He turned again to the screen.
"What is to be thrown on the screen now—in rapid succession for our hour is brief—I call our Marble Quarry. Just think of it! quarried by the same hard work which you all know, by which you earn your daily bread; sculptured into forms of exceeding beauty by the same hard toil of other hands. And behind all the toil there is the soul of art, ever seeking expression through the human instrument of the practised hand that quarries, then sculptures, then places, and builds! I shall give a word or two of explanation in regard to time and locality; next month we will take the subjects one by one."
There flashed upon the screen and in quick succession, although the men protested and begged for an extension of exposures, the noble Pisan group and Niccola Pisano's pulpit in the baptistery—the horses from the Parthenon frieze—the Zeus group from the great altar at Pergamos—Theseus and the Centaur—the Wrestlers—the Discus Thrower and, last, the exquisite little church of Saint Mary of the Thorn,—the Arno's jewel, the seafarers' own,—that looks out over the Pisan waters to the Mediterranean.
It was a magnificent showing. No words from Father Honoré were needed to bring home to his audience the lesson of the Marble Quarry.
"I call the next series, which will be shown without explanation and merely named, other members of the Brotherhood of Stone. We study them separately later on in the summer."
The cathedrals of York, Amiens, Westminster, Cologne, Mayence, St. Mark's—a noble array of man's handiwork, were thrown upon the screen. The men showed their appreciation by thunderous applause.
The screen was again a blank; then it filled suddenly with the great Upper Quarry in The Gore. The granite ledges sloped upward to meet the blue of the sky. The great steel derricks and their crisscrossing cables cast curiously foreshortened shadows on the gleaming white expanse. Here and there a group of men showed dark against a ledge. In the centre, one of the monster derricks held suspended in its chains a forty-ton block of granite just lifted from its eternal bed. Beside it a workman showed like a pigmy.
Some one proposed a three times three for the home quarries. The men rose to their feet and the cheers were given with a will. The ringing echo of the last had not died away when the quarry vanished, and in its place stood the finished cathedral of A.—the work which the hands of those present were to create. It was a reproduction of the architect's water-color sketch.
The men still remained standing; they gave no outward expression to their admiration; that, indeed, although evident in their faces, was overshadowed by something like awe. Their hands were to be the instruments by which this great creation of the mind of man should become a fact. Without those hands the architect's idea could not be materialized; without the "idea" their daily work would fail.
The truth went home to each man present—even to that unknown one beneath the gallery who, when the men had risen to cheer, shrank farther into his dark corner and drew short sharp breaths. The Past would not down at his bidding; he was beginning to feel his weakness when he had most need of strength.