WOODEN TONY

TONY was the idlest boy in Switzerland. Other boys of his age chopped wood, gathered edelweiss, looked after goats and cattle; carried parcels for the strangers, guided them on short expeditions; and earned pence in many ways. But

Tony did none of these things, and when his mother tried to

make him useful he looked so frightened that at last she left him alone and let him do as he pleased. Gradually he grew to look quite stupid, as if his wits had gone a-wandering: and he was called the "Wooden-head"--that was the name by which all the neighbours knew him.

"Poor little Wooden-head! he's no use at all to the you," they said to his mother; and at this she waxed angry, for though she often called him Wooden-head herself, she did not like to hear others do so.

"Perhaps he thinks more than he cares to say," she would answer.

"But he never tells of what he thinks; and a thinker who says nothing is like a signpost that points no way, and has nought written on it to guide him who looks up," old Gaspard said one morning.

"The signpost was made before the writing, and the talking that is worth hearing only comes after much thinking. He'll tell us enough some day." the mother answered. But though she spoke up bravely she was sad at heart. "I love thee dearly, my little son," she said. "I love thy pale face and wide open eyes, looking as though they expected to see Heaven's door creak on its hinges so that thou mightest know what the heavenly city was like; but who besides will care for thee if thou art stupid? And if thou art useless who will want thee? Even thy father gets impatient." Tony turned from the faggot that was beginning to crackle and merrily lick with its long flames the black soup-pot hung over it.

"Could I be with thee and yet far off?" he asked. "I long to be far off."

"Dear mercy!" his mother exclaimed. "But why dost thou want to be far off, Tony?"

"Then would I be little and could lie in thy arms; and none would want me to do the things I cannot do and forget to do."

"But how would being far off make thee little, my son?"

"All the people are little far off," he answered. "I often watch the strangers come down the pathway from the big house. They grow bigger and bigger as they come near; they pass the door and go on by the gorge, getting smaller and smaller till they are as little as the figures in the wood that my father cuts away in the winter. When they return they grow bigger and bigger again as they come near. Yes—I want to be very little and far off."

"My son, thou art a fool," his mother said. "Is thy father even smaller, dost thou think? It is only the distance that makes the strangers seem as thou hast said; if thou drew near them thou wouldst see that they had neither grown smaller nor larger." But Tony shook his head and would not understand.

"They are little to me," he said. "I would like to go away and be little to thee again, and then thou wouldst not be always asking me to do this thing and that, and be angry at my forgetting. There are so many things in my head that come before my eyes and make my hands useless."

"Thou art no good if thou art useless," his mother sighed. "All things have a reason for staying in the world, and the reason for the young and strong is that they are useful." But Tony answered only, --

"Some day I will go far off and be very little," and went to the sunshine and sat down on his little stool by the door. Presently he began to sing a song learnt in some strange fashion unknown to any near him, as a solitary bird might learn from its own little lonely heart.

"Ah, dear child," his mother said sadly as she listened. "He is no fool in spite of his talk, or if he be one, then his voice is sweeter than the wisest; there is not room for an evil thought anywhere within sound of it. While I listen to him I could even forgive Gaspard's wife for getting the fine linen to be washed for the English lady. It was a small thing to quarrel about."

But you do not know yet where Tony lived. In the summer his home was far up a high mountain in Switzerland. Beneath was a valley abounding in little meadows and winding pathways that had at one end a waterfall. The waterfall fell over a mountain side and was like a dream forgotten before waking-tine, for though the spray went down and down, it never reached the bottom, but scattered itself in the sunshine and was lost. Tony used to watch the falling water, and try to feel as he imagined it felt--caught by the breeze and carried away in its arms. Sometimes he could almost fancy himself journeying with

it--on and on, till he lost all likeness to himself, and, meeting the great winds, he became a part of them, and swept over the far-off sea. All about the valley and here and there on the mountains were the chalets or dark wooden houses of the peasants. Some were built on piles, so that when the storms and floods came the herdsmen and their beasts might still keep themselves dry; and some had heavy stones on their roofs, so that the winds might not blow them away. When Tony was very little, and before he had seem the builders at work, he thought that the piles were wooden legs on which the chalets had walked up in the darkness and stillness of the night, and that the two little windows in most of their fronts were eyes with which they had looked out to guide themselves. He often wished that he could see them staggering step by step upward along the zig-zag pathways. When he grew older it was almost a grief to know that human hands had built them on the mountain and in the valley, and that they would stay where they first rose till the winds and rains had done their worst. There was a little heap of rubbish on one side of the mountains; he had often wondered what it meant, but at last he knew, and then he stood looking at it and thought sadly of the children crouching over the fire, while the herdsman watched the sweeping storm gather to shatter their home and leave it in the past.

