said slowly, remembering what she had read in the distance as she watched Jim and Lucy climb the hill, and wondering how she might help them. ;' I kind o' think we fail ourselves, mostly, expecting what isn't reasonable, and not being ready enough to take what is there. You see lots of folks don't love anyone well enough to let 'em be themselves. They keep fixing up in their own minds what other people ought to do, and how they ought to act, and when the others don't run on that track they get hurt; it's more'n likely all the time that the other folks don't even rightly understand what's expected of 'em. How can they, when words don't sound the same to different ears, and lots of folks is—well, if' not color blind, at least color dim-sighted?'

‘There you are!’ cried Jim emphatically. V Oh, it takes a weaver to understand what queer things, people’ll stick to, sure they’re right !’ laughed the old woman. ‘ Look at this very piece of carpet I’m working on now. The woman I’m weaving it for said she dyed these rags herself to be sure and have the. right shade o’ pink to go with the roses on her painted set, and nothing anyone’d say would make her believe ’twas a fiery red.’ She pointed to the vivid scarlet stripes with a chuckle. ‘ Now, let me tell you, my dear,’ the weaver continued, pulling her chair closer to Lucy’s and bending forward . earnestly, weaving makes a body see how life gets woven. Don’t you know we cut up our own material, dye ’em, too, lots of times? And then we get ’em woven by someone else, but it’s always out of our own rags, cut up by us, and our own dyeings. You see, I’m all alone, but I guess I needn’t have been. Once I had a fine strong warp to get woven in with my rags, a fine, strong warp! True blue ’twas, but I got to thinking maybe ’twas some other colorpartly that, and partly I wanted to dye it all over to suit myself. I tell you, young folks, love is awful exacting. I thought I loved this dear man I was going to marry, but— I did love him, but not enough, not near enough ! We don’t love, enough till we’re ready to . make allowances for everything that isn’t a sin, and it isn’t love that makes us get offended and unforgiving— if ’tis, it’s love o’ self. Things went wrong between us; little things at first, then bigger ones, till we had real quarrels, and at-last we parted. I’m a Catholic, my dears, and we think a promise to marry is a solemn thing ’ ■ We are Catholics,’ said Lucy, and Jim looked up •, for the first time, as he sat studying the cracks in the ) floor, with a glimmer of light in his gloomy eyes at Lucy’s ‘we.’ * / ‘ls that so? Well, then, you know all about it,’ said the weaver heartily. ‘ I felt widowed when my Jim left me-—-’ ‘Jim!’ cried Lucy, involuntarily. The weaver nodded. ‘ Jim, my dear* true,, patient, good Jim,’ she said unsteadily. ‘ The man I was going to marry. I felt widowed when we parted, but I wouldn’t send for him and do what I wanted to do, just cry on his shoulder and tell him I knew I : was in the wrong ! He’d have come if I’d sent; he’d sure have, come! There wasn’t a-mean, small thing in all Jim’s six foot of manhood; he wasn’t one to hold a grudge, Jim wasn’t. He’d made up and been glad

to, any minute. But I never sent. I used to grieve and cry, but I wouldn't give in.: And jthen one day he died. There was a sudden, thaw,; and /another man—a poor, good-for-nothing, hardly ever —started out across the pond on the ice, and it broke. Jim saw it, and went out after him. He got the man up, and the chill ..had sobered him,;so he held on to the ice and scrambled out ; but Jim was hit on the head by a sharp piece of ice, 1 andwell, Jim didn't get out. He died to save that poor imitation of a man; big, noble Jim! Well, no one knows why God weaves as He does. But they said the poor creature repented and lived decently after that, and Jim never . had done anything really bad to repent of, so maybe that was why he died to give the other a chance. When X went to see himl was ready enough to go to see him then! I'd have followed him gladly into the next world to beg his pardon and be with him, if I could; have gone. Pride seems a pretty small thing when death Peonies! When I went to see him, and he lay there so strong, so quiet, uncomplaining, just as he always had been, then I knew what I'd done, what I'd lost. And the real loss wasn't when he died, mind you, but remembering that I had hurt him, parted from him, been headstrong. So then I did what I'd ought to have done before it was too latelaid my. head down on that kind shoulder and told him to forgive me. He never moved, nor noticed, and nothing could have showed me he was dead like that, for that was not like Jim. That's why I live alone,' my dears, and why I weave and weave, with no one to do for me! And that's why I see life in my weaving and the colorblindness of lots of folks, and the snarled warp they tangle for themselves, I just as I didjust as I did, and wouldn't pick out the snarl till too late, when God had cut mv thread.' \

The second Jim, Lucy's lover, sprang up as the story ended 'Lucy!' lie cried stretching out his arms. . • But Lucy had anticipated him. Tears were streaming, down her face as she ran towards him. ' Oh, Jim ! dear old Jim, forgive me! I've been a horrid little wretch, but I'm sorry,-Jim; I was sorry all the time!' : Jim kissed her tenderly. ' I'm not going to have anyone call you names, little Lu, not even you!' he said.

• ; The weaver had gone back into the corner and seated herself at her loom. A gentle smile rested on her sad lips and satisfaction lighted up her age-beaten •face as she tied a fresh ball of brown warp to the end of her weaving and set the treadle in motion. Lucy ran over to her and stopped her work with a hand on each bent shoulder as she kissed her. How did you happen to tell us this story Did you guess?' she cried. ' " ~ * ■ ;. 'I wanted to tell it,.' said the weaver. f I watched you coming up the hill, and I saw you had got your warp tangled. I didn't want to see your weaving spoiledyou're both so young and look such nice children.' ' --'i.-""•"

y 'You've untangled' 1 us!' cried Lucy delightedly. 'You're a wonderful weaver!'

/ Jim shook both the gnarled hands that he had taken from the loom into his own. ' I'm mighty grateful to you. I wonder if another Jim mayn't be "allowed to prove his gratitude?' he said. The old woman looked up and smiled at him. ' You're a dear boy,' she said simply, f::.' Maybe you came this way to be woven into my pattern. I'd like to have you take an interest in me I need it. We never know what materials God is bringing us to weave. I'm sort of glad I'm a weaver; it seems to show, me a lot, and weaving, warp and woof, : : may mean most anything.'Catholic Home Annual.