STONESTUDY
Somewhere in the past ages, I've had something to do with stone-work. This came to me first with a poignant thrill when I found myself in the presence of the Chinese Wall. Illusion or not, it seemed as if there were ancient scars across my back—as if I had helped in that building, and under the lash, too.
... I heard the mason here tell his tender that he had done a lot of stone-work, but had never been watched so closely as this. He penetrated to the truth of the matter presently. I wasn't watching because I was afraid of short time or flaws of construction—I was watching because it satisfied something within, that had to do with stone-work. I do not get accustomed to the marvel of cement. The overnight bond of that heavy powder, and its terrible thirst, is a continual miracle to me. There is a satisfaction about stone-work. It is at its weakest at the moment of setting. If you can find a bearing for one stone upon another without falling, you may know that every hour that passes for years, your wall is hardening. These things move slowly, too. All that has to do with stone-work is a slow process. In the very lifting, the masons learn that muscles must not tug or jerk, but lift slowly. The mortar that hardens slowly hardens best.
The study building happened between two long tasks of my own, so that there was time to be much outdoors. I doubt if there ever was a lovelier Fall than that—a full year before the thought of Europe became action. I watched the work—as the Japanese apprentices watch their craftsmen, so that the mind gets the picture of every process. The hand learns easily after this.
It is a grand old tool, the trowel, perhaps the most perfect of all symbols which suggest the labour of man upon the earth, his making of order out of chaos. The hammers interested me as well—six, eight, and eighteen pounds. The young man who used them was not much to look at, his body sagging a bit from labour, set in his opinions like the matter he dealt with, but terrible in his holding to what he knew, and steadily increasing that store. I have come to respect him, for he has done a great deal of stone-work here since those Fall days, when I seemed to be learning masonry all over again.
"Handle these hard-heads all day, and you're pretty well lifted out by night," he would remark, and add deprecatingly, "as the feller says."
There's a magic about the breaking. It isn't all strength. I think it is something the same that you do in billiards to get that smooth, long roll without smashing the balls. The mason says it is in the wrist. I asked him if it was the flash of the heat through the stone that broke it.
"No, it's just the way you hit it," he answered.
Two old masons worked with him for a time on the later work. They have built in these parts thousands of tons of brick and stone—fifty years of masonry; and their order is wonderful. I watched them taking their stone-hammers to the stable in the evening, and placing them just so. They have learned their mastery over the heavy things; they have hewed to the Line, and built to the Square. Their eyes are dim but the essence of their being (I cannot think it otherwise) is of more orderly integration. There is a nobility from stone-work which the masons put on with the years—the tenders have it not; neither have any of the indiscriminate labour men. One must have a craft to achieve this. The building is not so much. The houses and barns and stores which the elder masons pass everywhere as the labour of their hands in this country—they are but symbols of the building of character within. They see into the stones, see through their weathered coatings. To another all would look the same—the blacks and reds and whites, even the amalgans—all grey-brown and weathered outside—but the masons know what is within, the colour and grain and beauty.
"Try that one," I might say, looking for a certain fireplace corner.