Just above his father's chalet was a big stone house, called the Alpine Hotel, where strangers came and stayed in the summer. The strangers talked among themselves in a language Tony did not understand, and were curious about the country round, professing to love it much, and day after day they walked over little bits of it. It seemed odd to Tony that they should travel from far countries to see the things he had lived among all his life--just the hills and valleys, the snow and the edelweiss, the sunshine and the infinite stillness. Was it really for these that the strangers came? He wondered for these that the strangers came? He wondered sometimes what more might be in the distances beyond his home, and in what strange forms the great world stretched itself. Yet he did not trouble often about either the strangers or the world they came from, but silent and lonely let the days and nights slip by as one that swims with but just enough movement to keep himself from drowning. So Tony seemed to swim through time, and to find each day as difficult to remember from the one that went before or came after it as he would have it to tell one mile of sea from another. Sometimes he wondered if the strangers were people easy to break, or to kill, or to get lost, for though they never ceased praising the beauty of the mountains, yet they were afraid to go alone up the steep paths or on the snow-plains that he could have wandered over in his sleep. But it was good that they had so little courage, for they gave his father money to show them the mountains ways, to carry their food, and pull them across the little precipices and crevasses that Tony scarce noticed, to cut steps on the sheer ice to which his feet clung surely, to take care of them altogether, those foolish strangers who professed to love the mountains and yet were afraid to be alone among them. All day long while his father was away Tony stayed in the chalet watching his mother scrub and clean and wash, and make the soup ready for his father at night. Or he would sit by the doorway, listening to the falling avalanche, and letting the warm sun fall on his closely-cropped head. Happy Tony! the trees made pictures and he saw them, the wind blew and he understood: surely he belonged to the winds and the trees, and had once been a part of them? Why should he trouble to work? Vaguely his heart knew that not to work as his father and mother worked had the journeyed into the world from the mists beyond it. Had he not been very little once when he set out on that first journey? Some day, when he had done his resting on the mountain, he would go on into the distance, and be very little once more. And there were, besides, other thoughts than these that came into his heart, for he and nature were so near akin--thoughts of which those about him knew nothing; but he had few words with which to talk; even the easy ones of daily life his lips found difficult to use.

When the evening came, and the soup was eaten, he stood by the doorway, listening to his father's stories of what the strangers had said and done. Sometimes when they had been niggardly or very silent or the day a disappointing one, his father would be cross and grumble at the soup, or reproach Tony for being idle; but his mother always took his part.

"Nay, nay, do not be hard on him," she would say. "Now he is as one called too soon, before his sleep has satisfied him, and his dreams overtake his waking hours. Let him get his dreaming done, and he will rouse to work as men do in the morning time."

"Ah, nonsense," the father would answer; "we can any of us dream who are too stupid to wake and too idle to work. If it were not that he could sing I would have no patience with him."

The strange thing about Tony's song was that no one knew how he had come be it. He sang a little bit of it in the days when he looked for edelweiss seek for the the little white flowers that grow on the edge of the snow on the Alps, and when he brought any back they were tied in bunches and offered for sale to the strangers. That was before he had grown so silent, before the time when the great cobweb seemed to have wrapped him round, before he wandered into a dream and shut the door on the waking world. One day he came back with his basket empty.

"But where is the edelweiss?" his mother asked.

"I did not see any," he answered, and sat down beside the smoking wood. Then he began the song he had known since he could sing at all; but this time there was something that his mother had never heard before.

"Where didst thou learn that?" she asked, but Tony would not speak.

"It is hard on thee," Gaspard's wife said, "that thy son should be a fool."

"Nay, he is no fool," the mother answered.

"But he cannot tell even where he learnt his song," the woman said.

"He learnt it in the clouds, or on the mountain side, farther up than our feet can climb--what may be there—only the like of Tony can tell," and she waited scornfully for

Gaspard's wife to go; but then she sighed sadly enough.

"Surely he will some day awaken," she though, "or what will be the good of him?" But from that time Tony forgot more and more the things he was told to do, and lived among his dreams, which grew so tangled that even he could not tell the sleeping from the waking ones.

It was only in the summer that the days passed thus.

When the storms came and the snow descended, the hotels and all the chalets on the mountains were closed, and the peasant and the herdsmen and their families and their flocks went down to the valley for the winter. Tony and his parents lived with a neighbour at the entrance to the village, all of them huddled together in a wooden dwelling. The floods came, and the winds swept past, and the snow-drift piled higher and higher against the windows till it was hardly possible for any light to enter the close and smoky room. Tony used to watch his father cutting bits of wood: chip by chip he seemed to take away the walls that held little animals and men and women in prison. He never realized that his father's sharp knife and precise eye shaped the toys, or understood that it was just for the sake of the money they would bring that his mother placed them away so carefully till the dealer from Geneva came to buy them, or till it was time to put them on a tray outside the chalet door so that the strangers might see and bargain for them.

One winter there was a dark knotty morsel of wood that

fascinated him. Every morning as he drank his milk his eyes wandered toward it. In the evening as he crouched shiveringly by the smouldering fire beneath the black

soup-pot, he kept his eyes fixed on it and wondered what strange thing it concealed. One day his father took it up, and, turning it over and over, began to cut, till there came forth the figure of a little woman who had on her face an expression of listening and waiting. Tony's father looked at her and held her up before him when he had taken off the last bits of wood that clung to her.

"Maybe thou are expecting some one to come and bear thee company," he said, speaking to it affectionately, as though it were a child; "but I do not know of any thou canst have, unless Tony here will please thee?"

Tony shrinking back fancied that the woman's eyes turned towards him.

"She is only wood, my lad," his mother said, "and

to-morrow she will be sent to the dealer's far off--there is nothing to e afraid of, she cannot move, and in things that cannot move no danger lies. All things that live and move have power to frighten, but not this bit of wood that has been shaped by thy father's knife."

But Tony crept out of the chalet and trampled the soft snow under foot, and he was afraid of the little wooden woman lying still and wide-eyed in the smoky chalet. When he went back his mother looked up and said, just as if she had divined his thoughts, "Our neighbours Louis has gone to

Geneva to look for mules for the summer; he has taken all thy father's carving with him, so thou needst not be afraid of the little woman any more."

This had happened more than year ago, and Tony had forgotten the piece of wood and what had come from it.

Now his father was carving again, and making ready for the dealer who arrived once a year to buy their winter's work from the peasants; and if the dealer would not buy, the little figures would be put away in a drawer ready for the strangers.

"If I were but like one of them," Tony used to think as he saw them wrapped in soft paper, "to be always little, to be handled tenderly and put to sleep in a drawer till the summer, and then to be warmed through and through by the sun. Why should they have legs that never ache and hands that never work?'

It was a cold morning when the dealer came--a dark, silent man, black haired, with overhanging eye-brows.

"Who is this?" he asked, looking at Tony.

"He is my son," the father said; "but little enough good is he save to sing."

Is he the boy whose song the goatherds say was learnt in the clouds?"

"It may be."

"Ah, Tony's song is known all down the valley and over the mountain too," his mother said.

"A stranger came to Geneva once and tried to sing it," the dealer said, "but he could not remember it all."

"It is no good to Tony," the father said, "he is only a fool, and will not use his hands and feet." Then the mother spoke up for her son.

"Don't judge him harshly," she said. "Surely, some are made to use their hands and some their feet, and some it may be just their hearts to feel and their lips to speak. Does he not sing a song he has fetched from the clouds? Let that travel instead of his feet and work instead of his hands."

"He is called the Wooden-head," the father went on, unheeding, "and he might well be all wooden but for his song. The rest of him is no good--"

"A song has something lived longer than the strongest hands that ever worked for bread, and travelled farther than the swiftest runner," said the mother.

"--And he would be like one of those," the father added, pointing to the little carved figures he had made.

"They were hidden in a block of wood, just as thy song is hidden in thee," his mother said, looking at Tony fondly.

"He would be better without his song," his father said. "He might dream less and work more."

The dealer considered and was silent, and when he spoke again he spoke slowly.

"Let him go to the city with me--to Geneva," he said, "and I will take the song from his lips and send it over the world."

"Tony," asked his father, "wilt thou go to Geneva?

Perhaps there thou wouldst get thy wish to be far off and very little."

"Ah!" said the mother, with a heart that stood still, "but I have heard it said that a wish and its fulfilment sometimes find themselves strange company. But go if thou wilt, dear lad, there is much in the world. I would not keep thee from seeing it."

The peasants came out of their chalets and stood at their doors watching Tony as he went through the village with the dealer; but Tony did not see them. He walked as one who was dazed. The icicles hung like a fringe on the waterfall, and everywhere the sun had kissed it there rested a little golden star; but he did not look up as he passed by. He kept his eyes toward the long, straight road, and wondered if in the stems of the fir-trees beside it there dwelt strange figures like those his father had set free with his knife. The dealer pulled some wire from his pocket and fashioned it carefully as he walked on, but he said no word until the village was far behind and they could no longer hear the trickle of the unfrozen water. Then he looked up and said,

"Sing."

Mechanically, as though he were a puppet, of which the string had been pulled, Tony began to sing, and the dealer twanged the wire in his hands till it almost echoed the song. But Tony did not hear it. Over his senses had stolen a great rest; he walked as though before him he saw the land of his dreams and presently would enter its gateway.

Twang, twang, went the wire.

The fir-trees swayed a very little in the breeze; more and more as the twilight deepened, as the night came on. Tony turned his face toward them; he felt as if he knew them, he wanted to go to them, to walk among them as his friends, but something held him and he could not. The trees knew him and held out their arms: they whispered a message but he did not understand it. But he was going to understand them, to learn their language and ponder their secrets.

Twang, twang, went the wire.

The trees were wrapped in darkness at last, but Tony did not stop, he went on, on and on without stopping, into the blackness till that too was behind, and towards him slowly stole the morning light. There was a range of low mountains far in the distance. They rose higher and higher as he drew near if to greet him.

"Sing," said the dealer.

But his song was different, it seemed no longer to come from his heart but only from his lips, and as he sang he heard the notes repeated. The song was going out of him and on to the dealer's wire. He did not look toward it, he did not care; he felt nothing keenly. His legs were growing stiff and his feet were hard, yet lighter to lift than they had been. He was not tired, or warm, or cold, or glad, or sorry, but only in a dream

The fir-trees were far, far behind now. Tony and the dealer had passed other villages than the one from which they had started yesterday. They were nearer to the mountains that had looked so low at first, and before them was a blue lake reflecting the bluer sky. Beside the lake was a long road that led to the city of Geneva--the city toward which they were journeying. But there were more villages and little towns to go through first--towns with white houses on the hill-side and others low down close to the water's edge. There were carved wooden balconies to some of them, and some were built altogether of wood. Tony wondered in what strange forest the trees of which they were made had grown. He seemed to have more and more kinship with the things that belonged to Nature's firstness--with the sky and the lake and the trees nay, even with the dead wood that had been used on human dwelling-places. But toward human beings he felt a strangeness spring up in his heart as if between him and them had begun a separation. They seemed to be made of a different texture, of different flesh and blood from himself, and they—these people-- were so tall, they overshadowed him; they took long steps and carried great loads that would have crushed him. And yet they did not look bigger than his father and mother, it was only when they were beside him that he realized the difference in height. It did not surprise him, for nothing surprised him now, or stirred his pulse, or made his heart beat quicker. He went on, on.

The dealer twanged the wire, and the music of it grew more and more to resemble Tony's song. But Tony trampled in silence looking at the lake and sky, while the sun shone, and the mountains rose higher and higher. He felt as if they were his parents or had been once in a far-off time, and now they were reaching out to him trying once more to bring him back to themselves before it was for ever too late. Too late for what? He did not know, he could not answer himself. His heart was growing still and slow, his lips were growing dumb.

"Sing," said the man again.

Then Tony opened his mouth, but the words of his song had gone, he could not remember them, he could not say them, only the notes came forth, but they had no meaning that could be written down in words, and each listener heard them differently. Gradually instead of singing he listened, for his song was all around and about, but it did not come from behind him, but when he tried to turn he could not. He was clasped everywhere by the wire, and in the midst of its cold tangle he walked, strange and rigid, as if in a dream. One arm hung by his side, he could not move it; one hand was in his pocket, he could not pull it out. His clothes seemed to have changed, to have grown as stiff as he, and to be separate from him no more. Only his feet moved just enough to carry him forward, and that was all.

But now the last miles of the road were behind, and the sounds of a city were before him with lines of houses standing up high and white, and many little windows like gaping mouths talking in the air or lidless eyes looking out on the people in the streets. Lower down there were windows, reaching to the ground, filled with all manner of things to please those who had money to go in and buy. Tony walked by all scarcely knowing: but he understood, for he had seen his shadow: he was in the distance towards which he had looked so often from his mountain home.

He was far off and very little.

He knew that he was bound and a prisoner, but it did not matter, he did not care. It was only part of a new life in the new world that he had entered. Suddenly with a jerk he stopped by one of the great windows; a door opened and he entered. All about him was wooden--wooden houses and people and animals-- and everywhere a sound of ticking. Tick, tick, tick. He was lifted by the dealer's hand on to a height. Before him was house, a chalet, with a flight of stairs outside leading to a balcony.

"Go up," the dealer said, and slowly stair by stair he went, his feet growing stiffer and stiffer with ever step upward. He rested on the balcony; there were two little doors leading into the house, they opened suddenly and disclosed a little room behind. In the room waiting—surely waiting for him? was the strange little woman Tony had seen his father take from the block of wood. He remembered that he used to be afraid of her. How foolish he had been; now he was afraid of nothing. He took his place beside her, he felt that they would never be apart again unless great change or sorrow came: surely it was like a marriage? He saw that the little woman was as big as he, had she grown? or had he--but he could not think or reason. He was jerked back, the wire twanged, the doors closed, and all was still. He was in the darkness waiting too, but for what or how long he did not know: all time was the same to him, he could measure it no more.

In the distance he heard other wires twanging, and presently the melody of his song came from many directions, as though the place were full of it. He could hear the people in the street; they hummed it as they passed by. Once far off he heard a band playing it. But he did not listen long, for all things grew faint as they would have grown dim too had he been in the light to se and know. For Tony's life had gone into his song; only a simple little song, just as his had been a simple little life.

Life is not only in nodding heads, and work is not only for hands that move and feet that walk; it is in many other things.

After a time there were sounds of fitting and tapping over Tony's head, a loud ticking-- tick, tick, tick unceasingly, and then a strange whirring and an iron tongue struck out clang-clang up to eleven. As the last stroke fell the little doors flew open and Tony and his companion were jerked out by the wire that bound them on to the balcony at the top to the stairs by which he had mounted, and stood together while all around and above the song was played-- the song that never would come from his lips again. Before them, separating the place in which their dwelling was from the street, was a great window letting in a flood of light, and on the outer side against the glass were pressed eager faces watching; but Tony and his companion did not know this; as the last not died away they were jerked back into the little room and all was darkness till another hour had passed, and then it all happened again. Hour after hour it was always the same, day after day, week after week, month after month, in light and dark, in heat and cold.

Two weary faces once were pressed against the window, those of a woman and a man, and as the doors opened and the two little figures came forth on the clock and stood while the song was played, the woman cried,

"It is Tony, it is Tony, it is his song; there beside him is the woman you made, and he is wooden too-- he is wooden."

"Thou art dreaming," said the man; "Tony is gone into the world, and we will go and seek him."

"No, no," the woman cried in despair, "his song has gone into the world, but Tony is there," and she pointed to the clock; "he is wooden-- he is wooden." The man looked long and silently.

"He had always a wooden head," he answered slowly; "maybe the rest of him has gone wooden too, for he did not move enough to keep quickened. But he was useless," he added, trying to comfort his wife; "didst thou not say thyself that his song would work instead of his hands, and journey instead of his feet?"

"Ah, that was well enough for those who did not love him," said the mother, "but it does not comfort me. It is Tony that I want, my son Tony who sat by the door and sang, or by the fire watching the wood smoulder." While she spoke the song, ceased, the figures were jerked into the darkness, and the doors closed; before the man and woman lay the long road and the weary miles that led back to the village and the mountains.